Masala fried rice

I don't know a life without cumin, coriander, and red chilli powders

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This week’s paid subscriber newsletter is a recipe for a quick masala fried rice – I hope you’ll give it a go. If you’d like to support my work, please consider a paid subscription. Thank you!

It seems pointless to share a recipe for something so fundamental and frankly universal but here I am doing exactly that. This recipe for masala fried rice isn’t authentic by any means (side note: is anything ever authentic?) but I also don’t think any recipe for fried rice is; it is however authentic to one’s family, routine, or desires. What fried rice you make when you most want it is what matters. Mine contains unidentified amounts of coriander-cumin-chilli powders, the three Cs of confident masala cooking that I have come to rely on, like so many others in India.

Someone I worked with often told me that Indians cannot cook anything without a perverse desire to wantonly add red chilli powder to everything… and they are right. They’ve described me spot on and I’m happy to be typecast – what can I say, I have an overt fondness for craving the same flavours again and again. I have eaten versions of this recipe on the streets near my home in Chennai, watching the master (which is what cooks are sometimes called) deftly tossing the wok back and forth on a flame so monstrous that made him sweat throughout the whole night. Sometimes there would be a dash of green chilli sauce, sometimes just straight up red chillies. But some form of masala was constant.

I came across Hetty Lui McKinnon’s mapo tofu fried rice and my first thought was some masala would be great here! My mind is cursed! Rice, in any forms and flavours, has been indispensable to my identity and comfort; “I can tell you about my life in rice: I eat too much of it. My phone is filled with photos and videos of fluffy biryanis, homely pulaos, gloopy risotto, sweet payasam, kanji, stir-fries, dosais, idlis, idiyappam, kozhukattai, aval, bhel puri, and just about every rice dish I hold dear,” as I wrote here.

And this recipe is no different, heaving on my fondness for the grain and starting with leftovers.