Readers of The Bitten Word cooked every recipe in the September 2013 Bon Appetit magazine. Here's their take on Fat Rice.
Stephanie: It looked like a complicated dish, so I timed my active cooking time, including trimming chicken, scrubbing clams, and making hard boiled eggs. It came to just under 3 hours. My family's comments, "Interesting, great, never thought I'd like these flavors, make this again."
Claudia: We just moved to CapeTown, South Africa a little less then a year ago, so I still don't know where to get some things, so I substituted a few things...I could not find Manila clams, or any fresh clams. The best I could do were these frozen clams that weren't so great...many didn't even open, but I did get REALLY big beautiful Mozambique prawns fresh! The rice and Soffritto are delicious, but I couldn't find the gochugaru either.
Holly: Worth the prep-shop-prep insanity! Presents beautifully and is even more delicious than it looks :)
Lisa: The dish has quite a few steps but if you break up the steps as suggested, it is manageable. I followed the recipe exactly, with the exception of using headless shrimp. I really liked the combination of Portuguese and Asian flavors. At first I thought the list of garnishes was too much, but they really added to the final flavor of the dish. I especially liked the crisp rice at the bottom of the pot. It reminded me of the Korean dish, Bibimap.
Marianne: This is a BIG recipe, many not so hard steps, but lots of them. But as my friend Charles said, this dish is "crazy voodoo delicious."
Julia: In a nutshell: Complex recipe + just got back from Burning Man = a mind boggling challenging challenge. Whoa…The Challenges:
1. Gochugaru (Korean red pepper powder) is hard to source when you can't see straight, so I used Chinese red pepper powder.
2. You have to make five things to assemble this Asian paella; it took two days.
3. Couldn't figure out how to stuff the prawns with garlic/chiles, so we just tossed them together.
4. I used brown jasmine rice thinking it wouldn't add time to the cooking process since brown jasmine rice cooks in 20 mins and the recipe says to simmer the rice for 20-25 minutes anyway, but it took FOREVER.
The result? It was awesome. The curry chicken is a wicked twist on the traditional recipe. I'd make it again, but simplify with regular prawns (saving the drive to source the head on variety) and sausage (I don’t think I could tell the difference between Chinese sausage and something else). And I’d skip the hard boiled eggs; a superfluous step yielding minimal benefit when you’ve already got curry chicken, prawns and clams on your plate.
Luke: What a challenge! With recipes within recipes this isn't the dish for throwing together quickly after work. All the elements came together into a delicious and lovely looking meal. Well worth the time and effort... and the trips to all over Toronto to get all the ingredients!
Kaitlin: This dish was fantastic with lots of complex flavors: smokiness from the paprika, a little spice from the sausages and curry, sweetness from the raisins, tanginess from the vinegar and wine. It is an all day recipe with lots of steps, but worth it because the resulting dish had lots of layers of flavor. We were looking forward to crisping the rice at the end - the recipe suggested drizzling olive oil down the sides of the pan, and letting the rice get crispy, but it didn't work as well as we hoped. Some of the rice got burned on the bottom, and we only got a few edible crispy pieces. It was a fun technique to try, though. We'd definitely make this again, probably for company.
Get the Fat Rice recipe at Bon Appétit
Head back to the Mains (Fish and Pizza) Index