I’ve made soy sauce fried rice more times than I can count, but there’s always one fatal problem I can’t solve: The rice gets stickier the more you stir-fry it—it’s damn near impossible to separate the grains I’ve watched a ton of fried rice tutorials online, and not a single one explains why this happens. Most just say: use day-old rice. But I always use day-old rice! So why does it still come out wet? In the end, the ever-reliable Chef Wang Gang gave the answer.

The chef I admire most, Kiritani Hana, once said: “Good food is improved through constant practice.” So every time I cook, I try to make it a little better than last time, and add a bit of my own recipe while I’m at it. Soy sauce fried rice is already pretty good, I think. But recently I got my hands on a bottle of “salted duck egg yolk mayo” — hardcore stuff — and I figured I’d throw it into the fried rice. Tried it today and it went great. Here’s the rundown.

Egg fried rice made from leftover rice, with diced beef tossed in. The method is a total ripoff of Kuan You Wang’s video. The key is frying the egg whites and yolks separately. Except I didn’t have fresh shiitake mushrooms, and no cured meat either. I used beef paste, the kind with lots of diced beef in it. For the mushrooms I subbed in diced carrot.

Soy sauce fried rice is a dead simple dish, but it tastes way better than it has any right to. The stuff you’re frying is basically just rice — day-old rice is best — and then whatever else you feel like throwing in. Boiled corn, lettuce, shiitake, shrimp, bacon, whatever you’ve got, just dump it in. The soy sauce is the point.

During the May Day break I made fried rice for three days straight. A lot of people don’t get it — why “leftover ingredients”… It’s kind of a long story…

I was going to make ehōmaki today, but Zhengzhou’s PM2.5 is at 400 and I don’t want to go outside. The leftover rice can only become fried rice.