Want to be a leftover legend in your home kitchen? Repurpose last night’s salmon for a healthy, quick, and easy meal of salmon fried rice.
There are so many delicious ways to use up leftover salmon in the kitchen, but salmon fried rice is truly one of our favorite next-day meals. Filling and fragrant, salmon fried rice can be made with basic ingredients that you likely have stashed in your pantry and fridge. That makes it a low-maintenance dish that’s ideal for putting leftover fish and rice to use.
Here’s a quick and easy salmon and rice recipe that makes a basic but flavorful fish fried rice that you can customize to your liking. You can use anything from grilled sockeye to poached coho in your salmon and rice recipe.
Notes:
The right cooking oil for stir fried dishes can withstand high heat without burning. Something like peanut or canola oil works well for stir fries.
Ginger is always a nice addition to stir fries, imparting a fresh, herbaceous flavor that helps to balance out the fried deliciousness of the finished dish, while dried chili flakes of any kind add just a bit of heat to whet your appetite.
Garlic adds a savory umami note that helps to add depth to your stir fry, but if it’s not your thing, consider using a handful of finely diced onions or shallots instead; the flavor profile will be more sweet than savory, but you’ll still be adding dimension to the dish.
Leftover rice makes for the best stir fries since the grains lose excess moisture after being stored in the refrigerator. That means you’re going to get maximum flavor absorption with any liquids and juices you’ve added to the wok, whether that be soy sauce, fish sauce, Shaoxing wine, moisture that has sweated out of an ingredient like onions, etc. In addition, drier, leftover rice will get a proper fry, rather than steaming in the pan — it’s the same reason why you pat a fillet of fish dry in order to get a good sear. Break up the rice if it’s clumped together so that you can easily toss it into the wok.
To help give your salmon fried rice some body and another savory layer of flavor, you’ll want to add eggs to the mix.
Soy sauce is the ultimate source of umami, and will be the main seasoning of the dish. If you like the tangy, fishy umami of a good fish sauce, you’ll want to add in a few dashes of that to suit your palette.
Cooked, flaked salmon, whether sockeye or coho, and any addition of tender green herbs will simply be stirred in at the end to be incorporated with the finished rice until everything is just warmed through. (Consider even adding in something like kimchi or leftover cooked veggies to finish the dish.)
Alternatively, if you don’t have any leftover salmon on hand, try pan-searing a couple of packs of our Captain’s Cuts in a separate pan for a quick, crispy dose of protein that you can simply layer on top of your bed of fried rice — crispy skin-side up, of course. Essentially, you want to keep your salmon fried rice process as streamlined as possible, and tossing raw salmon into the wok will likely throw off your fried rice game.
