The Easy Swap You Need To Try For Ultra-Tasty Pork Fried Rice

Pork fried rice is truly an all-purpose food, working as an easy weeknight meal, a soul-warming comfort food, and a handy tool to use up some leftovers you might have hanging around. With a base of simple ingredients, pork fried rice is not only effortlessly thrown together, but it's also inherently customizable to your own tastes. Whether you want to give your fried rice an extra savory kick with some fish sauce, or you want to add mirin for an easy but effective upgrade, sauce is certainly one route to go when customizing your dish. But have you ever thought about how you could change the pork in your pork fried rice for a scrumptious variation of the classic meal?

Although regular pork, such as pork chops, are a perfectly legitimate choice when it comes to pork fried rice, choosing to add bacon instead can be a real game changer for this dish. You already know that bacon seems to taste good with everything, so this isn't too controversial of a take. But if you stop to think about it for a second, the idea of using bacon in your fried rice makes a ton of sense beyond the simple fact that it is already delicious.

Bacon is a nearly perfect tool to use in your fried rice, because it will expertly complement many of the flavors already found in the dish. Of course, this isn't revolutionary, since bacon will still fill the role previously occupied by regular pork — both will give you a meaty bite and lots of umami flavor when mixed into the rice. But since bacon is cured and often has other spices and flavor components added, it'll bring a layer of complexity to your fried rice that simple pork strips cannot.

It's no secret that bacon is pretty salty, but this works to your benefit in a fried rice, where the bacon's flavor will be enhanced by the likes of soya sauce or fish sauce, elevating that taste to the next level. Bacon also works quite well with spicy ingredients, as you might know if you've tried combining bacon with chili oil, so you don't need to worry about any conflict if you add ingredients such as chili peppers or sambal oelek. In fact, they'll likely work quite well together. So cook up some bacon and put it to use in a next-level fried rice. You can also check out the best way to cook bacon, which also happens to be the easiest, so you can enjoy your fried rice experience even more!