Jacques Pépin makes rice cakes with eggs

Premiere: 9/3/2020 | 00:03:22 |

"I often have leftover rice—from going to a Chinese restaurant, or just leftover from something I cooked at home, sometimes plain, sometimes seasoned in one way or another—and when I do I like to put it in a skillet to make a kind of rice pancake, which is crusty on the bottom. On top I usually put a couple of eggs at the last minute, to make a great lunch dish."

About the Episode

Serves 2

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons olive oil
2 ½ cups leftover cooked rice
¼ cup water
salt and pepper
2 extra large eggs, preferably organic
1 tablespoon chives, for garnish

Method:

Heat the oil over medium-high heat in 7 or 9-inch non-stick skillet. Add the rice and water and cook, pressing the rice down with a spoon. Add salt and pepper if needed. Lower the heat to medium and cook until a thick crust forms, about 7 minutes. Flip the rice over and cook an additional minute.

Using the back of a spoon, make two indentations in the rice and crack an eggs into each, grind pepper over the top and cover and cook, until eggs are done, about 2 to 3 minutes.

Slide onto a plate, sprinkle with chives, and serve immediately.

QUOTE

"I feel that if Jacques Pépin shows you how to make an omelet, the matter is pretty much settled. That’s God talking. "

— Anthony Bourdain

TRANSCRIPT

TRANSCRIPT

(cheerful music) - Hi, I'm Chef Jacques Pépin, and this is 'American Masters at Home'. We cook a fair amount of rice at my house.

My wife loves rice in any form.

And I do that recipe when I have the rice left over.

Sometime, like when I go to the Chinese restaurant, and eat just plan white rice, then I can do a kind of rice pudding, you know, re-cooking it with milk and with some dry fruit and so forth.

This one here, I forget what we did with it, but it's already seasoned.

What we do, we do a cake with that, and usually with eggs on top.

So, I would put about a couple of tablespoon of good olive oil there, about two and a half cup of rice here.

So this is a seven-inch, no-stick pan, so that would work on it.

I'm gonna put this on top here, and to make it a little more gooey and so forth I put a little bit of water in it, like, you know, quarter of a cup of water.

And then I want to cook this on fairly high heat, until I have a beautiful crust.

Rice has been cooking about seven minutes now, and I could leave it like that, slide it on a plate, or if you think you can turn it, turn it over, you can see you have a beautiful cake here, and I serve it this way as a garnish with meat, or sometimes we put eggs on top of it which is what I'm going to do after one minute, so that I have a little bit of a crust on the other side, so I can slide it off, on the plate.

You can also, turn it on a flat plate, and slide it back on top.

It's a bit more heavy, but here, I'm going to, put on egg, right there.

Make a little bit of a nest here, we build a nest here, and the egg.

We love eggs too, so... (eggs sizzling) Okay, it's just a dash of pepper on top of it.

Tiny dash of salt, and then I cover it, and there will be enough of steam coming up to kind of cook my eggs.

I like it pretty runny, in the center of it.

Well that's about it, now.

So I cook that about seven minute on one side, I flip it over, which you don't have to, and you can serve the rice as is, or, serving it on top of this, here, with or without, of course, the eggs, or the garnish.

But that's a beautiful dish, that I'm sure your family will enjoy, and when you have leftover rice, try that recipe.

Happy cooking.