Dashi Fried Rice

Fried Rice, known as Yakimeshi in Japanese, is such an easy dish to make with ingredients you already have. It’s a typical lunch dish to make at home with leftover rice, meat, and vegetable you have in the fridge. While salt and pepper with a bit of soy sauce are all you need to season Japanese-style fried rice, here we use dashi stock powder.

Dashi powder is a mixture of dry ingredients to make flavorful Japanese dashi stock. It’s usually sold in individual packets, and each packet contains just enough ingredients to make broth for a medium pot of soup. It’s packed with umami-rich ingredients such as dried sardines, mushrooms, kombu (kelp), and katsuobushi bonioto flakes. Each manufacture has a different blend, and it’s often flavored with added salt to boost the flavor. This convenient powder mixture is so versatile that you can use it for more than making soup stock. One popular way is to open the packet and season fried rice. Umami from the dashi powder will take the ordinary fried rice with leftover to the next level.

A packet of dashi powder is all you need to season the rice for 2 people (roughly 2 cups, but you can add more if you like). White pepper goes very well with Japanese fried rice, and adding a bit of soy sauce at the end will further enhance the flavor. You should always taste it before serving as each brand of dashi is different. You can add some salt if needed depending on the type of Dashi packet you use (some brands contain less salt.)

Dashi stock powder is readily available at Japanese or Asian markets here in the U.S. Or you can check out our Amazon store (#CommissionsEarned) where we recommend a few brands of Dashi that we have used and liked.