Japanese Garlic Fried Rice ガーリックライス

Garlicky and buttery, this simple Japanese Garlic Fried Rice topped with garlic chips is full of flavors!  You can enjoy this fried rice recipe with many dishes including grilled shrimp.

Japanese Garlic Fried Rice, or what we call Garlic Rice (ガーリックライス) in Japan, reminds me of my college days. It’s so easy and simple to cook, yet flavorful and delicious.

With a salad and a meat, seafood, or other protein dishes on the side, it was a nice home cooked meal I could enjoy during my youth days. Now decades later, I’m still cooking this dish for my family and they love it.

How to Make Japanese Garlic Fried Rice

Garlicky and buttery, this simple Japanese Garlic Fried Rice topped with garlic chips is full of flavors!  You can enjoy this fried rice recipe with many dishes including grilled shrimp.

What’s in Japanese Garlic Fried Rice?

As the name suggests, the rice is stir-fried in garlic flavored oil. What makes it uniquely Japanese? It’s the simplicity of the dish (not overpowering with seasonings) and use of Japanese short grain rice that is slightly stickier than other types of rice used in other fried rice recipes.

Ingredients:

If you have been cooking some Japanese recipes, you may have realized that the amount of garlic used in Japanese cooking is very minimal compared to other recipes. One to two cloves of garlic is considered a “good” amount of garlic in Japanese dishes.

So keep that in mind when you make this dish, especially if you’re used to using a lot of garlic in your cooking daily. It might not be “garlicky” enough for your taste so feel free to increase the amount of garlic to your liking.  Just make sure it doesn’t overpower the side dish you plan to enjoy it with.

Besides garlic, other common ingredients in Japanese Garlic Fried Rice are butter and parsley.  You can omit butter if you’re vegan and skip parsley and use scallions instead if you don’t like parsley. You can add fried eggs as well similar to other fried rice recipes, but if you are going to serve this garlic rice as a side dish, I’d recommend to keep it simple.

Seasonings: The seasoning for Garlic Rice is usually simple salt, black pepper, and a little drizzle of soy sauce. Remember that soy sauce is NOT to season the entire rice, per se, but to add umami and char taste created from stir-frying in the hot frying pan.

What to Serve with Japanese Garlic Fried Rice

Garlic Fried Rice is really delicious on its own, but it’s often served with Yoshoku, Japanese-style western meal. Here are my recipes on the blog that I sometimes serve Garlic Rice with.

• Hambagu (Japanese Hamburger Steak)
• Japanese Chicken Curry or another version with bone-in chicken
• Keema Curry
• Loco Moco
• Omurice (Omelette Rice)
• Pressure Cooker Seafood Curry
• Seafood Doria
• Sous Vide Japanese-style Steak
• White Stew

Wine Pairing with Japanese Fried Garlic Rice

We previously paired FEL’s pinot noir with our Waygu post, and it was really delicious so we were excited to try their 2015 FEL Chardonnay Anderson Valley. The Chardonnay didn’t disappoint and paired perfectly with the garlic fried rice and grilled shrimp.

As you smell the wine, it is refreshing, pure, with a hint of sweetness. You can already dream how delicate the wine will taste. As you take the first sip, it feels like sipping peace juice on a warm sunny day, with flavors of melons and pear fruits. The mouthfeel is light, like drinking spring water and we love how it’s not syrupy and overly sweet. Finally, it finishes with a light hint of citrus with no lingering aftertaste.

If you are looking for a bottle of white to pair with seafood, or to enjoy on a warm sunny day with friends, give this bottle a try.

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Japanese Garlic Fried Rice

• 1 ½ rice cooker cups uncooked Japanese short grain rice
• 2-3 cloves garlic
• 2 Tbsp extra virgin olive oil ((30 ml))
• 1 Tbsp unsalted butter ((15 g))
• 1 tsp soy sauce ((5 ml))
• ¼ tsp kosher salt ((or more for taste))
• freshly ground black pepper
• 3 stalks parsley

Grilled Shrimp Skewer (Optional – see below)

• 6 pieces shrimp ((medium size))
• ½ Tbsp extra virgin olive oil
• 1 Tbsp sake ((15 ml))
• kosher salt
• freshly ground black pepper

To Prep:

1. Gather all the ingredients first.
   
2. Cook the rice in the rice cooker or in the pot over stove. Transfer to a large bowl and set aside uncovered to remove moisture.
   
3. Cut half of the garlic cloves in thin rounds widthwise (so you see a hole in center) and mince the other half.
   
4. Remove the parsley leaves from the stems and mince them.
   

To Cook Garlic Fried Rice:

1. Add the olive oil in the large frying pan. Slowly fry the thinly sliced garlic pieces until golden brown. If you add the garlic slices in a hot oil, they burn too fast and you will be extract the flavor from the garlic much and end up with burnt garlic slices. Transfer to a dish line with paper towel and keep the garlic infused oil in the pan.
   
2. Add the minced garlic in the same pan and stir fry until golden brown and fragrant.
   
3. Add the butter and swirl around. Then add warm steamed rice. If you add cold rice, it takes too long to warm up the rice and the garlic will get too dark (and may burn).
   
4. Break the chunk of rice to separate. The Japanese short grain rice is stickier than other types of rice, so it’s normal that rice is stick to each other, but should not be in huge chunks. Once the garlic oil is coated with the rice, add the soy sauce and toss the fried rice.
   
5. Season with kosher salt and freshly ground black papper. Taste the rice and make sure it is seasoned to your liking.
   
6. Lastly add the chopped parsley and mix all together.
   

To Serve:

1. Put the garlic fried rice in a rice bowl, pressing gently to make sure there is no space in the bowl, and invert the rice on a serving plate.
   

To Make Grilled Shrimp Skewer (Optional)

1. If you like to serve the garlic fried rice with grilled shrimp skewers, shell and devein the shrimp. You can keep or remove the tail.
   
2. Skewer 3 shrimp on each damp skewer without leaving spaces. Sprinkle kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper.
   
3. Lay skewers flat on a greased cast iron pan (or regular frying pan). Cook the shrimp with the lid on about 2 minutes per side or just until cooked through and no longer transparent. Remove the shrimp from the grill and serve with garlic fried rice.
   

Recipe by Namiko Chen of Just One Cookbook. All images and content on this site are copyright protected. Please do not use my images without my permission. If you’d like to share this recipe on your site, please re-write the recipe in your own words and link to this post as the original source. Thank you.

skip butter for vegan, use GF soy sauce for Gluten Free

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