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Spanish Fried Rice

A simple fried rice made with rice, butter or dripping, onions, tomatoes, garlic, and hot water, seasoned with salt and pepper.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Onion and garlic match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Spanish Fried Rice

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Wash the rice and brown it in hot dripping.

  2. Add onions, tomatoes, and garlic.

  3. Cover with hot water and season with salt and pepper.

  4. Let the rice cook thoroughly, adding water as needed. Do not stir.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Onion + garlictop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Tomato + garlictop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together14,076 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  3. Pepper + clovetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Rice + tomatotop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together3,065 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  5. Pepper + tomatotop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together17,923 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Rice
Forms the bulk of the dish and absorbs the liquid as it cooks into tender grains.
Dripping
Fat that browns the rice and carries flavour through the whole dish.
Onions
Add sweetness and savoury depth as they soften during cooking.
Tomatoes
Add moisture and acidity that flavour the cooking liquid.

The step that matters

Let the rice cook thoroughly without stirring. Stirring releases starch from the rice, making it sticky and mushy. Leaving it alone while adding water as needed lets the grains steam and cook evenly.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (rice, butter, pepper, onion, tomato, garlic):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Cuminfits better
  3. Parsleyfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against rice, butter, pepper, onion, tomato, garlic. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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