Sunday, May 28, 2023

keto fly lye

After much dithering, I finally made some keto fried "rice" using "riced" cauliflower. It turned out great! I don't miss the real rice at all. Of course, using soy sauce kind of drains away some of the keto-ness of the dish; you can compensate by switching to tamari, a form of soy sauce that's more keto-friendly. You can also reduce the amount of soy sauce and increase the amount of sesame oil as a finisher (I don't recommend frying anything with sesame oil).

The fried "rice" you see below has three proteins: (1) diced-up, pre-packaged chicken; (2) egg; and (3) shrimp. Veggies (aside from the cauliflower) include minced carrots, minced onion, diced mushrooms, and minced chili peppers. There's also some salt and pepper. Now that I know how awesome this dish is (I seriously don't miss the rice at all, and not because cauliflower somehow "tastes like rice"—it doesn't), I'll be making large batches of it. It pairs perfectly with a nice bowl of kimchi, which is also super-keto.

You can also "rice" cabbage in a food processor; I might try that next because I love what happens when you quickly sear cabbage from its raw state: you get that classic egg-roll smell. Slightly more carbs, though: you get 4.1 g of carbs per 100 g of cauliflower, but it's 5.5 g of carbs per 100 g of cabbage.

This really was much better than expected. Why didn't I do this years ago? And since Korean juk (porridge) can have most of the same ingredients as the above rice, I'm going to see whether I can make keto juk using xanthan gum to replace the rice starch that normally thickens the porridge. Xanthan gum has to be used with caution, though: too much of it makes your dish goopy and gross. I know this from experience.

A word about carrots: carrots do occasionally appear in keto recipes, but they aren't really considered keto because of their starch content. Use with caution.

Oh, and a word about texture: keto fried rice isn't going to be as sticky as regular rice, so doing that trick where you fill a bowl with rice, then plunk it onto a plate to create a rice mound... well, it might work, but it probably won't look as good as a mound of regular rice.



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