Cooking the eggs without scrambling them allows them to brown and puff while remaining tender.
Let's talk about egg fried rice. Egg fried rice in its absolute purest form—nothing but eggs, rice, cooking oil, soy sauce, and scallions—is one of the simplest stir-fries around. But like all simple foods—pizza, grilled cheese, a roasted chicken—it's the details of the process that elevate its basic ingredients into something transcendental.
The video embedded here is the easiest way to see the differences in these processes, but I'll walk you through some of the details here. First, let's look at how to cook egg fried rice in an ideal setup—in aCooking Outdoorsalong with a 14-inch, 14-gauge, round-bottomed, hand-hammered carbon steel wok and a wooden wok spatula. I connect the burner to a propane tank in my backyard.
As for the process, the main difference is a longer preheat before longyau, and rather than shutting off the heat partway through cooking, I leave the gas on at full blast throughout. That's because even the most powerful home burner will max out at around 25k BTU—only about 15% the power of my outdoor burner. Leaving the heat on ensures that the pan will stay hot enough while the egg cooks before adding the rice so that the rice can fry properly without sticking or turning mushy.