Cooking Experiment: Tomato Beef Sauce on Crispy Rice

Maybe you've had tomato beef sauce on Hong Kong-style pan fried noodles. It's one of my favorite dishes from my childhood, but the downside is that cooking ramen noodles, then frying them in oil, is not really all that healthy. The sauce is fine, it's just... You need at least about a teaspoon of oil per serving to fry the noodles crisp.

Sometime this past week, I was chatting with my brother and the subject of 'nohm' came up. I'm not sure what the proper name would be; that's just what we call it in our family. What it is, is the rice crust left over at the bottom of the pot after you cook rice and serve most of it out. When you let it cool off, it is crispy and delicious with meat gravies.

There's only one catch: I cook my rice in a rice cooker, and rice cookers don't do that. By design they steam the rice perfectly, leaving no crust.

( Cut for images! )