Bread by ~tasick on deviantART

Omlette Fried Rice by ~perffection on deviantART

Fried rice tastes so good when you've had bread for an extended period of time.

Bread is only tasty when you put on some funky spread. Even then, you taste your peanut butter, jam or kaya instead of the bread itself. Even when you to eat a piece of plain white bread on its own, it takes a while for your salivary amylase to break down the starch in the bread into maltose, giving it a mere subtle sweetness that may not be noticeable to the many unobservant people out there.

On the other hand, fried rice tastes good without any additional condiments. It does not require any fine tasting to appreciate the flavourful burst that accompanies every spoonful, every grain of fried rice, infused with all its ingredients and a dash of love from the chef.

Let's pump a little KI into the equation. Taste is merely part of our perceptions, which for all we know may be fed to us via a Matrix-like machine, i.e. the brain-in-a-vat syndrome. So the taste of bread or fried rice does not actually exist. Now for a little biology. Taste is the way that our brain interprets chemical signals in our food. The tastier it is, the more nutrients there are, the better the food.

In that sense, fried rice has an absolute advantage over bread.

Another thing I have against bread is how it loves a good fight against me. In my mouth. Have you ever experienced how bread stubbornly clings to the roof of your mouth? How about the way it attempts to clog up your oesophagus every time you try to swallow it, relenting only against a huge gulp of water that you will be forced to take? And after finishing your bread, do you recall how remnants of it will oh-so-irritatingly stick to your molars, inviting bacteria to flourish in your buccal cavity and the crevices between your teeth?

Fried rice does not have most of the above shortcomings. No, how the hell do you get fried rice to stick to the roof of your mouth? Yes, it can be a little dry and tough to swallow, but does it ever form a fibrous plug in your throat? Yes, it still sticks to your teeth, but to a much lesser extent that bread does.

So, fried rice is less of a pain to eat as compared to bread.

Culturally, bread is rather distant. Most probably introduced to Singapore by the British, and quite obviously not originating in Asia at all. Of course, I am excluding roti prata, which is not really bread at all.

Fried rice is, however, very Asian. In fact, it is also a product of my Chinese roots. A rather traditional Chinese dish. Intuitively, it is much closer to my heart.

Fried rice scores one for cultural significance to me.

Let us consider the ease of preparation as a point of comparison.

The process of baking bread is a science, but then again, not quite. Recipes require near-stoichiometric quantities of specific ingredients that have to be measure by the most precise of baking instruments. However, when you mix all of the ingredients together, it just doesn't seem quite right. The dough is almost always too dry or too wet. So you will have to exercise your obviously imperfect judgement and moderate the amount of additional milk (water if you're cheap) or flour you add to control the texture of the dough. Now that's just the first part. After ensuring that you haven't killed your Saccharomyces cerevisiae by ensuring that you don't add it to the hot dough, you'll have to let your dough rise for the time specified in the recipe. Or not, since your recipe's never accurate anyway. So you'll have to use your own iffy judgement again, further compounding the chance that your attempt to make bread will turn out to be an epic failure. And we're not done yet. Baking the bread itself is another challenge, since your oven will never ever behave the way the oven of the writer of the recipe did. And when you screw up bread, it's almost always completely unpalatable. Great.

Basic White Bread

By Diana Rattray, About.com

Ingredients:

• 1 cup milk
• 1 pkgs fast-rising dry yeast
• 3 Tbsp. sugar
• 2 tsp. salt
• 2 tablespoons shortening
• 1/2 cup cold water
• 1/2 cup lukewarm water
• 1 tsp. sugar
• approx. 5 cups flour

Preparation:

Scald milk. Stir in salt, 3 tablespoons sugar, shortening, and 1/2 cup cold water. Cool to lukewarm Measure 1/2 cup lukewarm water into bowl, stir in the 1 tsp. sugar, sprinkle with yeast. Let stand 10 minutes, then stir until well blended. Stir in lukewarm milk mixture and 3 cups flour. Beat until smooth and elastic. (use electric mixture if you like) Work in sufficient additional flour to make a soft dough. (approx 2 cups more) turn out onto floured board and knead until smooth and elastic approx 5 minutes. Place in greased bowl. Cover bowl with greased waxed paper. Let rise in warm place until double in volume. Approx. 1 hour. Punch down batter. Cut into two equal pieces and form into 2 loaves and put into 2 (9" X 5" ) greased bread pans. Let rise again for approx. 45 minutes - 1 hour. or until dough fills pans and the centers are well above the tops of the pans. Bake 425 deg. oven for 15 minutes, reduce temperature to 375 deg. and bake until bread is done. about 25 - 35 minutes more. Remove loaves from pans and place on wire racks to cool. Brush with melted butter if soft crust is desired.
http://southernfood.about.com/od/yeastbreads/r/blbb205.htm

I don't think I really liked baking. Ever.

Fried rice has always been a joy to cook though. Rice, lots of mixed vegetables, shreds of seafood sticks, and slices of chicken frankfurters. All coated in a golden layer of egg and quickly fried over a large flame. Unless you're a total hopeless bloke when it comes to cooking, even when you mess up a dish of fried rice, it doesn't taste that bad. It just tastes like the sum of all its ingredients, that's all.

Oh, can I have it done nasi goreng style, with a healthy dose of chilli, please? It's good for the nerves. Keeps those denrites, axons and synpases happy and healthy.

During breakfast today, I ignored the bread on the table and went for the siew mai instead.

If you'd like to know, I had fried rice for lunch today. Really.