Ground Beef Fried Rice

What happens when you combine crispy pan fried ground beef with a sweet and spicy sauce and a couple bags of frozen rice? Magic, that’s what! This ground beef fried rice is super easy to make in one pan, and you can make it low carb with frozen cauliflower rice or high enjoyment with frozen jasmine rice or brown rice.

Either way, you’re in for a treat.

How to Make Fried Rice with Ground Beef

It’s as easy as browning and cooking ground beef, adding a sauce to the beef, and transferring to a bowl before adding olive oil to the skillet along with two bags of your choice of frozen (or cooked and chilled) rice.

Sauce for the Ground Beef

For the sweet and spicy sauce, you’ll need:

• chili garlic sauce or sriracha
• honey
• soy sauce
• fresh or frozen minced ginger
• black, rice, or balsamic vinegar
• corn starch slurry

Feel free to take creative liberties with the sauce. Other options might include my firecracker beef sauce or a pre-made sauce like in my teriyaki ground beef and broccoli recipe.

Cooking the Ground Beef

You want to brown the beef well on both sides. I like to use a nonstick skillet for this recipe. Whatever type of pan you use, make sure it’s hot before the beef goes in. A hot, dry environment is best for browning meat via the Maillard Reaction.

Browning creates both flavor and texture. And I don’t know about you, but I love texture in my fried rice. Once the beef is cooked and broken into small pieces, you can add the sauce and cook that down. It won’t take long to reduce and coat the cooked ground beef.

Making Fried Rice with Frozen Rice

The recipe calls for one bag of brown rice and one bag of frozen rice cauliflower stir fry. You’re welcome to use any rice you want. But if you’re not using some kind of stir fry, you’ll want to add some ingredients like frozen peas and diced veggies, toasted sesame oil, fresh ginger and garlic, white pepper or maybe Chinese five spice, and some extra soy sauce or tamari when finishing.

You can also use cooked and chilled rice instead of frozen and even freshly riced cauliflower. Cook times may vary for other rice options, though.

I’ll also add that you could add some eggs to your ground beef fried rice. Check out my bbq chicken fried rice for an example.

Once the rice is as crispy as you’d like, you’re pretty much done. Add the cooked ground beef and some freshly sliced scallions to the pan, toss it together, and voilà—ground beef and rice stir fry.

How to Serve Ground Beef Fried Rice

Something I love about this recipe is that it’s a true one pan meal. You don’t really need any pairings or side dishes.

I like to garnish with toasted sesame seeds, chili crisp, and extra scallions. If you have an ingredient like Bachan’s Japanese barbecue sauce, it’s also great drizzled over as you serve your hamburger fried rice.

I hope you enjoy your ground beef fried rice. I’d love to hear your thoughts or what customizations you make in a recipe review or comment on this post. You can also drop any questions about the recipe in the comments below.