I mean it was a generalisation repeated by everyone from my Chinese grandmother to the minstrel showman Uncle Roger, I don’t really mean it literally.

Because freshly cooked rice is wetter and clumpier, it makes it harder to stir fry and has a different texture, but easier to pick up a clump with chopsticks for a regular meal. This is especially true of shorter grain rice varieties. It’s also harder for seasoning to penetrate the inside of a sticky ball of rice, requiring constant attention to break up clumps (or attempt to break up the clump and sometimes it just turns into a mush). If you regularly have fried rice as street food or in a restaurant, the contrast in texture becomes even more apparent. With eating out being cheaper than cooking at home for a lot of Chinese, it feels bad when you spend more money and time on ingredients to get a worse product.

Another aspect of stir frying anything with Cantonese style of stir frying techniques, where you want to achieve wok hei. I’m not hugely opinionated on wok hei because I’m from Wuhan, but some people do. Wok hei is a chemical reaction that calls for as little moisture as physically possible, as the flavour comes from a combination of the Mallard reaction and the polymerisation of oil as ingredients in a wok are tossed and aerated, coating the ingredients in hot, seasoned, aerosolised oil. Moisture brings down the average temperature of the wok, which is the first issue. The second is that half the flavour comes from the oil hitting smoking point (but not burning) and clinging onto the ingredients, and oil is hydrophobic, wet ingredients will not get seasoned, the oil just rolls off. You can get around this with a jet engine stove (like restaurants have) which reach 300°C on low to instantly get rid of any excess moisture, but that’s not practical for home cooks.

The way around this is to steam it (steamed rice rarely absorbs more water than the rice wants to, very hard to get it too wet or clumpy) or purposefully use less than the recommended amount of water for a shorter amount of time, but a lot of people don’t know to do that or don’t want a whole batch of rice to come out like that. Just as an example, the family rice cooker we have in Wuhan has a volume of 5-6 litres, usually serving 4-8+ people. Undercooking an entire batch of rice for the sake of fried rice is very unusual.

Like, you can get sushi rice, leave all the surface starch on by not washing it, pressure cook it for an hour and stir fry that. You’re not gonna die eating it, cook how you want to, but sometimes there’s a reason for why some things are done the way they are.

Rice is as versatile as bread, you can spread Vegemite on pita bread. You can dip wonder bread in hummus. You can throw bahn mi ingredients in a tortilla. I’m sure none of them are going to be bad, per se. But sometimes the form and factor does make a difference to overall enjoyability.