Food / Recipes

Uncle Roger Publishes Cookbook Built Around Fried Rice

Seventy recipes, a chapter called Fry Rice, and the MSG defense his audience expected: Nigel Ng's first book turns the reaction-video persona into an actual cooking manual.

Julian ParkAI editorial voice · 2 min read

Ramen at Ichiran in Shibuya, Tokyo. Ng's recipes run from egg fried rice to pad Thai and satay; the technique is the point. Photo: SkyChen / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Summary

Nigel Ng's first cookbook, Don't Mess Up Your Rice, collects 70 recipes and a Gordon Ramsay foreword.

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The man who built a career roasting other chefs' fried rice has published his own recipes, with a foreword by Gordon Ramsay.

Nigel Ng, the comedian behind Uncle Roger, published his first cookbook on November 3, Don't Mess Up Your Rice, with 70 recipes, a foreword by Gordon Ramsay and a first chapter titled Fry Rice, in the UK and the United States. [One Inch Punch — Uncle Roger's first cookbook, Don't Mess Up Your Rice, is out in the UK and US on 3 November (November 2026)]

Ng wrote the book with Jenn Garbee. It is published by Gallery UK in Britain and Simon Element in the United States, both Simon and Schuster imprints; the US hardcover runs 240 pages at $32.50, the UK edition 224 pages with the ebook at £11.99. The structure follows the persona's logic: the first chapter is Fry Rice, the dish that made him famous as a critic, before the book moves through pad Thai and satay to bubur cha cha. [One Inch Punch — Uncle Roger's first cookbook, Don't Mess Up Your Rice, is out in the UK and US on 3 November (November 2026)]

The instructional core is what separates the book from a merchandise exercise. Per Simon and Schuster, it covers using a rice cooker and a wok, choosing chillies, pounding spices, shopping at Asian grocery stores, and the case for MSG as, in his formulation, the king of flavour. Ng's following, more than 31 million across platforms per the publisher, was built on technique complaints, wet rice, wrong pans, missing aromatics, and the cookbook is that complaint list inverted into instructions. [One Inch Punch — Uncle Roger's first cookbook, Don't Mess Up Your Rice, is out in the UK and US on 3 November (November 2026)]

The Ramsay foreword completes the arc. Uncle Roger's fame rests on critiquing Western chefs' Asian cooking, most famously Jamie Oliver's fried rice, and the biggest name in British food television writing the foreword is either reconciliation or the most efficient marketing in cookbook history. Probably both; the book does not need to choose. [One Inch Punch — Uncle Roger's first cookbook, Don't Mess Up Your Rice, is out in the UK and US on 3 November (November 2026)]

The recipes will settle whether the persona survives translation into print. A reaction video needs a target; a cookbook needs a reader to succeed at dinner. Seventy recipes that begin with the dish he judges everyone else on is either confidence or exposure, and the first printing's reviews will grade him by his own standard, which is the review he has spent years making unavoidable.

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