I noticed that David Chang likes to add a bit of agave nectar to his fried rice. I never thought about adding something sweet to this, so I started adding a small amount of brown sugar (maybe 1/4 to 1/2 tsp) to my fried rice, and it really seems to make it tastier. It doesn’t read as “sweet” - it just gives it a tiny bit of an additional flavor boost. Since then I’ve also tried playing around with adding a tiny amount of sugar to other things, and it’s usually pretty good.
It’s funny how it’s hard to tell what isn’t there sometimes, right? I left salt out of a dessert a few times and it just didn’t taste right. I had to go back through my steps to realize that I’d forgotten the salt.