Tailored design and synthesis of high-quality electrocatalysts is vital for the advancement of oxygen evolution reaction (OER). Herein, we report a powerful puffing method to fabricate hierarchical porous N-doped carbon with numerous embedded Ni nanoparticles. Interestingly, during the puffing and annealing process, rice precursor with N and Ni sources can be in-situ converted into Ni-embedded N-doped porous carbon (N-PC/Ni) composite. The obtained N-PC/Ni composite possesses a cross-linked porous architecture containing conductive carbon backbone and active Ni nanoparticles electrocatalysts for OER. The pore formation in N-PC/Ni composite is also proposed because of carbothermic reduction. The N-PC/Ni composite is fully studied as electrocatalysts for OER. Due to increased active surface area, enhanced electronic conductivity and reactivity, the designed N-PC/Ni composite exhibits superior OER performance with a low Tafel slope (～88 mV/dec) and a low overpotential as well as excellent long-term stability in alkaline solution. Our proposed rational design strategy may provide a new way to construct other advanced metal/heteroatom-doped composites for widespread application in electrocatalysis.