I took pictures but I won't post them til the end. I love cooking blogs with a hot burning passion but I really hate how people intersperse pictures of cilantro and lemon zest gently resting on a mortar and pestle among the recipe. I'm trying to make your god damn recipe. Don't make it harder by forcing me to scroll past your artwork. No one cares about your lemon zesting skills. Really.
I'm trying to figure out how to make a blog post about this that is easy/fun to read and also useful in creating spring rolls if you want to do it. Here's the thing: I'm not teaching you how to roll them out or use that rice paper stuff. It's annoying and takes practice and that's all there is to it. I don't like the Blue Dragon brand I got recently. The real deal that I found in the unAmerican section of Wegmans are better and cheaper and sturdier. The truth is, these little fu*kers easily rip and you have to kind of work that into your rolling time and your patience quota.
The main reason to bother with spring rolls: They are the perfect canvas for experimenting with random combinations of stuff in small packages.The best part is that you can be really creative and they are kind of like little sculptures visually and taste-wise. You basically have the boring canvas of rice paper and you can stick all kinds of shit in there.
I'm not very good at rolling them or making them pretty, so that's not why I make them. That doesn't mean that how they look isn't fun and important.They can be cool looking from the outside because the wrap is see-through--try putting heart-cut strawberries or star-shaped peppers in there! They can be beautiful when you cut them, along the cross-section.
Recipe is a misnomer cause this is just a conglomeration of stuff I put together. My prep entailed gathering stuff I might want to stuff in a roll. I didn't use everything I gathered (see picture below that doesn't even include everything). The only cooking I did was toasting the sesame seeds and quickly searing the tofu. I made normal ones that I consider kind of boring and just full of veggies, some with rice. You can add noodles too. To me, spring rolls are kind of a vehicle for sauce. So, it's a rice wrapper with maybe a starchy filler (rice, noodles) but DEFINITELY with veggies (cabbage, peppers, sweet potato, cucumber, avocado, carrot, celery, lettuce, spinach, cilantro, mint, parsley, whatever!), and a clever garnish inside (pickled ginger, sesame seeds, nori, sprouts, hot peppers, fruit, sauce, meat, etc) that is kind of dippable until it falls apart. I made 3 sauces.
Yes, we associate spring rolls with Asian flavors but I made 2 kinds tonight that were, emphatically, not Asian tasting. I'm not giving the ingredients or procedure for the uninteresting standard spring rolls. I'm sure allrecipes.com has some shit on that or something. I'm here to give you my wild ways.
The general procedure is to: put in your ingredients and roll it up. I don't know how to explain how to do it other than to say a few unhelpful sentences: You use less than you think you should. You should do it in stripes.
So, a rice stripe with avocado on it. Then you can have a stripe above and below the rice. Maybe one is yellow pepper and another is cabbage. Then on top of your stripes you can put light squashy things like tofu or bean sprouts or whatever. Just try stuff and try different ways of layering and rolling. There's no best way, in my experience. Be gentle with your little wrappers and kind of tuck them as you roll.
Sauce 1 and Sauce 2
ALWAYS **taste as you go a whole bunch. I ended up with a bunch of sauce because I kept having to add shit to tweak it until I liked it**
SAUCE ONE Sort of smokey and spicy. I wasn't a huge fan but maybe you will like it OR you can tweak it and make it really good. As I look at the "recipe", I'm disappointed in myself.
-1/4 c soy sauce
-Sriracha...some squirts, maybe 2
-Hoisin sauce, the bottled kind, maybe a teaspoon. Maybe it needed more
This sauce was good on the plain rolls.
SAUCE TWO Peanut butter salty sauce. It's what I think of when I think of truly inauthentic Thai Cuisine for Americans
-2 Tbs peanut butter
-1/2 tsp sriracha
-1 tsp ginger powder? Less? My ginger powder is like 4 years old (I use fresh whenever possible...don't judge me) so it isn't very potent. BE CAREFUL. Ginger powder will f*ck you up if you aren't careful.
-1 tsp of onion powder. I don't know if it's necessary. I used it cause I used it last night with success and I was like "Hey! I remember you! Let's give you another spin!"
-Soy sauce...I don't know how much. I used too much and it was pretty salty. Less than a TB
-Bragg's amino acids. Adds an important briny overtone but DON'T overdo it so use VERY LITTLE. Like 1/4 tsp. This sauce is still good on sardine rolls but if you use too much Braggs it will make the sardine rolls gag-worthy.
-1 Tb Agave Nectar: this is the secret. It keeps it from being too umami, salty, or sour.
-Water to thin.
I have NEVER found a bottled peanut sauce I like. Dr. Sarah, a friend of mine, swears by Wegmans but I'm not persuaded. I think the best probably include fish sauce.
The Traditional-ish rolls with the secret ingredient:
The special ingredient is....SARDINES! HAHA!! You never would have guessed it, right?! Don't go yet. It's good. Trust me.
By the way: It is not lost on me that the blog is vegan tempehest and I used sardines. Whatever. Enjoy the irony or the dissonance or the hypocrisy or whatever. I'm not totally consistent and never will be. I think it's healthy to break the rules sometimes. Even--or maybe especially--my own rules.
Ingredients:
-Can of sardines. I tried to pull out the little backbones that look like centipedes (**shudder**), with mixed success
-brown rice seasoned with: soy sauce, brown rice vinegar, and Mirin (taste as you go. I don't know how to explain how I needed it to taste.)
-chiffonade cabbage (google chiffonade..it's just a fancy way of cutting leaves)
-yellow and red bell pepper
-sesame seeds, toasted in a dry pan
-Nori, cut into triangles or other shapes (looks good on the outside of the roll, see-through the wrapper for decoration)
-broccoli sprouts
Sauce for Sardine Rolls:
So you want this sauce to compliment the VERY fishy flavor of sardines without masking it and without amplifying it too much while maybe even dampening it a little. I tried a variety of things and here's what I thought was best:
--a few tablespoons of corn syrup (dark is better than light). If I'd had molasses I would have used it.
--a few squirts of sriracha
--1-2 tsps of powdered sugar
--maybe 1 teaspoon of rice vinegar. I put more in than I meant to.
Yeah, you could use brown rice syrup or agave or something like that but i wanted the really neutral taste of corn syrup.
Italian Spring Rolls! Bella!
-On your unrolled floppy rice wrap, sprinkle a bunch of dried Italian herbs.
-Next make your stripes. I didn't use any rice or noodles but both would be good in these. Tortellini?
-I used cabbage, peppers, cucumber, and pan-fried tofu on my stripes.
-Sprinkle with balsamic vinegar and olive oil. And I mean sprinkle! Go easy! I have a teeny spoon that I use for this kind of thing.
-Wrap it up. It doesn't need sauce. I like it!
-Yes, this is just a salad in a rice wrapper. It's still good.
Dessert Spring Rolls: I got tired and made way fewer and no variations. Sorry.
I would have made more if my spring-roll-partner-in-crime had been around but he's off rolling around on smelly mats somewhere else. These aren't the kind of thing that you save either so he's shit out of luck this time. But I do want to work on these dessert rolls. I have lots of ideas for them. Here's what I did tonight and I'm finding I crave these now.
Ingredients:
Toasted coconut flakes/bits
Bananas
Peanut Butter OR almond butter or sun butter for those who cannot or do not indulge
Trader Joes Crack I mean Toasted Coconut Chips
Prunes or raisins or
Toasted pepitas (pumpkin seeds)
My procedure was to:
1. sprinkle coconut bits on open wrapper
2. put about a teaspoon of PB across in a stripe
3. layer about 4 slices of banana, cut on the bias a bit
4. another teaspoon of PB
5. some pepitas
6. more PB!
7. MORE BANANAS!
8. MORE COCONUT!
9. Wrap it up. Garnish with peanut butter and coconut crack.
I have made these with strawberries in them, with oranges. They'd be good with chocolate of COURSE. Whipped cream. Silken tofu cheese stuff. I have plans. But I wanted you to know how easy and good the banana and peanut butter rolls are. They are really good.
From beginning of spring rolls to this moment, this has been nearly 4.5 hours. Jesus H. Christ. I was going to do an entry on my massaged kale salad. F**k that. You can google a recipe for that.
So pictures below in order:
-Impending chaos
-Sardine roll
-Sardine roll from the top, with all the ingredients
-A stupid busted roll that ended up as a handful of salad smashed in my face with sauce. Just wanted you to know that they fall apart and that's okay.
-The rolls, laid out and cross-section. Pretty, even though I didn't really aim for that.
-Dessert rolls.
These are not the prettiest pictures but they are kind of fun!
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