These are interesting. You create a chicken salad with some sort of condiment (good soy sauce, or Thai sweet chili) and some crunchy uncooked veggies, boil water in a pan and (here’s the clever bit) slip this thin 6″ round sheet into boiling water and haul it out without folding it. Load and fold like a burrito, and you’ve got a spring roll, of sorts, not your typical egg-roll. Serve with side salad. Light, pretty fast, but requiring some sort of utensil I don’t own. A pancake turner won’t do it that well. I’m going to search among really odd tools you collect over several decades and see if I’ve got any broad flat thingee with holes. I’m sure there are tools made for just this operation. But I may have something.
I think it’s going to be spring rolls tonight…
by CJ | Oct 16, 2011 | Journal | 15 comments
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perhaps one of the scoops that consist of wire on a straight stick. They’re used for fishing wontons out of the wok, as well as fried rice noodles. They’re usually brass wire, the handle is a flat piece of wood maybe 3/4″ wide. I don’t know what else you could use, unless it would be something like a pair of plastic tongs (what they use for salad bars). I certainly wouldn’t recommend trying a fork in one hand and the pancake turner in the other.
Would it be as easy to steam it and then pull it out?
I use a dinner plate filled with boiling water. Slide the rice paper in so it goes just under the water. Pull it out once it gets a hair softer than real paper. If it’s too stiff to completely collapse, you don’t spend so much time untangling the wrinkles. Since it’s still wet, it will absorb water while you stuff. In theory, you’re supposed to drop it onto a bamboo rolling mat, but I never figured out how to use one. I use 1 lb ground pork, 4 c shredded cabbage (napa, bok choy and regular green all work), 1 c diced green onion, 1 shredded carrot, 5-10 chopped shitake mushrooms, 1-2 Tbs toasted sesame oil, 1/2 tsp ground black pepper, 1 tsp salt. Then I spray with spray oil & bake 425 for 20 minutes. I serve with 1/2 c rice vinegar, 1/4 c honey & 1/2 tsp red pepper flakes.
So, one of the places I think OSG may not have visited in her Christmas time visits to NYC is Pearl River, the store in Chinatown with every single thing you might ever have wanted, particularly as to Chinese cookery. So, perhaps, this year she will go there with me and we will find the utensil you need. this will be something for me to look forward to, because work has prevented me from going to Vienna this winter 🙁 I’ve gone to Vienna (for a UN thing) for the last three years, and it is like losing a limb not to go this year 🙁 🙁
Kokipy, we went to Pearl River — I think it was last year, or maybe the year before.
I just got home from being away for a long weekend. Now I can start to plan my winter sojourn to NYC. I realize that can’t compensate for Vienna, but we *can* return to Pearl River!
Something like this? http://www.amazon.com/Helen-Kitchen-5-inch-Spider-Skimmer/dp/B000PKQ3YW/ref=sr_1_1?s=home-garden&ie=UTF8&qid=1318811135&sr=1-1
You can get those as a huge festive appetizer at our local Vietnamese place. They give you a shallow bowl of hot water, a stack of the dry wrappers, and platters of grilled meat bits, shrimp paste, stuffed vine leaves, rice thread noodles, and veggies, along with individual plates just a bit larger in diameter than the wrappers. But it’s so much food that we only do it if we’ve got a crowd with us!
You can also order just a pair of pre-made rolls as a single-portion appetizer – they call them “garden rolls,” and I’ve also heard them called “summer rolls.”
SOunds fun! I hadn’t thought of it as a make-it-yourself!
Sounds like my idea of a “roll your own.” We have a taco factory here that makes lusciously thin flour tortillas. I have used them to make a kind of spring roll with chopped scallions, bean sprouts, diced tomato (or diced pickled beets), diced water chestnuts, cubed avocado, sliced black olives, finely shredded spinach and chopped chicken breast that had been cooked in a GF grill or barbecued. Ditto same with chunk tuna. I make a vinaigrette of olive oil and liberal dash of balsamic vinegar and paint the inside of the flour tortilla with it, put in the goodies and roll burrito style. Have also done it as a pita sandwich. It might work with rice thingies like those of which you speak. Never tried them. Drat. Now I’m hungry.
I’ve got plans for the Halloween Pot Luck on Wed., but I’ll keep this as an idea for the future. How would you stack them so they didn’t stick? Waxed paper? I’ve had them where they were prepared in advance and warmed. They were stacked high in large pans. I figure they could be warmed in my crock pot. I could use parchment paper and not worry while warming. Those would be great for the gluten free gang at another party in a few weeks.
Must pull the chicken tenders and the container of marinade out of the freezer when I get home! I was going to put them in the refrigerator to thaw last night or this morning! I may have to take my small Geo. Foreman grill to work and cook them there on Wed!
I have nearly everything needed except the spring roll wrappers themselves and the spider, which I think is the name of the tool needed. I think. I had great fun trying out homemade egg rolls / spring rolls a while back. So we’ll see. The recipe sounds good!
That burrito wrap sounds neat also. One advantage around here is there are local taquerías and panerías for fresh tortillas. Heck, my local Kroger’s has a decent bakery and deli, wish fresh tortillas and some produce, plus local and imported Latino foods.
Good stuff. — I need to find a couple of Asian ingredients that I am pretty sure are available and I’m not locating in the store. Will hunt up a stock boy or manager next time. Determined to try more.
Haha, my chopsticks technique still varies wildly, but is mostly, “eats like a barbarian gaijin white boy.” Very aggravating when manners, courtesy, and some grace are important. Heck, my Western table manners are good, American or French.
@brenna – thank you, I couldn’t figure out what it was called, and my description is probably lacking in imagination. That is what I was trying to describe.
Thanks to Brenna. If I had looked at her link, I would have seen the tool I was trying to describe, and it’s indeed called a spider. I’m going to get one for the next time I fix Asian or Italian. Good stuff.
Mom used to have a kitchen tool that might be what you’re looking for, and I saw one on one of the PBS cooking shows recently. Imagine an irregular triangle with rounded corners about 9″ x 7.5″ x 4″ (don’t know if that actually works, just trying to visualize). The handle goes at the most acute angle end, the 4″ end has a slight curve. The metal around the edges is maybe 1/2″ wide, inside that there are long slots between about 6-8 fingers maybe 1/4″ wide. I hope you can visualize what I’m trying to describe–probably recognizeable if you’re looking around at a good kitchen utensil store. Sounds like what you’re asking for.
Oh, that wasn’t so hard to find! Under “slotted spatula”.
http://www.newwestknifeworks.com/Files/Site/slotted_spatula.jpg
Reminds me of a funny but less-than-politically-correct reference to a kitchen utensil. The cook I was helping instructed me to get a “female serving spoon”; when asked “female spoon? what’s that?” she responded, “the one with extra holes” (i.e. a strainer-type). That got a LOL, and the utensil she wanted. This would probably be also classified as such.