Recipes Discovered

Summer Rolls Recipe

When Seth and I eat at a Vietnamese restaurant, we always get summer rolls. Summer rolls are similar to spring rolls, but they aren’t fried and are served at room temperature. Shrimp, vegetables, herbs, and rice vermicelli (a very thin Asian rice noodle) are wrapped inside an unfried rice wrapper. They are often served with fish sauce or peanut dipping sauce. I don’t really care for fried spring rolls, but there is something about the combination of the chewy rice wrapper and the filling of the summer rolls that I love.

I decided I would make 3 dipping sauces for the summer rolls. The first was the traditional chili fish sauce, which consists of fish sauce, lime juice, garlic, sugar, garlic chili sauce and water. I whisked the ingredients together until the sugar dissolved. The second sauce was peanut sauce, which is another traditional sauce served with summer rolls. >> For this sauce, I sauteed onions, garlic, and red chili flakes in a little oil until the onion was soft. Then I whisked in water, peanut butter, hoisin sauce, and ketchup. The third sauce was just hoisin sauce topped with crusted peanuts, which I made in case the other two sauces were really horrible. I trasnfered the sauces to three seperate dishes and set them aside while I made the summer rolls.

Prepping to make these rolls is the hardest part. First, I cooked rice vermicelli in boiling water for 3 minutes, and then let it drain and cool. Vermicelli is a very long and thin rice noodle found in the Asian section of the grocery store. Mine came in an 8 ounce package, but I only needed 2 ounces for this recipe. Getting the noodles apart is difficult, and I ended up cutting them apart with scissors. While the vermicelli was cooling, I chopped basil, mint, parsley, lettuce, and cabbage. It’s hard to say how much 3 tablespoons of mint or parsley is, but basically, I had a palmful of each of the herbs and about twice as much lettuce and cabbage. I also laid out pre-shredded carrots and shrimp to add to the rolls. And speaking of the shrimp – make sure they are cooked before they are added to the rolls. It’s not fun when you are getting ready to take a bite and realize the shrimp aren’t cooked. Then you have to undo the rolls and take the shrimp out, which isn’t very easy. Oops! Ok, moving on. Rice wrappers are very thin hard disks, similar to a tortilla, made from rice flour. When they are soaked in warm water for a few seconds, they become pliable and a bit sticky. Even though they are very thin, once they are rehydrated, they are pretty sturdy and don’t tear as easily as I thought they would. I soaked the rice wrappers one by one, and when they become pliable, I laid them flat, topped them with a handful of vermicelli, small amounts of all the herbs and vegetables, and the cooked shrimp. To wrap them, I folded the two short ends in and folded one of the long ends over and rolled it up. It’s similar to rolling a burrito or enchiladas. The rice paper is stick enough that is holds everything together, but the tighter the rolls are wrapped, the better. After I wrapped each roll, I placed it on a plate between two damp paper towels to keep them from drying out. The recipe also said that the rolls can be wrapped in damp paper towels and stored in the refrigerator in a Ziploc bag for a couple hours. When I finished wrapping all of the rolls, I put them on a clean plate and served them along side the dipping sauces.

The summer rolls turned out great. Very much like ones that we have had in restaurants. I don’t think there is anything I would change about them. The garlic fish sauce was okay, but the peanut dipping sauce was outstanding. I would definitely make a double or even triple batch of that though because there nearly enough. Overall, it was a bit of work, but I think it was worth it.