 |
| Or with sweet and sour sauce |
This would have been lunch for my colleage and me, ... if my body hadn't decided to be sick. But I didn't want to let the ingredients go to waste and made the summer rolls. These are Vietname style summer rolls, so they are not fried/deep-fried. They're low in fat and gluten-free (in case anyone suffers from celiac desease) if you substitute the beer that is used to soak the rice paper for water or gluten-free beer.
The summer rolls are great for buffets, picnics, lunch at work, or long trips. They're also really yummy!
Ingredients for the rolls:
- Bánh Tráng rice paper (I used 29 sheets with a diameter of 22cm/8 1/2 in)
- ca. 200g of soy sprouts
- 400g of plain tofu (you can also take 250g of smoked tofu and skip the frying/soy sauce step of the recipe)
- 4 medium carrots
- some fresh mint
- some fresh cilantro
- 1/2 cucumber
- Some lettuce (I prefer lollo biando)
- 100g of rice vermicelli (100g = uncooked weight)
- 0.5l beer (this can be substituted for water)
- some soy sauce
- some oil for frying
Ingredients for the sweet and sour lime sauce:
- 1 small (or half a medium) carrot finely shredded
- 3 tablespoons agave syrup
- 2 table spoons rice vinegar
- 30g of fresh ginger
- juice of a lime
- a little bit of salt
Instructions:
- Cook the vermicelli rice noodles briefly. I rinsed the noodles afterwards, so they would lose some of the starch. This way I could seperate them more easily when I took portions for each roll. For this purpose, I also cut them up a bit.
- Cut the tofu in thin slices - as thin as you would like thin French fries.
 |
| Warning! Tofu still tastes like soggy card board at this point! |
- Heat up a little bit of oil in a pan and fry the tofu sticks.
- Moving the tofu in the pan every other minute or so, fry for 6-8 minutes in total.
- Warning: At this point the tofu still taste like soggy (slightly crisp) cardboard!
- After your 6-8 minutes are up, generously deglaze with soy sauce. And by generously, I mean generously. This is probably going to take around 80ml of soy sauce.
- Move the tofu around in the pan, so each tofu stick gets covered in soy sauce.
- Turn down the heat and leave the pan on the burner.
- OR you can just use this recipe for deepfried tofu.
- While the tofu is sitting on the stove, we'll get started on the sauce, so the flavors of the ingredients can develop while we're making the rest.
- Grate the carrot finely.
- Peel the ginger and grate finely as well.
- Juice the lime. If you have an organic lime, you can also zest the peel and add it.
- Mix carrots, ginger, agave syrup, lime juice, rice vinegar and a pinch of salt.
- Mix well and put it in the fridge to rest.
- Chop the mint and cilantro.
- Mix the chopped herbs with the vermicelli noodles. This way you get an even distribution of the herbs and won't get a surprisingly strong mint taste every other bite.
- Grate the carrots - not as finely as for the sauce though.
- Cut off half a cucumber, peel it and cut it in quarters.
- Cut out the core, then cut each quarter into three thin stripes.
- Then cut them in short pieces.
- Set up everything for the big rolling!
- Not pictured: The lettuce.
- Get a plate that's big enough for the rice paper.
- Fill the plate with beer - or water. The beer adds a nice taste to the summer rolls.
- Soak the rice paper in the beer, one sheet at a time! Do not put in several sheets at once. They will only stick together.
- Don't leave the sheet in for too long. They should not get too soft.
- Then, place the sheet in front of you. Place another sheet into the liquid.
- On the sheet in front of you, mix all of your ingredients: Noodles with herbs, soy sprouts, carrots, cucumber bits, tofu sticks. Drizzle a little bit of soy sauce on top.
- Finish the whole thing with some lettuce (I didn't use it back when I wrote this recipe ;), so it's not pictured).
- Rolling is really easy:
- Wrap the filling once from the bottom, then fold in the sides, and roll it up!
- Done!
