My dear friend introduced me to doing up fresh salad rolls. I enjoyed the process of making them together, and I enjoyed the flavour and the unique texture.
My son thinks these are "really cool" and has done a bit more experimenting with fillings than I've even considered. One of my daughters refers to these as caterpillars.
We find that our frying pan is the right size for wetting the rice paper, and we use room temperature water that is leaning towards warm.
Immerse an entire cicle of rice paper (make sure the edges are all immersed!) under the water for a few seconds until it is soft (not too long; not too soft!). Place the circle onto a plate.
Salad rolls can be folded two ways (possibly more, though I only know of two):
- with one end open so they end up looking sort of like a sandwich wrap
- completely enclosed like a spring roll
I start filling the circle about a couple inches or so from the edge closest to me, depending on how many ingredients I'm using, then lay the ingredients in so I'll have a taste of everything in each bite. If you are brand new to rolls, it will only take you one or two rolls to figure out how much to put inside without the rice paper ripping. Once I've finished with the fillers, I pull the bottom of the circle up over the fillers to completely cover them, fold in the paper edges on each side, and carefully roll the salad roll to the top of the rice paper to finish it up.
Our favourite salad roll includes:
-cilantro
-shrimp
-Italian parsley or curled parsley (or go wild and add both at the same time!)
-mint
-sprouts (Josh LOVES radish sprouts in these; I prefer bean sprouts)
-cooked and cold rice noodles, thick or thin
-sometimes a leaf of crunchy lettuce
-Josh usually adds chile pepper flakes or hot sauce to his; I prefer dipping my finished rolls in hoisin
Of course, you could also use rice, pork, chicken, smoked salmon, dill, and any number of other ingredients, most likely limited only by the imagination.
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