Soup Noodles

As I’ve gotten more and more into real Chinese food, I’ve lost track of spring rolls. Before I discovered good Chinese food, I knew all about bad Chinese food. Ordered from a local takeout, it featured things like butterfly shrimp, Bok choy in a thick, bland sauce containing way too much cornstarch, and spring rolls. It was different from the usual Western fare, and, I have to admit I loved it. Especially the spring rolls. I ordered them every chance I got.

These days, contemplating a Chinese appetizer menu, I’m really unlikely to choose spring rolls. Faced with one of those appetizer plates offering 6 or so possibilities, I’m likely to leave the spring rolls to others at the table.

Why? Is there something wrong with spring rolls as a concept? Not at all. There’s great pleasure in a good spring roll. The teeth crunching on a wonderful crisp outer layer, passing through the softer underlayer of the wrapper, firmed by the oil but not crisped by it, and finally the filling, a mixture of veggies for body, meat and mushroom for umami, and a bit of shellfish to round out the flavors.

And spring rolls are a great comfort food. Fried crunchy things are appealing — just look at French Fries. Fried crunchy things with a soft center are appealing — just look at French Fries. And spring rolls cap that off by having actual interesting flavors and textures in the interior. I’ve made spring rolls in the past, and eaten 5 or 6 of them just about as soon as they’ve (almost) cooled enough so that the interior doesn’t burn my tongue.

I do have to admit, though, that in a way there is something wrong with spring rolls. You have two choices. You can order them at a restaurant, or you can make them yourself.

If you order them at a restaurant, and you’re not in Hong Kong, where the chefs go the extra mile to put magic in a dish, chances are that they’re not going to be as good as you dreamed when you ordered them. If the oil is old and tired, you’ll taste it for sure, because the wrapper absorbs enough oil so that you can taste just what it’s like. The filling, which really needs to be loaded with flavorful goodies to overcome the impact of the wrapper, will probably be dominated by cabbage, carrots, and other inexpensive ingredients, to keep the costs down.

So you can make them at home, and fix all that. But if you wrap and fry 18-20 spring rolls, which is about what a package of wrappers and a recipe of filling will make you, you can have as many excellent spring rolls as you can stuff down that night. But what about tomorrow? You’ll never get that crust to be crisp again.

Those are the sort of arguments that keep me from making spring rolls very often. Then, occasionally, I relent, and wonder why I waited so long. Yes, spring rolls are a pain to make. Typically you stir-fry two separate mixtures, one veggie, one meat. After all that, you still don’t have food — you have to stand there with your sealing egg wash and your wrappers and your brush, and make 18 or so neat little sealed packages, and then deep fry them. If that weren’t enough hassle, many of them tend to favor one side over the other when floating in the oil, and you have to force them to stay flipped, to fry evenly, with a chopstick and/or some tongs.

Horrible. But there’s nothing like a really good freshly fried spring roll. Nothing.

So I found myself once again with a large jug of peanut oil, a supply of spring roll skins, and ingredients for two very different spring roll filling recipes.

One of these was the real deal, from the magnificent Yan Kit’s Classic Chinese Cookbook. The other was a throwback to the “bad” Chinese-American food of my childhood, a thoroughly inauthentic, and thoroughly delicious, recipe, containing hamburger and MSG, from the out-of-print Joyce Chen Cook Book. Would you believe that my wife likes the inauthentic one better, and I’m not so sure she isn’t right?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 21st, 2006 at 7:32 pm and is filed under Chinese Recipes, Chinese Cooking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.