I began making these twenty years ago when I won a Ayam cook book in a competition and they have quite literally ruined any chance we had for enjoying spring rolls in Chinese restaurants, which all taste, by comparison, like a few strips of old cabbage wrapped in too much pastry.
Our spring rolls are BIG, two handed jobs. They are a meal. If someone is still hungry after eating four of these you need to get some worming tablets from the chemist.
These days when I make them I do a smaller bowl of the mix without the seafood components (prawns and fish sauce) for Master8. We’re pretty sure he’s okay to eat them now (or so the tests show) but we just can’t convince him to even try.
Part of the beauty of these is you’ll probably only ever need to read this recipe once because you can put just about any sauce or Asian veg in them which takes your fancy. Sometimes we add sweet chilli sauce, sometimes we use chicken mince, sometimes we add black bean sauce, sometimes we don’t include the sprouts or the shoots, sometimes we add Chinese cabbage. They all taste good and they’re all favourites.
You will need:
oil for deep frying
500g pork mince
200g green prawn flesh, chopped
2 shallots, chopped
100g snow peas, chopped
1/4 cup chopped red capsicum
2 garlic cloves, crushed
5cm ginger, grated
227g tin sliced chestnuts
225g tin bamboo shoots
410g tin bean sprouts
2 tablespoons coriander
2 tablespoons plum sauce
3 tablespoons oyster sauce
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons fish sauce
pack of spring roll wrappers
milk, for brusing
STEP ONE: Start heating up oil in deep fryer.
STEP TWO: Mix all ingredients, except wrappers and milk, in a bowl
STEP THREE: Put a couple of heaped tablespoons of mixture onto a wrapper, wrap (so no mixture is sticking out, and brush on some milk to seal.
STEP FOUR: Deep fry a couple at a time until golden.
STEP FIVE: Eat as they are, or dip in whatever dipping sauce takes you fancy. We ALWAYS dip in plum sauce.
When not typing away over here and checking his stats every two minutes Bruce Devereaux hangs out at his ‘BIG FAMILY little income’ Facebook Page.
’raising a family on little more than laughs’
