Recipe: Thai Style Spring Rolls

 Last month I had my first spring rolls in an Asian restaurant. They were incredably good: crispy, fresh and light. I decided to make my own clean, healthy spring rolls. In this article I am sharing the super easy recipe with you.

[dropcap]Spring rolls[/dropcap] are made from rice paper. Rice paper is thin, translucent, edible paper made from parts of the rice plant. Moreover, rice paper is gluten free and easy to digest. Especially in the Vietnamese and Thai kitchen rice paper is used a lot.

Spring rolls are a typical Thai and Vietnamese dish. There are various ways to make spring rolls. Besides the main ingredient rice paper, they may consist of raw, cooked or stif-fried veggies, combined with meat, fish or a meat substitute. The ingredients are wrapped up in the rice paper.

As long as healthy ingredients are used to wrap up in the rice paper, spring rolls fit perfectly into a healthy diet.

I made 4 big spring rolls and served them with miso soup 

 

As you can see, I used a green leaf in my spring rolls. That leaf is bok choy, a Chinese cabbage. The leaves of bok choy are dark green; they are full of  disease-fighting phytochemicals.

Besides, raw bok choi leaves are very crispy, which makes them a tasty leaf to use in the rolls as a first layer within the rice paper.

For my spring rolls I chose cooked shrimps, avocado, carrot, cucumber and alfalfa sprouts, but you can really choose any ingredients you want, whether you cook them, fry them or use them raw.

Step-by-step recipe

Let me take you through a step-by-step description of how I made my spring rolls. I started by preparing all the ingredients I wanted to wrap up in my rolls:

Step 1

Tear 4 medium leaves from a washed bok choi. Leave as little of the white as possible (you can use the white as an ingredient for Balinese Gado Gado, for instance).

Step 2

The next step is to prepare your filling. If you would like to use the same ingredients as I did, do the following:

1. cut 1/4 washed cucumber (julienne)
2. cook 50 grams of small shrimps
3. slice up half an avocado in thin slices
4. shortly stir-fry a hand full of alfalfa and cut carrots julienne

In the next images you can see how to wrap your spring rolls:

Step 3

Prepare your rice paper:

• Fill a bowl with hot water.
• Place 1 rice paper in the bowl and take it out after 30 sec’s. The rice paper has become soft and flexible.

Step 4

Fill your spring rolls and wrap:

• Place the rice paper on a plate and place a bok choi leaf on top of it.
• Place your ingredients in the middle on the edge of the leaf. Don’t use too much ingredients per wrap; this will cause your rice paper to rip once wrapped.
• Wrap up the ingredients with the rice paper and leaf. 
• As you roll, fold the edges inside, sealing the package.
• Set the wrap aside while the rice paper cools down and hardens out a bit.
• Repeat for the other 3 rolls.

I liked my rolls best with  tamari soy sauce and wasabi dip.

Enjoy your rolls!