Vietnamese Fresh Rolls

If you’ve never had them, they’re an absolute MUST. There are Thai and Vietnamese versions, both of which usually come with shrimp in them (yuck!), but we make ours completely vegetarian, (so no extra time spent deveining anything), and they’re fabulous. Most of the time spent is in prep: shredding cabbage (or some people use iceberg), julienning carrots, cutting up tofu into slivers, match-sticking cucumber, cutting long lengths of noodles into mouth-sized bundles … The rest of the prep time is in assembly, which is just rehydrating your Vietnamese Fresh-Roll Skin (bánh tráng) in water (they start out looking like a pancake, but are the consistency of a dry noodle, and they’re made of tapioca or rice starch and water) slapping down some ingredients, and wrap-rolling the thing up like a Vietnamese burrito.

Usually cilantro or mint is the herb which flavors these rolls, and ground roasted peanuts often accompany the Thai versions. This batch contained a bit of green curry paste, ground almonds, green onions, tofu, bean-thread noodles, cucumber, and tofu. That’s it: no harder than that. Wrap them up, hit them with some Mae Ploy Sauce, and you’re in heaven. Really and truly the best Asian food invented, ever.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.