Best Spring Rolls Ever

It's a bold claim, I know.

But anyone who has travelled as extensively in Vietnam as I have has eaten a lot of spring rolls, so I feel like I have the credentials to judge this.

Now, when you think of spring rolls, your mind might cast to your local Asian food restaurant, where they're ordered by the giant frozen case, and chipped out to be fried as needed as a part of a combo plate for the daily lunch special. The spring roll you're thinking of is probably long and cigar-shaped, with a crispy golden brown wrapper that's almost impossible to negotiate with chopsticks.

You probably like to pour plum sauce on these spring rolls. (So do I.)

The spring rolls you know are filled with a motley assortment of odds and ends - anything from rice noodles to green peas. If it's a cheap "vegetable" spring roll, it probably only contains shredded cabbage, msg, and tiny flakes of carrot to maintain the illusion of vegetable diversity.

I am not talking about these spring rolls.

In Hanoi, an incredible array of things are wrapped and rolled in rice paper. They can be fried or fresh, filled with vegetables, herbs, fish, shrimp, pork, beef - pretty much anything that doesn't move fast enough to avoid being rolled. They're dipped in hoisin sauce or nuoc cham - a mix of fish sauce, lime juice, and other seasonings. And they're eaten anytime, as a part of a family meal, or as a convenient snack with a tall glass of draft beer, while looking out over one of Hanoi's many lakes. Any self-respecting Com restaurant will have a large tray of them for patrons to add to their take-away lunches. And I can well imagine, every family has their favourite version, and every housewife has her own recipe.

When I was in Hanoi this month, I had planned to travel to Sapa, in the northwest mountains of Vietnam, and to take a few days touring Halong Bay as well. The weather put a wrench into my plans, however, as a typhoon blew through cutting off a lot of the roads out of Hanoi. I found myself at loose ends for a day or two while I arranged alternate plans. A friend (and travel agent extraordinaire) hooked myself and Wendy up with an afternoon cooking class with Yen at Yen Cook House. This turned out to be divine luck, as it was here that I learned several killer Vietnamese dishes that I'll be writing about over the next few weeks. At Yen Cook House, I sampled some of the finest dishes I've ever tried in Hanoi - Yen's passion for cooking and Vietnamese food shone through the language barrier, and it was clear to see that his years spent working as a chef had given him a sense for how to season his dishes expertly. What impressed me the most, however, were his Hanoi-style nem - fried spring rolls. If you only ever cook spring rolls once in your life, (and you might only make them once; after all, it's a messy and tedious business, although the results are worth it) please make these.

If you've eaten a Hanoi-style nem before, you'll know that they differ from Saigon-style most obviously in their wrapper. I'm not quite sure what the difference is, but in the south, the wrapper is similar to those I often ate in Canada - I suspect it is somehow wheat-based. In the north, they use a pliable rice paper which fries up into light ethereally crispy layers that shatter into salty-sweet fragments when you bite into them. The nem are about an inch in length, to make them easy to eat in one or two bites using chopsticks. They're dipped in nuoc cham, a potent mixture of lime juice, fish sauce, sugar, chilis, and garlic, which nicely cuts the richness of the pork fat and frying oil.

Step 1: The filling

Now, I'm going to give approximates here. Close is good enough in horseshoes, hand grenades, and hand rolls. Above, you see pictured Yen's filling. I will attempt to list the items.

• 4 or 5 dried chinese mushrooms, reconstituted and thinly sliced. (You want huong, or perfume mushrooms, if you have a Vietnamese grocery nearby)
• 1/2 a carrot, peeled and julienned.
• 50 g of bean sprouts, rinsed, drained, and cut into smallish pieces for mixing.
• 50 g of rice noodles, cut into smallish lengths.
• 200g of ground pork.
• 4 or 5 green onions, finely chopped.
• 2 tablespoon of fried shallots (available in pouches or jars in most asian food stores).
• 1 tablespoon of chicken stock granules (Knorr or Maggi).
• 1 teaspoon of ground pepper.
• 1 teaspoon of chopped garlic.

Mix it all together. And let it sit for 10 minutes or so to let the flavours mingle.

Step 2: The Rolling

If you can find rice papers that are bendy like these, they're ideal, since they won't need to be dampened for rolling. Odds are you won't be able to, so regular stiff round rice papers are fine too. Keep a bowl of hot water in your prep space, and soak each paper until it becomes pliable enough for wrapping. Set it down on a cutting board or plate, ready to roll.

Now this is one of the tricks I learned from yen to help create the beautiful, brown crispy coating of a Hanoi nem. Mix up a bit of water, cornstarch and sugar in a bowl. When you put the wrapper down, before adding any filling, take a swipe of this mix and pass it over the rice paper lightly, enough to barely coat it. Then, in the bottom third of the wrapper, place a tablespoon or so of mix. Roll the paper over once, and pat eat side of the filling lump to firm up the filling into a solid style log. Fold the right side of the wrapper back over the filling log; then do one complete roll of the log. Fold the left side over so that you now have a completely wrapped log of filling. Continue to roll the log until all the wrapper is wound around the filling. You should end up with a plate of these:
They should be roughly the length of your thumb.

Step 3: The Frying

Fill a deep frypan with cooking oil, and heat it so that the tip of a wooden chopstick sizzles when inserted.


Pop the rolls into the oil all together, and fry for 5 or 6 minutes, turning them once or twice, until they look golden, like this:

The second trick I learned was to pull them out of the oil at this stage to let them rest. If you're making these for a party, you could make them up until this point and hold them for later; or freeze them for use at another time - maybe for a bento? Then, just before you're ready to eat them, put them back into the hot oil, and fry again until they reach a burnished brown colour. Of course, I know that double-frying yields a perfect french fry; but I had never extended this logic to frying other things.

The final product:

The tomato rose is optional, of course. These are usually served with a light dipping sauce called nuoc cham:

This nuoc cham has been garnished with seeded cucumber and thinly sliced carrot. Yen's recipe is:

3 tbsps of vinegar
4 tbsps of water
1-2 tbsps of fish sauce
2 tbsps sugar
1 tbsp of lemon or lime juice
2 cloves of garlic, chopped
1 small red chili, chopped (optional)
Fresh ground pepper

Mix everything together until the sugar dissolves. It will keep for a day or so in the fridge. You can buy bottles of this in most asian groceries, although I think that fresh happens to taste better.

Alternatively, you could serve them with bottled sweet chili sauce, sriracha, or even plum sauce.

If you put a platter of these out at a party, expect them to disappear immediately, and expect people to say it's the best spring roll they've ever eaten. You can smile and tell them it's a Hanoi thing.

Yakitori Izakaya

A final post before I take off to Hanoi for a couple of weeks for some sightseeing and serious eating.

Peter's parents arrived this week to join us for our holiday this year, so our first trip was to Tokyo, of course! Our first dinner, however, had to be in Fujisawa, at our favourite yakitori restaurant, Sui Sui.

Yakitori, simply, is chicken on a stick. Traditional yakitori places are easily found near train stations everywhere by looking for their trademark haze of chicken grease smoke. They serve up all parts of the chicken, from wings, to hearts, to bits of chicken cartilege, and cold draft beer to weary salarymen on their way home. The chicken sticks are grilled over hot charcoal, which gives them a smoky, fatty taste that goes perfect with beer.

Sui Sui, however, is a more of an izakaya-style bar which serves not only chicken on a stick, but a wide array of other snacks as well. When we arrived, we ordered a range of things for John and Wendy to enjoy.

When we sat down, the first thing up was an unordered dish - the house serves one automatically, as a kind of table charge, in case you weren't planning on eating much. This is annoying to a lot of foreigners, but at Sui Sui, it's always tasty, and since we don't have to tip, I don't mind it at all. This was some soy braised chicken tossed with onions, peppers, and mizuna leaf. I've got to figure out how to make this one at home.



Next, a traditional summer snack - edamame, or soy bean pods, boiled in salt water. Just the thing with cold beer! We also tried some pork belly with kimchi - I'm on the record as say that pork and kimchi are one of the world's finest flavour combinations, along with tomato and basil, and peanut butter and chocolate.


A more traditional take is chicken thigh and negi - a kind of Japanese leek, grilled simply with salt. Fantastic!

Not-so-traditional potato wedges - fried and then drenched in garlic butter. Don't knock it, 'til you've tried it! It's a good thing we spent the whole day walking, though.


A little more crazy - mochi (pounded sticky rice balls) wrapped in bacon, brushed with soy and mirin, topped with cheese and black pepper, and grilled. Un-%^&*ing-believably good.


Finally, a favourite of many foreigners in Japan - tsukune - chicken and green onion meatballs, grilled with more soy and mirin. They also do a ponzu citron sauce as well, which we always forget to order.

This is one of my favourite places to go and have a quick drink and a bite to eat. They also have a selection of awamori - Okinawan rice spirits, which John swore tasted like the potato moonshine he used to make in P.E.I. Wendy was happy with her ponzu and ume wine, and as for me, two cold Ebisu drafts were all I needed to rehydrate. A perfect night!

Pork and Myoga Salad

Like a lot of people living in the greater Kanto area, I face an hour commute on the train most days. When my train pulls in at my station each night at 10 pm, rather than walking alone down a quiet platform, I join hordes of shuffling suited salarymen and women on their way home. It sometimes takes as long as five minutes to get off the platform and out through the gates, especially if the throng, heads bent over mobile phones as they resignedly send their ETA to family members, gets thwarted by the odd Tokyo-bound passenger locking up a gate coming onto the platform. It's Japan, so no one grumbles - we just pull our bags to the side and pause our shuffle long enough for the straggler to crowd-surf his way to the train.

After being spit out of the gate, I follow the crowd past the bicycle lot and down the road. I can't bear to take a left turn into the 7/11 like so many others, because the thought of konbini egg-salad sandwich or floppy chicken karaage leaves me cold. When I finally get in the door, I'm hungry, but a heavy meal is out of the question. That's when a recipe like this saves the day - it's light; it's healthy; and it keeps well in the fridge to make up the next day's lunch. If I'm feeling like something more substantial, I have it with a bowl of steamed rice.

I found this recipe in the Japan forum at eGullet.org, which has been an invaluable resource to me as I've learned how to cook Japanese food. First, you need about 200 g of lean pork - I take thinly sliced Japanese pork and boil it quickly, which cooks it without any added fat. Really, though, any cooked pork would do - leftover grilled pork loin or chops would be fine, I think. Then, I thinly slice three Japanese cucumbers, which is about the equivalent of one English cucumber. To this, I add three shredded myoga bulbs, which are a sort of edible bulb of a ginger plant. It doesn't actually taste like ginger, though - more like a shallot or sweet red onion, either of which would make a lovely substitution. Three largeish shallots or half a smallish red onion would do. Then, for a dressing, mix 100 ml each of good quality soy sauce, mirin, and rice vinegar. The final touch is to add wasabi paste, which adds a lovely sharpness to the salad - add it to taste. There isn't any oil in this recipe, but I don't miss it in the dressing, because the salty soy, the sweet mirin, and the sharp wasabi all work together to make it well-balanced and satisfying.

This time of year, having a cool bowl of tangy salad - along with a cold Kirin beer - is just the way to relax after a sweaty and stressful commute.

Corn Jumble

I'm really on a vegetable kick, aren't I?

Well, it's summer, and I really don't want to waste a bit of it. With Sous-chef Peter bringing home piles of produce every weekend from the market, I'm having fun thinking of new ways to deal with it all. I know it's impossible to think that you could ever get sick of eating fresh, sweet corn on the cob, and I haven't yet. It's hard to resist five ears for 200 yen, but my fridge and bento box are just too small to hold full ears of corn, so as soon as they come in the door on Sunday, I get to work cutting them down into a more manageable size.

Right now, I'm making a sort of corn salsa/pickle out of them, which Canadian Bento christened "corn jumble". It's as good as name as any, and so I present to you: corn jumble.

This travels great as a side dish in a bento, or to the beach like it did this week as a trio of side dishes for a yakitori cookout on Enoshima beach.

I steamed five ears of fresh corn, and diced up half a red onion; a red pepper, and two Japanese cucumbers. I soaked the red pepper in cold water for ten minutes to take away the sharp onion-y taste - I find even red onions in Japan are stronger than I'm used to. I rubbed the cucumbers with salt, to take away any bitter taste in the peel. Since Japanese cucumbers are so small, they don't need seeding - I'd recommend using an English cucumber or a seeding a regular cucumber. You could add black beans to this to make it more substantial, but since I didn't have any hanging around - I didn't. I seasoned this with a half teaspoon of salt and several grinds of fresh pepper, and then made a dressing from 2/3 cup each white sugar dissolved over heat in rice vinegar. When the sugar is dissolved, I pour the dressing over the whole lot of vegetables; cool; and then leave in the fridge for an hour or so until the flavours mingle. Like most things, the longer you leave it; the better it tastes.

I don't recommend trying to eat it with chopsticks like I did, though. Exercise in frustration.

Ginger Eggplants

Eggplant, as you know, is one of my favourite vegetables. I love the way it slumps into velvety softness when you cook it properly. In Vietnam there was a restaurant that made eggplant stir-fried with garlic and honey that was breathtaking in its simplicity. Each piece was infused with garlicky oil, and was meltingly silky. I have always been frustrated in attempts to recreate this texture in my own kitchen, ending up with tough chunks of eggplant that burned in the wok, despite repeated lowering of the temperature, additions of more oil, tears, and desperate entreaties. Roasting an eggplant in an oven for a long time will eventually yield the texture that I'm looking for, but I'm still without an oven.

So when the summer's first eggplants appeared on our local vegetable stand this week, I turned to my copy of "Washoku" for guidance. The author gives several eggplant recipes, taking seasonality to a new level by calling for eggplants from different parts of summer. I chose a recipe for eggplants cooked with ginger, hoping to recapture some of the Hanoi magic.

I wasn't disappointed, as the recipe yielded a pile of sweetly tender eggplants with the exact right balance of sweet heat from the ginger and briny salt from the dashi. I made them one night after work, and left them in the fridge overnight to be served with sold somen noodles for the following evening's dinner. It was a great way to beat the heat.

I cleaned and scored the skins on five small Japanese eggplants. I'm sure you could use the fatter, bigger eggplants, if they were cut down into sixths. Then, I heated a teaspoon of oil in a frypan. I seared them, skin side down, for about a minute; then flipped them, and added 1 tsp of sake, 1/3 cup of dashi (made from a powdered mix), 1 tsp of sugar, and the peels from an inch stub of peeled ginger. I then covered and cooked them for another three minutes, until the sauce had reduced by half. After picking out the ginger peels, I thinly diced my peeled ginger and added that. The recipe actually calls for grated ginger juice, but since I keep forgetting to pick up a ginger grater every time I'm at the dollar store, I just chopped it up finely. I also added a small slosh of soy sauce and mirin, just to adjust the taste. According to the recipe, it's important to let the eggplants cool in the pan; covered; to allow the flavours to mingle and concentrate. Like everything I make from this book, they turned out perfectly. They can be garnished with white poppy seeds for contrast, but since my ginger chunks were still visible, I thought they provided colour contrast enough.

They had exactly the right texture; soft and yielding to the touch, and I was thrilled to have reached this texture without ridiculous amounts of oil. I'd like to try a Mediterranean spin on this dish using garlic and oregano as seasonings and chicken stock as the braising liquid. The daily piles of eggplants at the mujin show no time of stopping soon, so I'll have lots of raw materials on which to experiment.