A Vegetarian Dish A Month – November 2024: Vegan Spring Rolls
With just a couple months left to go in order to complete my New Years’ Resolution challenge to myself to make one new vegan or vegetarian dish per month in 2024, and my success with trying something way outside of my comfort zone last month, I decided that for this month I wanted to do something still unlike anything I usually make and with some kind of ingredient I have never used before…Turned out I had a perfect candidate in my kitchen cabinets already!
November 2024: Vegan Spring Rolls
Digging through my kitchen cabinets, I came across the perfect candidate: rice paper! On a past visit to Hawaii, my mom had bought the rice paper to make some spring rolls, and it had been sitting in our kitchen cabinet ever since, so I decided why not make use of them? I knew rolling spring rolls was going to be something new for me, and it felt like something I could make with things I already had in the fridge, so I set to work!
The Recipe
I figured, how hard could spring rolls be? You wrap a bunch of stuff in the rice paper and eat it. I decided to just wing it for this one.
Turned out I was pretty much right, too.
For the ingredients, I dug around in my fridge and found a block of firm tofu, avocados, spring mix, carrots, and lettuce. A perfect set of veggies, though I would’ve also liked to add some sprouts. I chopped all the veggies and set them aside for wrapping. Then I fried the tofu in some sesame oil and salt to give them a bit of flavor.
The hardest part by far of making the spring rolls was trying to figure out how long to soak the rice paper: too long and they become gooey mush or just tear immediately (and aren’t very pleasant to eat, either), too long and they are still hard in the middle, which also didn’t present the best texture. But after a few attempts, I started to get the timing down.
The next hard part was wrapping. To get that perfectly taut, tightly wrapped spring roll was surprisingly difficult. The rice paper is sticky and sticks to your hands, the surface you’re working on, and to itself. That meant trying to apply enough pressure so that you don’t rip the rice paper but still compact the veggies down while also trying not to let the rice paper touch any surfaces you didn’t want was a challenge, but after about 10-15 rolls, I started to get it down. They never got as pretty as the ones at a restaurant, but they were edible.
I had some peanut butter sauce that we had used for some past Vietnamese food we had made, so for this time around I decided to just use that up, though in future I think I would like to try to make my own sauce to make the recipe more ‘mine’.
The Verdict
Honestly, once you figured out the right timing for the rice paper, it’s pretty hard to mess these up. They were just as tasty as the ones you get from a restaurant, though they didn’t look nearly as nice. A tighter wrap would’ve definitely given them a better texture, but the flavor came mostly from the peanut sauce.
In future, I think I would want to add more avocado, as that offered a nice buttery richness that I didn’t add enough of, and I think cucumbers and sprouts would’ve also been a nice addition, as mine were pretty green-leafy-heavy.
This is certainly a dish I will be making again. Now that I’ve gotten over the fear of the rice paper, this feels like a pretty easy dish to make any time you’ve got a bunch of spare veggies in the fridge!
