So, since it’s a holiday and I had time, I figured: heck, why not try Vietnamese food?

I thought that chả giò, the Vietnamese fried spring rolls, would make a nice challenge. Boy, did I badly understimate.

The problem is that everything is suppposed to be chopped into very small pieces. This means:

• 1 whole onion
• 1 taro root
• 1 garlic clove
• 1 shallot, or 3 scallions (scallions is better, but harder to find)
• 500g filling (either pork, crab or shrimp–I used pork, and only 200g because I screwed up)
• 6 nam meo, or wood ear mushrooms : the dratted things are sold in dried form, but then you soak them for 20 minutes, and they balloon up to three times their original size, into a soggy, elastic mass that’s not so easy to chop
• 70-80 g of bun, wet rice vermicelli (which has been soaked in warm water for 30 minutes, so you can imagine it gets rather soggy as well)

Then you mix everything with the basic paste, which is made up of

• 2 eggs
• 2 teaspoons sugar
• 1 pinch of salt and 1 pinch of pepper
• and of 2 tablespoons of concentrated nuoc mam fish sauce (this is the bit where you dearly hope you’re not spraying your entire kitchen table)

And then comes the fun part. Take the rice papers, which look like this:

• soak them in 2L of warm water mixed with 3 tablespoons sugar
• wait until they’ve become translucid and supple
• lay them flat on a damp kitchen cloth
• put 1-2 tablespoons of filling on them
• and very carefully roll into a cylinder.

That’s usually when it broke down for me, literally: the darn things are so thin, and I’m so clumsy, that the paper would invariably tear.

Once you’re done, it looks like this:

.

Well, slightly less sagging once you get it right (those are my first attempts, when I was still figuring out the rice paper part).

Now deep-fry everything at 180°C for 15 minutes, and it looks like this:

And, boy, it tastes good, too. Served wrapped in salad, with a dash of dipping sauce (1 chopped garlic clove, juice of 1/2 squeezed lime, 5 tablespoons Nuoc mam, 3 tablespoons sugar, and about 15-20 cL of water, or whatever it takes to go up to a cup), it actually made for a surprisingly wonderful meal (especially considering all the bits I screwed up on the way there).

Must try that again

Similar Posts:

• Cooking experiments, part 2: gỏi cuốn
• Recipe for bi cuon
• Banh cua chien (fried crab fritters)