Work is split more or less equally between chopping everything into small pieces and rolling the rice paper.

• 15 tiger prawns, cooked
• 120 g bun (rice vermicelli)
• 100g soy beans, fresh
• 50g mint
• 50g coriander
• 1 small lettuce
• 1 small carrot
• 15 rice papers, plus extras

First, you have to cook the bun (3 minutes in boiling water, or according to the instructions on the wrapper). Then you wash the lettuce, and separate the leaves. Grate the carrot.  Cut off the pointy end of the soy beans, and wash.

Chop up the drained bun, the mint, and the coriander, and slice the shrimps in half, length-wise. Put every ingredient in a separate bowl.

Now comes (again), the fun part, which is setting up a rolling station, with every ingredient within reach, a damp towel to work on, and a big hot water bowl to dip the rice papers into.

It looks something like this (with extra helper in the person of Sara Genge).

• Take one sheet rice paper
• Dip into warm water until it becomes supple and translucid
• Lay it flat on worktable
• Put two halves of shrimp
• Put two pinches of salad, some bun, some soybeans, and carrots
• Spread a pinch of mint and a pinch of coriander over the mix
• Roll carefully into a cylinder, sealing the edges

Set the roll aside somewhere else (yup, you need a fairly large kitchen), rinse, repeat.

The end results looks something like this:

Dipping sauce is supposed to be soybean sauce, but nuoc cham works just as well:

• 1 chopped garlic clove
• juice of 1/2 squeezed lime,
• 5 tablespoons Nuoc mam
• 3 tablespoons sugar
• 15-20 cL of water, or whatever it takes to get the mixture to a cup

It’s a pretty tolerant recipe, too. Can fit pork or crab or whatever proteins you feel like. Much easier than the previous one, overall

(pictures thanks to Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, spring rolls courtesy of Rochita, Sara Genge, and Stephen Gaskell)

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