Vietnamese Fried Spring Rolls That Won't Explode When You Cook Them! - Marion's Kitchen

Crispy, traditional Vietnamese spring rolls. These are such a delight to eat, especially with a really beautiful, tangy, nuoc cham dressing. This is my version of Vietnamese fried spring rolls. These Vietnamese spring rolls, I love to eat them. But can I say, there are quite a few dangerous things that can happen with these spring rolls. There's a few tips and tricks to master here. I'm going to walk you through it. It's okay, if I can do it, you can do it. Let's go. The noodle we want here is called a bean thread vermicelli noodle. It's also known as mung bean noodles, glass noodles, cellophane noodles. The tricks start early here, my friends. With these noodles, if you boil them in a pot, they will go all soggy and soft. They will not be good. What you need to do is just soak them in some hot water. It doesn't need to be boiling. Just move those noodles around with a fork. Make sure they're getting an even soaking. There's no clumps anywhere. These will just take a bare 2 minutes. They're nice and soft. I want to make sure they don't cook any further. I'm going to put them into some room temperature water. You want to drain these really well. One of my little tricks here to get these noodles really dry, is just to pop them into a clean tea towel. Give them a really tight squeeze. The reason we want to make sure there's not too much moisture in these noodles, is because moisture inside of these spring rolls is going to mean explosion when it comes to frying time. Trust me. That's about as dry as we're going to get them. Pop them into a large bowl here. To make these noodles more manageable, I like to go at them with some scissors. I always feel like my mum's going to come over and get angry at me whenever I'm chopping noodles with scissors. Because of course, there is this Asian superstition that chopping noodles is bad luck. There's a lot of bad luck happening here today, guys. Now for the rest of the filling. We're going to do some pork mince. Some red Asian shallots. You could also use some French eshelots as well. The key here is we want them chopped really nice and fine. I also want some prawns. I need these really finely minced. To flavour our filling, we need some fish sauce. Some sugar. Some white pepper. A pinch of salt. To bring it all together, we need to bind it with an egg. Give this a really vigorous mixing. You want to kind of work the proteins in the pork and the prawn, so that everything becomes quite firm and quite sticky. For the wrapper, we're going to use rice paper. This is what you're looking for. When you're going to buy your rice paper from an Asian market, from a supermarket, try to look out for one that's a blend of rice flour and tapioca flour. The tapioca flour seems to make it softer and more manageable. A lot of the plain rice flour ones can be overly sticky and hard to work with if you're not used to working with them. There's a tip for buying those. For preparing them, there's a couple of things we need to do here. We need to wet these in order to roll the spring rolls. On the other side of the coin, any kind of moisture that goes into hot oil results in an explosion. That's what we don't want. There's a couple of ways around this. First of all, we want to prepare the water that we're going to use for soaking. For that, I need some hot water. A little trick that you might not have thought of is to add some sugar into the water. The sugar is going to help the wrappers to caramelise and brown quicker in the oil. Give that a stir to dissolve. To combat that moisture on the outside of the wrapper, I like to put a tea towel down first. That will soak up some of that moisture as we roll. The other secret here is that you don't want to leave the wrapper in here long enough that it gets soft. Because that's when you're going to be in a bit of trouble because it'll stick together. Dunk it in. Make sure you get every part of the wrapper submerged. At this stage, it's still quite firm. Don't worry, it'll soften up. Pop that onto your tea towel. I'm going to put my filling here. The key to this is to shape your filling into a cylinder first. The other thing we need to do here is make sure we're expelling as much air as possible. Air pockets are going to be another reason why your spring rolls will explode in the oil. Rolling time. Roll over from the bottom. Try to, as I said, get rid of any air pockets. Keep rolling. Fold the sides over. Keep rolling. Keep everything nice and tight. Pop this on a tray lined with baking paper. Baking paper because this stuff is sticky. It will stick. There's one more thing we need to do here. I know there's a lot of little tips to remember for this recipe. I want to put these into the fridge for about 30 minutes uncovered. That's going to help those wrappers to dry out a little bit before we put them in the oil. While that's happening, I'm going to make our dipping sauce. Start off with some fish sauce. Some sugar. Some finely chopped chilli. Some garlic. Some lime juice as well. I nearly forgot. I want a little bit of white vinegar as well. Whisk that quite vigorously so that sugar dissolves. I just love that magical combination of the sweet and the tangy and the salty. Perfection. Here we are at the moment of truth where the spring roll is going to meet the hot oil. All those little precautions that we've made, hopefully, fingers crossed, they all work out. I'm going to test the oil first. I want to make sure it's hot. I don't want it too hot because overly hot oil and explosions aren't good. But I want to see some nice bubbles here. Definitely do this in batches. As I said, these guys are sticky and they will want to stick to each other like there's no tomorrow. I like to put in about half a dozen depending on how big your wok is. You're going to need to get straight in there with some chopsticks. Keep them moving and separate them as they're frying, just until they get a little crunchy. Once they've gotten crunchy and hard on the outside, they'll stop sticking together. Now we're looking good. These guys are going to happily fry, not stick together now. You can see we're getting a little bubbling effect on these spring rolls. The wonderful thing about these guys is their imperfection. There will be some little bubbles, some little gnarly bits on the outside. That's okay. It's just the way they are. Once these are golden and they're starting to get some dark brown spots, that's when I know they're ready to go. To serve these up, I like to just snip them into smaller pieces. Obviously, we're serving them with our nuoc cham dressing. Then on the side, just some lettuce leaves and some herbs. The way we want this to go is... Grab a lettuce leaf. Add a little chunk of spring roll. Some dressing. Some nice fresh herbs. Now that gets all wrapped up. It goes straight in my mouth. Texturally, this is beautiful. The crunch and that soft savoury filling. Flavour-wise, my goodness! The fresh herbs, that porky prawn mixture, and that tangy dressing that just brings everything together. Every mouthful right here is an explosion of flavour. Amazing! If you've got any comments or questions, pop them below. If you enjoyed the video, why not hit that subscribe button plus the little bell one. That way you'll get notified every time I release a new video. Thanks guys!