Shrimp Rice Paper Rolls

Youngest son Paul’s friend Lisa, who lives in Hong Kong, sent us a bunch of Asian cooking ingredients. One of the items was a package of rice paper wrappers.

We had a chicken and vegetable stir-fry on the menu for tonight, so it seemed like a good time to try making some rice paper rolls. I’ve never made rice paper rolls, and I’ve never even eaten them, although I have admired them on other people’s plates.

I started by making a dipping sauce. It was:

2 cloves of garlic, crushed
2 tablespoons lemon juice (I wanted to use lime juice, but we used up all the limes making guacamole last weekend)
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon rice vinegar
About 3/16th’s cup of soy sauce and 1/16th fish sauce
1/8th cup water
one crushed dried red pepper.

I stirred all that up together and let it sit while I made the rice paper rolls.

Here’s everything, ready to start rolling.

The filling is:

A handful of cilantro, chopped
A smaller handful of mint, chopped
4 baby carrots cut into matchsticks
4 shiitake mushrooms, sauteed and sliced
a handful of iceberg lettuce, sliced
a few bean sprouts
6 shrimp, cooked and sliced in half

I’d never seen a rice paper wrapper up close and personal. They’re paper-thin and latticed.

The wrappers are brittle coming out of the package. You soak them about 30 seconds in warm water and they become soft and pliable. One recipe I read suggested laying them on a kitchen towel and then filling and wrapping them.

It didn’t work that good for me to roll them on a towel. I did the first one that way, and did the rest directly on the countertop, which worked much better for me. You put some filling in the middle of the wrapper, fold the edge closest to you over the filling, then fold the right and left sides over, and then roll the whole thing up into a nice tight package.

At least that’s the theory. In practice, my rolls were a little loosely wrapped. I also learned to make sure the carrot matchsticks were oriented perpendicular to the direction I was rolling. Otherwise they’d poke through the wrapper.

The first few rolls were pretty sloppy, but I got better as I went, by the end I was getting a fairly tight roll.

Aesthetics aside, they were delicious. Light and fresh and crunchy. The dipping sauce went perfect with them, salty, sweet, sour, and just a little fishy.

I’m poking through the box of goodies from Lisa, trying to decide what’s next…