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Wikipedia has a good description of this delicious dish:
A summer roll (...literally "mix salad rolled") is a Vietnamese food consisting of pork, shrimp, herbs, rice vermicelli, and other ingredients wrapped in rice paper. Unlike Chinese egg rolls or spring rolls, summer rolls are served cold, and are not fried.
Summer rolls are normally dipped in either a simple sauce consisting of hoisin sauce, garlic, peanut butter, and water which are boiled until well blended or a combination of fish sauce, garlic, sugar, lime, and carrot.
Goi Cuon are a mix-and-match kind of dish. You lay out a variety of ingredients, and diners can choose whatever combination they want in each roll that they make. The sauce in step 2 and the rolling technique in step 8 are key, but feel free to change or substitute any of the items described in steps 3-7. It's also a good idea to get a bunch of individual steps going at once, since some (like waiting for big pots of water to boil) don't require all of your attention. Do things in parallel; as you'll see from the photos in this Instructable, getting friends together to prep can be a lot of fun.
More to the point: Summer rolls are one of my favorite traditional dishes from my childhood, and they've become popular with my friends. We sometimes have huge dinners at my house, and I'll make Goi Cuon for thirty or forty people. The beauty of it is that everyone rolls their own: All the chef as to do is prep, essentially. And if people don't like how a roll comes out, you can blame them for their rolling skills!
(Thanks to Alison Bank for taking most of these photos. If you see a crappy photo, it's one I took. The beautiful shots are hers.)
A summer roll (...literally "mix salad rolled") is a Vietnamese food consisting of pork, shrimp, herbs, rice vermicelli, and other ingredients wrapped in rice paper. Unlike Chinese egg rolls or spring rolls, summer rolls are served cold, and are not fried.
Summer rolls are normally dipped in either a simple sauce consisting of hoisin sauce, garlic, peanut butter, and water which are boiled until well blended or a combination of fish sauce, garlic, sugar, lime, and carrot.
Goi Cuon are a mix-and-match kind of dish. You lay out a variety of ingredients, and diners can choose whatever combination they want in each roll that they make. The sauce in step 2 and the rolling technique in step 8 are key, but feel free to change or substitute any of the items described in steps 3-7. It's also a good idea to get a bunch of individual steps going at once, since some (like waiting for big pots of water to boil) don't require all of your attention. Do things in parallel; as you'll see from the photos in this Instructable, getting friends together to prep can be a lot of fun.
More to the point: Summer rolls are one of my favorite traditional dishes from my childhood, and they've become popular with my friends. We sometimes have huge dinners at my house, and I'll make Goi Cuon for thirty or forty people. The beauty of it is that everyone rolls their own: All the chef as to do is prep, essentially. And if people don't like how a roll comes out, you can blame them for their rolling skills!
(Thanks to Alison Bank for taking most of these photos. If you see a crappy photo, it's one I took. The beautiful shots are hers.)
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Signing UpStep 1Get Ingredients
There are a lot of vegetarians at my house, so we make summer rolls with almost all veggie ingredients. That means no fish sauce in the peanut sauce, for example. The one concession I make to myself is the shrimp, which I love in goi cuon.
Below is a sample shopping list, serving 35. We go big when we do dinner parties at my house. I've also attached an excel file that you can use to adjust quantities (just change the number in cell A25.) And again, feel free to substitute whatever you think will taste good. Experiment!
For the Rolls:
Below is a sample shopping list, serving 35. We go big when we do dinner parties at my house. I've also attached an excel file that you can use to adjust quantities (just change the number in cell A25.) And again, feel free to substitute whatever you think will taste good. Experiment!
For the Rolls:
- 3.5 heads of soft lettuce (Romaine/red leaf/butter/not the regular salad type)
- 7 cucumbers
- 5.25 bunches of coriander(cilantro)
- 5.25 bunches of hung que or basil
- 1.75 bunch of green onion
- 1.75 pineapple or
- 7 star fruits or both
- 2.63 package of dry rice noodles (bun)
- 3.5 dozens large eggs
- 3.5 large bricks of tofu for frying
- 3.5 lbs large shrimp
- 5.25 packages of rice paper (about 8" diameter)
- 3.5 cups of peanuts
- 43.75 oz. peanut butter (either smooth or chunky is ok)
- 43.75 oz. of hoisin sauce (dark smooth sauce in glass jar)
- 1.75 bunch of garlic
- 3.5 limes
- hot sauce if desired
Goi Cuon Recipe.xls101 KB| « Previous Step | Download PDFView All Steps | Next Step » |
wonderful 'ible, and great photos as well!
I also found some really good rice paper that really works better than any I've tried.
Definitely make your own instructable to show your variations! Or, if you're feeling lazy, just snap some photos and post them in the comments, here, so people get some more ideas.