Introduction: How to Cook Spring Roll With Sweet Flavor

Spring roll is a classic home-cooked dish that most Chinese households are familiar with. People used to cook it during the Chinese new year, because spring rolls shows people’s expectation for the spring. I used Swiss chard instead of Chinese cabbage to make the filling. This little change will makes the spring roll to be a very tasty dish with a hint of sweetness notes from the chard and the crispness of the fried pastry. Anyone will surely start to love Chinese foods once they are introduced to this flavorful dish. To cook this spring roll, you may need over one hour to get the filling prepared, and another half hours to make the rolls. The fry process is relatively fast, you only need about 5 minutes to do that. As you can see, this dish takes a fairly long time to cook, but the process is definitely not hard to operate, and the advantage of this dish is that you can make as many rolls as you want in one time. You can reserve the raw rolls in the refrigerator and fry it whenever you want. So, I think the time you spent is worthy, plus you got this amazingly tasty dish.

Step 1: Ingredients

5 Cups of Chopped Swiss chard

3 Eggs

5 Cloves of garlic

1 Minced onion

1 Pounds of Ground pork

Egg roll shells

Oyster sauce

Salted pepper

Step 2: Prepare for the Chard

  1. I bought these chard from Hy-Vee, make sure the vegetable is fresh, this can improve the taste of whole dish.
  2. Remove and throw away the stems, then pick out the rotten leaves.
  3. Wash and rinse the leaves thoroughly, remove the dirt on leaves.
  4. Chop the chard into relatively small pieces as shown in the picture, but you don't need to cut it too small, because in the stirring step, we will break it into smaller pieces using stirrer.
  5. Put the chopped chard leaves into a large mixing bowl.

Step 3: Prepare for the Meat Filling

  1. Turn on the stove, use pan to stir-fry onion and garlic for about half min with high-fire. To improve the smell, you may need to add more oil to thoroughly extract the flavor in onion and garlic. Caution: The oil temperature of frying is fairly high, and some hot oil may splash on you due to the water in onions. So you should wear long sleeves and apron to protect your skin from the risk of burns.
  2. When the onion and garlic turn brown and the inside moisture comes out, add ground pork.
  3. Make sure you have oyster sauce, it is the key of the flavor.
  4. Add about 3 tablespoon of oyster sauce and 1 teaspoon of salted pepper, stir fry the ground pork until it change the color. You don’t need to fully cook the meat, because the spring rolls will be fried later. The whole process will takes about 3 mins. After finishing this, dish up the pork, we will use it in next step.

Step 4: Mix the Filling for Spring Roll

  1. While meat still is hot, add them in the large mixing bowl which containing the chopped chard.
  2. Mix the mixture, keep the move gently and the first stirring is relatively short, about 3 mins.
  3. After the first stirring, the mixture will looks as shown in the picture. The heat from the pork will cook the chard.
  4. Then, you will need 3 eggs.
  5. Crack 1 egg, filter the yolk in a small bowl, save it for late.
  6. Add the egg white and the other 2 eggs to the mixture, then mix it until the mixture become sticky. This will need at least 15 mins. The amount of egg is depend on how many spring rolls you want to make. This time I'm only making about 12 rolls, so 2 eggs is enough.

Tips: After stirring, if the mixture isn't sticky enough, you can add some cooking starch and little water to make it sticky.

Step 5: Make the Spring Roll

  1. Get the spring roll wrappers prepared. You can buy these wrappers from the Asian market.
  2. To make the egg roll, place the shell on a flat surface.
  3. Add the filling. The filling size is depended on the size of pastry. Usually, it is about a quarter coin large.
  4. Brush a little bit yolk on the top corner of the wrapper. This will serve as glue when you wrap the roll.
  5. Fold the wrapper from the bottom.
  6. Fold both sides like shown in the picture.
  7. Roll it from the bottom side to the top.
  8. When you finish it, the spring roll should looks like this.
  9. Repeat the above steps until you are done all the rolls.

As you can see, making a spring roll isn't too hard. The key thing is control the amount of filling. If the filling is too much, the wrapper may break up when you fry it. However, if there's not enough filling, the spring roll won't taste good.

Step 6: Fry the Spring Rolls

Now, you can choose to fry the spring rolls right away or put it in the refrigerator and cook it later.

  1. To fry the spring rolls, first set the stove to high fire. Then,add 5 spoons of oil in the pan. Wait until the oil is heated to a high temperature and the oil-smoke shows up.
  2. Spring roll usually taste better when using deep fry, but using less oil is also acceptable and it will save lots of oil. Turn the roll every 15 second, until the whole spring roll turns brown. The whole fry process is about 2 mins.
  3. Place spring roll on paper towel to soak up the excess oil.

Tips: If your spring rolls are from refrigerator, you should thaw it out before frying. Because if you cook it without frying, the filling will still taste cold eve though the wrapper is totally brown. After the rolls come out of refrigerator, wait until the wrapper becomes soft, then you are ready to go.

Finally, serve it with vegetable and any source you like.

Enjoy!