Spring Roll (潤餅/春捲)

The last weekend I was at home in PA, Ma made some Taiwanese egg rolls (潤餅/春捲) for us. I actually like it a lot more than fried egg rolls because it has a bit of sweetness and it's fairly rare to get this treat. Restaurants everywhere sell fried egg rolls but if we want this other kind of egg roll, we have to wait for my mom to make it.

Ma actually made the skin for the egg roll from scratch. Traditionally, the skin is made with a thick, gooey dough, and the way you apply the dough onto the pan is to hold the glob of dough in hand and in a circular motion, you wipe pan with the dough. You can see this if you watched the film Eat Drink Man Woman. Ma modified the recipe so it's easier to apply the dough onto the pan. It's still very tasty and impressive though. She started by mixing a watery batter with a blender and then let it sit for a while. To make the skin, she brushed the batter onto a lightly oiled hot pan. Because the sheets were so thin, they cooked really fast. As soon as the sides started to pull off, she flipped it over and let the other side cook.

She toasted peanuts in the oven, and then Ba grounded the peanuts and added some sugar to make the sweeten peanut powder. While Ba was dealing with the peanuts and I was separating and folding the cooled skins, he told me that in my mom's hometown there's a shop that made the spring rolls and the staff there could work really, really quickly while cooking the sheets on multiple pans. I would love to see that and eat the product. For the filling, Ma prepared many different dishes so we can customize our own egg rolls. There were boiled bean sprouts, shredded carrots, stired fried eggs, celary, shredded chicken, etc. Instead of just using hoisin sauce straight out of the jar, she cooked the sauce a bit.

Each of us got to roll our own spring roll. Ba, sis, and bro were making ones that were so big that the filling burst out of the paper thin skins. Ma, bro's girlfriend, and Ma made smaller ones that didn't spill out as soon as we bit into it. Ba and I of course used lots peanut powder because it's so good. I don't think I'll be able to make this on my own because the skins are so delicate and I don't have the skills to do that.