An oven option
Thanks to a pastry brush method, a hot oven and a baking rack, these egg rolls are a tasty treat.
Thanks to a pastry brush method, a hot oven and a baking rack, these egg rolls are a tasty treat.
Alice was our au pair from China, and when she joined our family she brought with her a slew of tasty dishes.
Our family fell in love with her complex fried rice, dumplings with juicy meat fillings and her crispy egg rolls with garlickymeaty-mushroom fillings. The tricky thing was that Alice was one of those cooks who worked her magic without a recipe. I would watch, taking mental notes of the ingredients and quantities (writing it down felt, well, wrong), but replicating her dishes proved similar to me trying to capture the exact taste of my grandma’s cooking — impossible.
Though we loved all of her cooking (well, except for her take on chocolate muffins, but that’s another story), her egg rolls were the family favourite. And why not?
Minced up goodies wrapped in delicate, fried (essentially) pasta? Yes, please!
So I took the liberty (since I was missing the mark anyway) to create my own version, one that managed to get most of the crispy goodness with far less fat. After experimenting with a variety of methods — from spraying the eggrolls with an oil mister or cooking spray as well as drybaking — the clear winner was the pastry brush method combined with a hot oven while also using a baking rack to allow for full air circulation during cooking.
So what if these egg rolls are not completely traditional. I did capture the essence of Alice’s cooking, and when the girls are missing her I know fond memories are only an egg roll away.
And by the way, my experimenting also proved that quickly sauteed bananas sprinkled with a little orange juice and a dark chocolate chip or two also make for a perfect dessert egg roll filling. Brush with coconut oil and dip cooked eggrolls in tangy Greek yogurt. Yum!