Chicken Vegetable Spring Rolls - 氣炸鍋雞肉春捲

Chicken Vegetable Spring Rolls

Prep time: 30-60 minutes (about 1 min/roll)
Cook time: ~18 minutes (each batch)
Serves: ~36 small spring rolls
Ingredients:

• 1 pack of Vietnamese rice spring roll wrappers (about 35-40 sheets for small wrappers, 20-25 for larger wrappers)

• About 1/4 cup of avocado oil for air frying

Spring roll filling:

• 1 serving (ball) of mung bean vermicelli

• 2.5 cups of diced carrots (about 3 medium / large carrots)

• 6 medium / 5 large leaves of cabbage

• 8 large shiitake mushrooms

• 1 lb of ground chicken

• 2 tbsp of fish sauce

• 1 small egg

Dipping Sauce:

• 2 tbsp of fish sauce

• 2 tbsp of rice vinegar / apple cider vinegar

• 1 tbsp of maple syrup / palm sugar

• 4 tbsp of hot water

• Optional: 3-5 stalks of chopped cilantro

• Optional: 1 sliced chili

• Optional: 1 clove of minced garlic

Cooking Tools:

• Instapot air fryer

• Food processor

• 3 large dinner plate for egg roll wrapping

• Hot water for wetting rice paper sheets

Directions :

Filling preparation:

1. Soak the mung bean noodles in hot water for 30 minutes. Drain and set aside.

2. Use fresh or soak dried shiitake mushrooms in warm water for 30 minutes. Drain and set aside.

3. Use the food processor to finely chop the carrots, cabbage, shiitake mushrooms, mung bean noodles, and cabbage.

4. Put the chopped ingredients into a large mixing bowl and add the egg, fish sauce, and ground chicken. Mix till everything is combined.

Wrapping the eggrolls:

1. Prepare 3 dinner plate. First for holding hot water to soak the rice wrappers. Second as your spring roll making work station. Third coated in oil to hold finished spring rolls.

2. Take a spring roll wrapper and quickly submerge it into the plate holding hot water. This water should be very warm to the touch but not burn you when you touch it, and fill the plate with enough water to submerge the entire rice paper wrapper in.

3. On the second plate, add 1.5-2 tbsp of filling on to the now softened wrapper, about 1 in away from the bottom edge. (I used the smaller wrappers. You may want to add more filling, e.g. 2-3 tbsp, if you’re using the larger wrappers.)

4. Fold the bottom side up. Then fold the left and right side in. (Feel free to push the filling around to concentrate it into the center).

5. Now roll the spring roll towards the top, and put the finished spring roll on to the oiled plate.

Air fry the egg rolls and prepare the sauce:

1. Add more oil onto the plate and drench each spring roll in oil. Use the Air fryer to cook the spring rolls at either 350F (my healthier version) or 375F (hub’s crispier version). Make sure to keep some space between the spring rolls to avoid them sticking together. I used Instapot Air fryer, normal 18 minute cycle.

2. Meanwhile, add all the sauce ingredients into a separate bowl and mix well. Note that this sauce has 1/2 the amount of sugar as the more traditional recipes (but still tastes amazing with the egg rolls).

3. Take out the egg rolls after they are done and serve with the sauce!

Cooking Tip:

• If you choose to deep fry these egg rolls instead of using an air fryer, please make sure they’re wrapped very tightly with no air bubbles. Otherwise you risk the danger of exploding egg rolls in hot oil. (Another reason I chose to air fry, aside from using less oil, lower temperature cooking, etc.)

• You can also serve these egg rolls on top of a bowl of vegetables and rice noodle mixed with the sauce.

Stay healthy with Annie:

I intentionally added more vegetables into this recipe so we’d have a more balanced mix of vegetable to chicken ratio in this recipe, and the mix of vegetables and chicken means this little roll packs a very comprehensive mix of our daily micronutrients/vitamins*.

While I will admit air frying these at 375-400F will result in much crispier egg rolls, air frying at a lower temperature helps make this a healthier treat when you have a fried craving. I say healthier and not healthy, because I try limit my use of the air fryer as compared to other cooking methods such as boiling or steaming, and treat it as an occasional indulgence. I will go further in depth with this topic another day, but this online article sums up the “why” quite well, and cites its sources. I guess my balance here is treating the air fried foods as an occasional delicious indulgence (can’t say it’s ever easy!).