Tried & Tased #7
Week: Seven, Recipe: Sweet potato summer rolls, By: Meera Sodha.
Recent sunny days have given us a long-awaited taste of the warmer months ahead and the bright, fresh flavours that come with summer. While writing this and squinting at my laptop in a sunny cafe garden, it feels appropriate to be bringing you Meera Sodha’s recipe for sweet potato summer rolls, found on page 175 of her recent cookbook, Dinner, or online here.
Originating in Vietnam, summer rolls are typically stuffed with either pork or prawns, alongside lots of herbs, lettuce and other crunchy vegetables, and vermicelli rice noodles. In this recipe, however, sweet potatoes are the stars of the show. Thinly sliced lengthways and roasted before being wrapped in rice paper along with peanut butter, spinach, noodles, mint and coriander.
Preparing the fillings
Though the rolling can be a bit fiddly and takes a while as a first-timer (at least for me), all in all, the process requires minimal preparation or cooking. If you were using pre-cooked shrimp rather than sweet potatoes, you wouldn’t have to turn the oven on at all which is always nice on a summer evening.
While the recipe calls for marinading the sweet potato slices in teriyaki sauce, I didn’t have any in, so used a mix of soy sauce, maple syrup, lime and sesame oil to somewhat replicate the sweet and savoury teriyaki flavour.
Meanwhile, after cooking and then cooling the noodles with cold water, Meera suggests snipping them with a pair of scissors to make them easier to handle – a handy tip that you’ll thank yourself for when it comes to the rolling process. I’d also recommend roughly tearing up the spinach and picking the coriander and mint leaves for the same reason.
So before you embark on constructing the rolls, it’s important to lay all the ingredients out on a work surface as you’ll only have one hand available for the fillings while the other is holding the half-rolled rice paper in place.
As for the paper itself, Meera suggests to be “brave and brief” when dipping it into a bowl of warm water – another good piece of advice as it’s easy for the paper to become too flimsy and end up ripping.
I’d also watch that your rice paper doesn’t stick to whatever surface you’re working on. After several ripped rolls, I brushed a tiny bit of sesame oil on my chopping board which did the trick and prevented any more tears.
And while you don’t want your rolls to be under-filled, when following the recipe’s quantities I ended up with over-stuffed rolls looking rather less elegant than Meera’s, so I’d suggest using trial and error when it comes to the fillings.
The dipping sauce
As is so often the case with condiments, sauces and gravies (in my eyes) - the dish would not be complete without them. And even more so in a recipe like this one, where the summer rolls themselves are not heavily seasoned/flavoured (though I couldn’t resist sneaking some pickled ginger in mine).
Here, the punchy dipping sauce is made with crushed garlic, bird’s-eye chillies, caster sugar, fish sauce and lime – a flavour combination that never fails to add a bit of excitement to a plate, though I did reduce the raw garlic quantity in mine due to personal preference.
Triumph or tribulation?
While the sweet potatoes brought a lovely splash of colour to the rolls, I think the dish was too dependent on the spicy, citrusy sauce to cut through the slightly gluey peanut butter and sweet potato combination. Next time, I’d use less of each and throw in a veg like radishes or beansprouts to add some crunch.
So… Overall it was a triumph as I very much enjoyed both the rolling and eating processes and am excited to make them again testing out different fillings. That being said, when faced with a summer roll vs. spring roll rivalry in a restaurant, It’d be very hard to turn down the fried variety…!
Some admin-y bits (and exciting news!)
I’m sorry this newsletter comes to you very belatedly - life has been getting in the way and after next week I will be taking a short break from T&T.
BUT, before then I’ll be bringing you a guest edition from my fabulous friend, Emily Fresson AKA Hot Milk Cookies, for you to devour over the May bank hols!