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Chinese Name: 春卷
English Name: Spring Roll
Category: Snack小吃
Main Ingredients: Flour
Spring Rolls春卷 are also called spring cakes春饼, spring plates春盘, and pancakes薄饼. It is a kind of traditional food at Chinese folk festivals. It is popular all over China, especially in Jiangnan and other places. In southern China, we don’t eat dumplings but spring rolls and sesame tangyuan汤圆 during the Spring Festival春节. In addition, they also eat spring rolls during the Qingming Festival清明节 in Zhangzhou. In addition to serving their own families, they are often used to entertain guests. Spring rolls have a long history, and evolved from ancient spring cakes.
Spring rolls are made by mixing flour with a little water and salt, kneading them evenly, putting them in a pan, spreading and burning them into a round leather, then putting the prepared fillings (minced meat, bean paste, vegetable lard, etc.) on the leather, folding the two ends, and then frying them in a long oil pan until golden yellow. Spring rolls have thin, crisp skin, fragrant and soft fillings, and a special flavor. They are common home dishes.
It is said that in order to thank Zheng Chenggong郑成功, people in Fujian gave him a dish. In order to live up to the people’s kindness, Zheng Chenggong put each family’s dishes on a piece of cooked noodles and rolled them up to eat. Then came the spring roll. During the period around Tomb Sweeping Day, many people in southern Fujian will make this kind of spring roll, because oysters are one of the materials of this spring roll. During the period around the Tomb Sweeping Day, oysters are the most fertile and not fishy.
Another legend is that there was a scholar in Putian, Fujian Province in ancient times. Before he became an official, he studied hard for ten years and went to Beijing several times to take the exam, but failed to do well. Although he was over 30 years old and had a family and children, he still insisted on reading poetry and books day and night, sometimes even forgetting to eat and sleep.
His wife loved him very much. In order to prevent his husband from affecting his study due to three meals, she ground wheat into flour and fried it in a pan to make thin and transparent pancakes. She was worried that the cake would be cold and hurt her stomach. She put the cooked vegetables in the wheat cake and rolled the wheat cake beside her husband so that he could read while eating. It was not time-consuming and convenient. The scholar, relying on the food made by his wife, stayed indoors, studied hard and made great progress.
In the same year, the scholar took part in the imperial examination, and he got very good results all of a sudden. Since then, Putian students have always loved to have a cake roll with vegetables for supper and called it a spring roll.
This traditional Putian spring roll takes the cake as its skin, and its stuffing is fresh vegetables of various colors. The skin is tender and the stuffing is rich, and the taste is delicious. It is different from the spring rolls filled with bean sprouts and fried with hard skin. Relatively speaking, Putian spring rolls have more characteristics of home cooking.
How to make Spring Rolls?
Spring rolls evolved from the custom of eating spring plates at the beginning of spring in ancient times. Spring plate began in the Jin Dynasty and was initially named the Wuxin plate. Li Shizhen李时珍 of the Ming Dynasty said, “It’s called the five spice dishes, which are mixed with onions, garlic, leeks, polygonum, artemisia, and mustard.” Later, the spring plate and the five spice plate evolved into spring cakes.
With the development and improvement of cooking technology, spring cakes have evolved into small and exquisite spring rolls. At this time, it not only became a folk snack, but also became a palace pastry, and was put on the court.
Ingredients：
- 12 spring roll skins
- 200g spiced dried beans
- 150g pork
- 100g cabbage
- 80 grams of carrots
- An appropriate amount of starch
- 500g edible oil
- Half a spoon of soy sauce
- Two tablespoons of salt
Instruction:
- Step 1, Wash the spiced dried beans, remove the leaves of cabbage, wash the carrots, peel and shred them for use.
- Step 2, Wash and shred pork, put it into a bowl, add soy sauce and starch, mix well and marinate for 10 minutes.
- Step 3, Pour some oil into the pot and heat it. Add pork shreds and stir fry until cooked. Remove.
- Step 4, Stir fry the rest of the fillings with the remaining oil, add pork shreds and salt, stir well, and finally pour in the starch to thicken.
- Step 5, Spread the skin of spring rolls, wrap the appropriate amount of filling and roll them. Deep fry in a hot oil pan until golden brown, remove and drain.
