Hello, this Chef John from Foodwishes.com and today we are making Spring Rolls. We are making California Spring Rolls and that’s kind of a take on the sushi restaurant favorite. The Old California Roll with the crab and the avocado. And the first thing, don’t be shock, I’m not using real crab. Have you lost all your respect? I’m going to use imitation crab meat but I’m not just going to use any old cheap fake crab. See this one is kind of free, most of them are but when you flip it over and look on the ingredients, you want to see some real fish extracts in there. So, it’s got a — they’re all made of that but the cheap one’s here just all vegetable filler, this has an oyster, crab, lobster, salmon, anchovy, a bunch of different extracts from different fishes so it tastes good and it’s good for you. See 90 calories for a half cup that’s pretty good. And it’s basically just carbo and protein.
So 16 grams of carb, 5 grams of protein but you can't beat it, are you going to be that? All right there’s our beautiful hass avocado. Now, first thing you want to do here is just break up the crab a little bit okay that’s why I got the flake style. It tears apart real nice and then that’s about enough for that. All right avocado, to get a perfect even cut, find where the stem was and put your knife right there until it hits the pit and just then roll the avocado, don’t move the knife. Just roll the avocado right around, keep the knife against the pit and how you’re going to screw it up like that? Here now, you’re going to twist and you have two perfect halves. See that? Then you’re going to take the knife and top it on the pit just tap. Turn, comes right out unbelievable.
Now, don’t try to pull the pit off the knife, that’s where people slice their finger off. Just give a little pinch with the other hand and it will get come right up. Now, what we want here is some nice, thin, lengthwise slices of avocado. So, don’t cut it in the shell and then try to scoop it out. Scoop each half out with a spoon and then with your knife see how perfectly ripe that is. There’s nothing in that feel as good. Slicing a ripe out or maybe there is some things but it feels really good to slice the ripe avocado see that, it’s just beautiful. All right that’s ready. There’s our spring roll wrappers also known as rice paper. They’re stiff, they feel like plastic, they’re dry, they’re basically—you see down there. They’re just rice, flour, salt, and water.
So, what you’re going to do is you got to hydrate this, okay. So, what I use to roll on is a baking mat, a silicon baking mat, a plastic cutting board will work and then you’re going to take a bowl of cold water and you’re going to dip that firm plastic, kind of translucent rice paper in there and when it goes from film like plastic and then you can kind of bend it, it kind of feels like leather then you want to stop, okay. If you over hydrate it, it’s too hard to work with. It’s going to continue to soak up the water as it sits on the cutting board around the silicon mat there. So you’ll see, it takes a couple of practice but what you’re going to do is you’re going to put down some red leaf lettuce, any kind of lettuce will work. I’m going to put down my crab next and I’m working on the first third of the wrapper okay so you’re not right on the edge, you’re not in the middle. I’m going to put some avocado on top of my crab and you don’t want to fill this too much. That’s a mistake you make and then they explode when you wrap them.
All right a little bit of shredded cabbage for some crunch and then you want to fold it over. Now at this point, I’m not pressing too tight. I’m just folding it just to kind of make sure everything is together. Once I make one fold and I’m kind of in the middle then I’m going to fold all over both edges then once the edges are in then you can kind of press a little more and that last enter too, that’s where you kind of make it firm.
Now, as these sets for a couple of minute until it will firm up, the outside will dry slightly and it will become a beautiful nice you know tight package to work with. If you’re going to store this very lightly damping the paper towel will work and you can refrigerate those for a couple hours. When you’re going to serve them, make sure you get a sharp knife so you don’t just mash the thing. So nice sharp knife, I always cut them on an angle why, because it looks cool. See, I’ll give it a close up here all right and it’s beautiful just like the Californian Sushi Roll. I got my crab which was fake but it’s okay. It’s very high quality, delicious, just perfectly right for avocado. I found this little fried pieces, wasabi piece in the cracker isle of my grocery store. See that dip, the mystery dip. I’m going to show you tomorrow okay.
So, that’s a wasabi dipping sauce. So, stay tune for that. You’re going to want to see that, very simple, very delicious dip I use that for pot sticker and things like that. Anywa,y check the site, check the blog, post, get all the info and as always enjoy.
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