Vietnamese Spring Rolls: Fresh and Full of Flavor
If you’re looking for an incredibly fresh and unbelievably tasty Vietnamese Spring Roll recipe then you’ve found just the thing! These are filled to the brim with marinated Halal chicken, fresh veggies, and tender rice vermicelli and wrapped in a light rice paper wrap instead of the fried wonton variety. But no spring roll is complete without the right sauce, so we’re also coming in hot with recipes for your own peanut sauce and a super flavorful Vietnamese dipping sauce that’s sure to please!
Get That Chicken Marinating
The marinade for the chicken is a mix of a few key ingredients for a big return on flavor. It’s a blend of sweet and savory from a combination of brown sugar, soy sauce, and fish sauce. But the real star of this marinade, and maybe the whole recipe, is the grated lemongrass. It adds a subtle but very much appreciated citrusy flavor to the chicken later that makes it more complex and delicious. We don’t use lemongrass often, but when we do, it’s always a simple ingredient that adds a ton to the recipe.
What’s In These Rolls?
For the fillings, we stuck with the classic combination of sliced carrot, cucumber, mint, and rice vermicelli noodles. The carrot and cucumber add a great crunch to what is otherwise a pretty soft and tender recipe and make the whole thing feel crisp and refreshing. The rice noodles are thin but fill out the roll with a simple carb that cooks in no time because it’s such a thin noodle.
Mix Your Sauces
But before we roll all these fillings up, we have to make the sauces I mentioned up top. The first is a peanut sauce, and this is a simple combo of creamy peanut butter, warm water, hoisin sauce, lime juice, and fish sauce. This is a pretty hands-off kind of recipe for this sauce, as we gave it a taste test throughout and adjusted get that peanut flavor balanced with the other ingredients. When you mix yours, give a taste occasionally to make sure you like it before moving on, what worked for us here may not be to your taste and that’s A-okay!
The next sauce is a hard one to describe, so I hope you give it a try. Vietnamese cooking has a family of sauces called Nuoc cham, and they’re typically a combination of sweet, savory, salty, and spicy all in one sauce. It gets a bit of sweetness from palm sugar dissolved in water, but it’s very subtle and not nearly as sweet as regular sugar would be. As with a lot of Southeast Asian cooking, fish sauce is a crucial addition that adds a lot of flavor depending on the saltiness from whatever brand you’re using.
And the spicy comes in from a few bird’s eye chilies, finely diced, and mixed in. If you’re familiar with the Thai family of chilies, then you know these lil’ guys are no joke! There’s a ton of spiciness packed into one of these, but when diluted into the sauce, it gives it just a little bit of heat that comes in as an additional flavor dimension without being too overpowering. Just like with the peanut sauce, taste this as you mix it so you can adjust various flavors as needed.
Is This The Most Amazing Chicken? YES!
When the chicken is ready, you can grill it or pan fry it like we did. No matter what you decide, if you take nothing else from this recipe, you have to try this chicken! The marinade on this is incredible, and like the rest of this recipe, is super complex and packed with a ton of flavors that all complement each other beautifully.
Roll It All Up And Serve
Unlike their fried counterpart, Vietnamese rolls are wrapped in a rice paper. They’re very brittle and fragile on their own, but when you hydrate them with a bit of water, they become a lot more malleable.
Lay one out on a cutting board, add the ingredients we’ve been working with all day, then roll it up like a burrito. They’re pretty fragile still and might tear, but if they do, you can easily re-wrap the whole thing with another rice paper. They’re thin enough, you won’t even notice if one is wrapped in 2 papers.
When it’s all said and done, serve these up with your sauces and you’re set. Everything about this recipe is loaded with flavor and the rolls and sauces are all deliciously complex. They’re all a combination of flavors that complement one another, and same with texture. The rolls are mostly tender from the noodles and chicken, then you get very satisfying crunch from the veggies. The peanut sauce is smooth and rich, while the Nuoc cham is looser with a more direct punch of flavor.
