What do you put in them?
Ground chicken is good; what veggies and spices do you use?
Veggies: bean sprouts, shredded cabbage, thinly julienned water chestnuts, ditto carrots. Stir-fry all veggies together with a bit of seasoning.
Seasonings: grated ginger, soy sauce, sugar, bit of minced garlic. Alternately, bottled stir-fry sauce.
Tip: Fry the rolls immediately after rolling them. I once let the raw rolls sit about for awhile, and the moist filling soaked holes through the wrappers and the filling leaked out into the hot frying oil and burned. Not pretty.
I cheat a bit. I start with a bag of precut cole slaw mix, and add the water chestnuts. Usually for meat, it’s ground chicken or salad shrimp. Spices are soy sauce, garlic ginger, and a touch of cayenne pepper or red hot sauce.
Use peanut oil to fry, and heat it to the point that it’s trying to smoke. The hotter the oil, the less it soaks in.
I use bok choy, bean sprouts, onion, carrot, water chestnuts as far as the veggies go, and I just shred the cabbage, onion & carrot in my food processor. Spices–ginger, soy sauce, garlic, hot red sauce.
I fry mine in sesame oil–gives it a great flavor.
How do you get sesame oil that hot without smoking and how do you afford it?
The sesame oil isn’t too expensive if I go to the oriental food markets, although I wouldn’t recommend buying it at the regular grocery store. I haven’t had any trouble with it smoking, so don’t know what to tell you there.
It would cost me about $5.00 to be able to fully emerse two rolls in a pot, and that’s buying at the Oriental grocery.
I’ve found that olive oil and sesame oil smoke if they get hot enough to fry quickly.
Sesame oil makes a great salad dresing, BTW.
So the Café serves egg rolls now?
Ahhhh, it’s a cooking-discussion thread. It 's cool.
I don’t deep-fry stuff myself, but whatever floats your boat.
Chicken egg rolls were ok for Mrs. Plant, but I need some ideas for my step daughter whose has gone veggie.
I like the pre-cut coleslaw idea–then adding bean sprouts and julienned bok choy, etc. Cuts out some of the work in making them. I’ve seasoned my rolls with soy sauce and some pre-packaged Chinese 5-spice mixture and a bit of fresh grated ginger.
I personally wouldn’t recommend the frying in sesame oil–try peanut oil. It’s much cheaper and you can get it really hot without it smoking.
Different oils have a smoke threshold that differs. ( That is potentially the most profound thing I’ve said in over 2,000 posts. You heard it here first, folks. 
).
I cook with sesame oil, but what that means to me is that I am using another oil for the cooking, and AUGMENTING it with the sesame oil. ( There’s a $ 5.00 word for ya, Eve. Now, it’s a thread about literacy AND egg rolls. 
).
The idea of cooking in pure sesame oil is a bit beyond me, and I’m a real sesame oil maven. You hand me a bowl of Chep Chae in a Korean Restaurant, and I am just so very happy. Sesame Oil is like Wasabe. Pluperfect in good doses. Give me too much, and it’s oral sensory overload. Can’t have that, now can we?
I’ve never hand-made egg rolls. When my brother in law was with his ex-wife ( who is Chinese ), we made dumplings by hand. My, but that’s good eatin’.
Cartooniverse
Hey, Java? Wasn’t Julienne Bok-Choy one of the Spice Girls?
Exactly. Oils such as sesame and olive have much lower smoke points, so they’re better in lower-temperature cooking, used in finishing a dish, or in cold preparations. Cartooniverse has a point about augmenting :rolleyes: … er, combining these oils with a high-temperature oil such as peanut, grapeseed, or canola (rapeseed) so the flavor is imparted, but with avoiding the smoke when up to a decent frying temperature.
Nah, it was Ginger-Chinese- 5-Spice.
Now, toasted sesame oil has a very low smoke point indeed (and a lot more flavor), but I think what we’re talking about here as a frying medium is the untoasted oil, which has almost no sesame flavor and a higher smoke point.
I’d still use peanut oil if I was paying. If someone else was, maybe grapeseed. Or lard. I love lard as a frying medium, but only use it once or twice a year.
Oh, and you could put tempeh or seitan into veggie egg rolls, along with bean sprouts for filler.
Oh.
I stand corrected. Is that anything like being Moon Unit Zappa?