Goi Cuon!

"Bless you!" is one appropriate response when someone says, "Goi cuon!" Another appropriate response is, "Yum!"

Goi coun (pronounced "goy coon," I believe) is a Vietnamese summer roll, and while The Boy and I have enjoyed ordering them at restaurants for a while, we'd never imagined they could be so easy to make at home.

It's hardly surprising, really, since they're not cooked in any way. Recently I stumbled over a recipe for the transcendently delicious sauce that goes with the rolls, and we thought we'd give the whole shebang a try. Here's how you too, can enjoy these lovely little hand-salads.

You will need (and we found everything odd at our local Kroger, by the way):






1. Wraps, and a variety of stuffings--any or all of the following:

• Rice spring roll wrappers - we found ours in the flat round package linked
  
• rice noodles (rice vermicelli--they mostly come dried in like long very thin white tangles in bags)
• cucumber - long skinny pieces
  
• carrot - long minced skinny pieces again
• shrimp
• avocado (which I happened to have--that's the mushy green mass in there)
• fresh cilantro
  
• fresh mint
• lettuce (chopped thin)
• other meats like fish or chicken--I imagine any red meat would be just too heavy here, though you can try, if you want.

2. Articles for the luscious sauce

• Hoisin sauce, which you should be able to get in your local grocery in the Asian section. We found ours in Kroger.
• Chunky peanut butter
• garlic, crushed
• lime juice
• sriracha hot sauce if you so desire
• a bit of soy, to balance the sweetness of the hoisin and the heat of the hot sauce
• a bit of water, if it seems too thick
  
• a few drops of fish sauce, if you so desire
  

Really, the only cooking involved here is melding the ingredients for the sauce together. Put a large lump of peanut butter into a pot, and begin warming it while adding the rest of the ingredients, and allowing it to warm together and become smooth, aside from the peanut lumps. You can then pop the sauce into a bowl to cool to a reasonable temperature while you assemble your goi cuon.

This would be a perfectly lovely thing to do at a dinner party--set out the ingredients, and let everyone roll their own and eat as they go. In fact, these are best eaten fresh--the wrappers tend to get sticky if left for a while. Not that that detracts from the taste at all, but it can make handling them a little awkward.

The spring roll wrappers are like crackly paper, so set out a large flat bowl of hot/warm water along with your plate of stuffings and bowl of sauce. Place a wrapper into the water for a moment (or at least get the whole thing wet if the bowl's not big enough), and give it a few seconds until you feel the texture begin to change. Don't wait until it's floppy--it should still be a bit firm when you set it on your plate and add fillings to it. The wrappers will get floppier as the minutes go by, even out of the water, so you want to have something semi-firm to work with.

I wrapped ours like little burritos - place the fillings in a lump at the edge of closest side to you, roll them toward the middle once, then fold the two edges in, and continue rolling for a neat little package.

I admit, they look a little odd - the wrappers are flexible and practically see-though. And the texture is a bit out of the ordinary as well. They can be a bit floppy and sticky. But combined with the sauce, they're just fresh and delicious as anything.