I watched Ainsley Eats the Streets show. In the Malaysia episode, he made this dish using something looked like lumpia wrapper. The dish is called Popiah in Malaysia. He used crab meat. And something called shrimp paste. It inspired me to try the recipe. But of course I had to make few changes to the ingredients. I used shrimps and artificial crab meat. Had to omit the shrimp paste. Made a dipping sauce with sweet tamarind. And used Vietnamese rice paper because I couldn’t tell if the lumpia wrapper that I saw in the store (in the package) would be thin enough to eat it raw.
Ingredients
- 1 box sweet tamarind
- 1/4 cup fish sauce
- 1/4 cup water
- 1/4 cup and 1 Tablespoon of vinegar
- 2 cloves garlic, minced
- 1/2 tsp grated ginger
- 1 big pickle cucumber (more crunchy than other kind)
- Some mint
- Some cilantro
- Some spring onion (more fragrant than regular ones)
- Peanuts or cashews, chopped
- Garlic chili sauce
- 10 medium shrimp
- 3 pieces artificial crab
- 1/2 tsp lemon zest
- Juice of 1/3 of a lemon
- Salt and pepper
Steps
In a bowl, mix fish sauce, sugar, vinegar, garlic and ginger. Set aside.
Peel the whole box of tamarind. Put tamarind in a big bowl. Pour 1/3 of the mixture of fish sauce on tamarind. Use a fork(or hands) to mash the tamarind to extract the meat. After a while, you can hear the seeds separating from the fruits.
Use a sieve (?) to get the meat of the tamarind into a bowl leaving the seeds on the sieve. Pour half of the remaining fish sauce and repeat the same thing. Again, pour the rest of fish sauce and repeat the same thing until only seeds are left on the sieve.
Taste the dipping sauce. Add vinegar or salt to your taste.
Boil some water with some salt. When water is boiled, add shrimps and cook for 2 minutes. Drain and wash shrimps under cold water to stop the cooking process. Peel and devein shrimps.
Peel cucumber and cut into quarters. Remove seeds. Wash some mint, garlic and spring onions.
Cut cucumber, mint, cilantro and spring onions. Put in mixing bowl, sprinkle salt, pepper and sugar. Add lemon zest and juice of 1/3 lemon. Mix well.
In a big mixing bowl, get some warm water(3/4 of the bowl). Take one sheet of rice paper, dip in water, rotate, make sure the sheet is completely wet.
Spread the rice paper on a cutting board. Put about 2 heaping full of the mixture of shrimps, artificial crab, cucumber and herbs.
Fold both sides in. Roll from south to north to make one roll. The mixture should render about five rolls.
For dipping sauce, add 1 tablespoon of chili garlic sauce, and nuts. Enjoy this light and refreshing Malaysian…ish summer rolls.
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