Looking for Chinese food or rather something closer to the heart? Let’s make egg rolls that will never betray our trust!
Naturally, we don’t trust newcomers or in fact anybody who is different from us. This is why it’s much easier to be racist than to be open to newcomers.
We’ve evolved to distrust each other, not because we are antisocial but for the same reason we keep our distance from unknown people, even in the modern world. Apparently, even today, the species that kills the most humans, are humans themselves. (The second ones are mosquitos or rather the virus they spread and 50x times more likely we’ll die from a lightning strike or falling out of bed than killed by a shark.)
In the past, humans from different tribes were much more ferocious than nowadays, and hunting on their territory would have had dire consequences. It’s not a coincidence we have learnt to read the saddle movements of all the 40 or so muscles on each other’s faces.
Distrusting anybody new, or in fact anything new, was much safer than inviting them over for a shared roast on the spit.
The same distrust is still at work today in each one of us, with the only difference that since human psychology has been researched in the past couple of decades, our behavior has been laid bare for those willing to exploit it for their own gains.
Our trust can be easily penetrated by those who know the language to our guts and willing to invest a little time to persuade it. Once our gut feels happy about someone, we can stand behind them, chanting 3 -5 words long, easy to remember slogans.
We don’t need much to trust. A cunning handshake, a couple of head nodding or confidently placed hand gestures all our guts need to be assured, we are dealing with a person of confidence.
The funny thing is that even these minimal effort interactions are needless if we get strong visual cues about a person, and we instantly distrust them if they are out of our expectations.
How much money we would trust on an investment banker wearing a grey hoodie or just brown shoes? Not to mention how comfortable we would feel if our doc came into our meeting, wearing flip-flops, shorts and T-shirt before diving deep into the details of our peacemaker surgery.
The flip side is though, that if someone puts on clothes we expect to see and uses lingo we expect to hear, we hardly doubt anything we are to be told. It’s no coincidence that chef knives are advertised with chefs, home fitness equipment with athletes or toothpaste with dentists even though they have very little to do with the whole thing.
Funny thing is, we do the same with our food too. Many times, we don’t even try something just because it doesn’t look familiar, let alone give our taste buds a chance to develop some sort of relationship with the new flavors.
Once we get over the initial trust barrier though, we can develop strong relations with the newly introduced dish, especially if it’s made up of starch end oil.
Egg roll wrappers are dense, crunchy and chewy, made to appease the American audience of Chinese restaurants in the US. They are far cry from the original spring roll wraps, the dish shares their roots with, but apart from that, both are rolls and contain various ingredients they share few common traits.
If we want to make egg rolls at home, the most common way is, of course, buy a pack of egg roll wrappers but unsurprisingly making wrappers at home not just superior in flavor and texture but easy and fairly quick to make too.
Egg rolls are made with thick doughy wrappers, consists of wheat flour and sometimes, although not at all necessarily, eggs.
Once egg rolls are filled up and immersed in hot oil pockets of air inflate on the surface of the dough, creating crunchy patches on the otherwise chewy texture.
The most common filling consists of cabbage and pork but similarly to spring rolls, there is no real limits of what we choose to fill in those wraps. The only thing, we have to watch for, is not to betray the trust of those who rely on us for their daily rolls.
Luckily though, as long as we do the rolling right, anything that’s inside a starchy oil fried coating, will have a chance to be liked and what happens after that is up to the taste buds to decide. 
Ingredients
- 2 cups / 250g Flour
- ⅖ cup / 100ml Water
- 1 piece / 60g Egg (optional substitute with 2 tablespoons / 30ml Water)
- 1 teaspoon / 5g Salt
How to make Egg roll wraps
- Knead flour, water, optional egg and salt until it comes together.
- Roll the dough into a ball then halve it.
- Seal one of the balls into an airtight container, so it won’t lose moisture, then roll out the other one into an 12″x 17″/ 30cm x 45cm rectangle.
- Divide the rolled out sheet into six, preferably equal parts. If we’ve done it right then we’ll have six pieces of 6″ / 15cm squares.
- Stacking them up without flouring the sheets will cause them to inseparably stick together so apply a bit of flour before placing them on top of each other. Or even better, don’t stack them up at all but fill them up right away.
Enjoy!
Egg Roll Wrappers Recipe
Ingredients
- 2 cups Flour
- ⅖ cup Water
- 1 piece Egg optional substitute with 2 tablespoons / 30ml Water
- 1 teaspoon Salt
Instructions
- Knead flour, water, optional egg and salt until it comes together.
- Roll the dough into a ball then halve it.
- Seal one of the balls into an airtight container, so it won’t lose moisture, then roll out the other one into an 12″x 17″/ 30cm x 45cm rectangle.
- Divide the rolled out sheet into six, preferably equal parts. If we’ve done it right then we’ll have six pieces of 6″ / 15cm squares.
- Stacking them up without flouring the sheets will cause them to inseparably stick together so apply a bit of flour before placing them on top of each other. Or even better, don't stack them up at all but fill them up right away.
Notes
Pin now, Enjoy later!
