Recipe: Pickled Plum-Sauce Harumaki (Veggie-Version, too!) (Patreon)

Richard came across this recipe (I'll link to the original at the bottom), I tweaked it a little and also made a vegetarian version.

Ingredients:

1 chicken breast

--for veggie version I nixed chicken and used a piece of atsuage deep-fried tofu

1 carrot

Package of some kind of bean sprouts (I suppose any sprouts will do)

umeboshi (5 for dipping sauce, five for marinade)

mayonnaise (one cup)

soy sauce

green onions for garnish

10~12 Egg roll or harumaki wrappers

Below are the sprouts I used. They're pretty hardy, got a crunch to them. Shredded cabbage might work well, too. Something like broccoli sprouts might be too delicate.

Cut bottom of sprouts, cut in half again. Then cut the carrot into

Like below. You can't tell in the photo but the sprouts are halved.

Set all that aside for a minute. Here is the atsuage for the vegetarian version.

Here is it chopped up.

Again. It's standard cooking practice to pour some hot to boiling water over atsuage in a colander of course) to get rid of any extra oil from the original frying.

Also chicken boiled and shredded.

Next make the marinade.

One half cup of water that the chicken was boiled in (just regular water if doing veggie version) mixed with 2 tablespoons soy sauce, 1 tablespoon sugar, salt and pepper and....

Half the pickled plums (umeboshi). So here I deseeded them and minced them to within an inch of their lives.

The number of umeboshi depends on what you like. I used ten. But they were kind of small and also made with honey, so not super duper sour. But pretty sour.

Add half of your pickled plum paste to the marinade and stir.

Then add that to your chicken or tofu or in my case, both!

Chicken.

And tofu looked like this.

Cover and let absorb the flavor while you make the dipping sauce.

For this you can use all mayo if you'd like. I used a half cup mayo, a half cup yogurt and a little extra virgin olive oil.

To that add the rest of the pickled plum mash, a little salt and pepper. You can add or subtract to taste. Use all yogurt if you'd like.

Top with green onion slices. Mine looked like this.

Put that aside while you make your harumaki.

I've made egg rolls a million times and I never get better at it. I guess I don't make them that often.

Remember not to overfill! I do all the time.

Important things I learned. Make sure you squeeze out all the marinade from the chicken or tofu (keeping the umeboshi bits for flavor). If you don't the liquid will just dissolve the wrapper. MESS!! You can always double wrap if that happens. I did. If there is a hole in the wrapper, it'll just leak out into your oil and make a big ol MESS!

Another thing. Those carrots are sharp. Make sure they're all going the same direction (shredded might be a better way to go with them, as well). But I got a hole or two made from over-ambitious egg roll wrapping and a rogue carrot.

So careful there, too. The above is the chicken version. I did the same but with tofu instead of chicken, too. Just the tofu held more water so I had to really squeeze it after the first one made the wrapper too soggy to use.

Another thing I did on half of them is add some XO paste I had in the fridge. It's a very fishy, slightly spicy sauce that was interesting.

I made them all, separating so they didn't touch and stick together. Then shallowed fried them in about an inch or so of oil, turning once they got brown.

Not so pretty, but tadah!

Serve on rice with a dollop of the mayo ume sauce on top.

Below is a chicken one.

And the tofu one.

They're quite good and fun. Not too sour. Probably just right amount of sour.

XO,

t