Following my post about incorporating tea into sushi last week, I wanted to do another post like that. We have a local pho restaurant that we absolutely love! They have a lot of great things on their menu but one of our favorites are the summer rolls!

There is something about the rice paper wrapping that I just love so much. Generally, their summer rolls have the thin rice noodles, shrimp, basil and a little lettuce. It comes with a peanut dipping sauce and is the way I ruin my appetite for pho every single time we eat there :)

I watched a few videos online about how to make these and they seemed simple enough! It looks to me that there were two different ways that I could easily incorporate tea into this dish.

1) In the noodles

2) In the wrappers

*Please note: I have linked a short shopping list at the end of this post. If you purchase through those links, I will earn a small commission at no extra cost to you!*

Noodles

Cooking the noodles is very simple, they are very thin so you put them in boiling water and cover with a lid for a few minutes until they are soft. Naturally, instead of using boiling water I used boiling tea!

I decided to use the same tea from my sushi post because I have a lot and I thought the savory flavors of the tea came through well in the rice. That tea is the pai mu tan from Chado tea room!

While I have seen people cook tea on the stove, as if they are boiling it I didn’t want to keep this tea on too long. I placed a large amount of leaves in a pot on the stove and covered it with water. I allowed it to come to a light boil and then poured directly over the noodles.

Not only did the noodles have a subtle tea taste, they also were dyed a little in the process. The noodles that are in our favorite summer rolls are bright white.

Wrapper

With the tea that you saved from cooking the noodles, the tea can be cool or warm but not super hot! You are essentially going to hydrate the wrappers with the tea. You want a container that is wide and not tall to do this.

When you hydrate the wrapper, you want to dip it into your tea, and gently rotate it so that the entire wrapper is hydrated. Then place is on a flat surface and make sure it is smooth. The it worked out well when I put my ingredients (minus the one I want to show off) towards the edge near me, far enough away to fold the edge closest to me over the ingredients. If you want certain ingredients to show through, place those on the roll now. Then I rolled once or twice and folded in the sides, then rolled it the rest of the way up. The wrapper is going to be super sticky!

Here is a video that you can follow :)

I decided to use ingredients I had in my house so I used tomatoes, mushrooms, thinly sliced zucchini that I fried and umeboshi! Since I didn’t make a dipping sauce the umeboshi in the rolls gave them a super kick of flavor.

You don’t want anything that is very wet in these rolls so if you do pre cook something like I did with the zucchini, make sure to take off as much excess liquid as you can!

Shopping List!

1) Rice Vermicelli Noodles

2) Spring Roll Wrappers

What ingredients would you use for summer rolls?