Recipe: Chicken Spring Rolls with Garlic and Chilli Courgetti

Everyone is going loopy for courgetti! The current trend for cutting back on gluten has brought a surge of vegetable alternatives to the table and I was very keen to try some of them (especially after the success of cauliflower rice). Courgetti is basically courgette spaghetti and has a very similar texture to the well loved carb without the gluten or calories – perfect! Having received a spiraliser for my birthday, I was really excited to give it a spin (haha) and sticking with our usual tradition of an easy but delicious Friday night supper to celebrate the end of the week, we decided that we’d treat ourselves to one of our favourites to accompany it – homemade chicken spring rolls!

The great thing about Spring rolls is that you can chuck in pretty much any vegetable you’ve got hanging around in the fridge, but ones you can cut into fine strips work best. I’ve included rough guides for what we used in ours and it made 6 spring rolls so could easily feed 3 people (or in our case, Adam and I for dinner, and then Adam again for an early morning cold spring roll breakfast!)

recipe-homemade-chicken-spring-rolls-with-garlic-chilli-courgetti-chicken-frying-chopsticksrecipe-homemade-chicken-spring-rolls-with-garlic-chilli-courgetti-spring-onionsrecipe-homemade-chicken-spring-rolls-with-garlic-chilli-courgetti-sauteed-plating-up

Ingredients:

  • 6x spring roll pastry sheets (you can pick these up in oriental supermarkets really cheaply – but be warned that they mostly come in large frozen packs – the leftover sheets from the pack once defrosted and refrozen will get more brittle.)
  • 1 large or two smaller chicken breasts (although you can replace with pork, prawns, lamb, beef…anything!)
  • 1 large carrot
  • 3 or 4 spring onions
  • a handful of shiitake mushrooms
  • oyster sauce
  • sweet chilli sauce
  • 1 large courgette
  • 2 cloves garlic
  • A pince of chilli – either fresh or dried
  • A dob of butter
  • Salt and pepper to season
  • Vegetable or sunflower oil (either for shallow frying or in a deep fat fryer)

recipe-homemade-chicken-spring-rolls-with-garlic-chilli-raw-fillingrecipe-homemade-chicken-spring-rolls-with-garlic-chilli-courgetti-chicken-choppingboard-kniferecipe-homemade-chicken-spring-rolls-with-garlic-chilli-raw-filling-mixed

For the Spring Roll Filling:

  1. Heat a little oil in a non stick pan whilst you slice your chicken breast into thin strips
  2. Fry the chicken so that its crispy and fully cooked (but not so much that it goes dry) and cut up into small pieces
  3. Shred the vegetables into thin strips of roughly the same size. Don’t make them too long as they’ll need to fit into the spring rolls.
  4. In a large bowl, mix the chicken, vegetables and a generous dollop of sauce (we use a mix of oyster, sweet chilli and soy usually) You want the mixture to be coated in sauce, but not runny else you’ll make a huge mess when you try and eat them!
  5. Separate your filling mixture roughly into 6 in the bowl

recipe-homemade-chicken-spring-rolls-with-garlic-chilli-courgetti-pastryrecipe-homemade-chicken-spring-rolls-with-garlic-chilli-courgetti-origami-1recipe-homemade-chicken-spring-rolls-with-garlic-chilli-courgetti-origami-2

Folding the Spring Rolls:

I was so busy making the spring rolls I couldn’t take photos at the same time so I have reenacted it at my desk with a post-it note (my colleagues think I’m weird!)

Before you start and get covered in sauce, unstick each of your spring roll pastry sheets and lay one out with a corner facing you.

  1. Take 1/6 of the filling and lay it onto your pastry sheet halfway between the centre of the pastry and the point closest to you
  2. Fold up the point closest to you so it lies over the top of the filling
  3. Bring the left hand point and the right hand point into the center of the square. This should fold over the edges of your filling
  4. Roll the filling up in a sausage shape towards your last point, til you can just see the end of the point
  5. Dip the point in a bowl of luke-warm water and stick it down on the back of the spring roll.

Note: the tighter your spring roll is, the better it will turn out – if you go wrong you can always unfold it and try again.

recipe-homemade-chicken-spring-rolls-with-garlic-chilli-courgetti-spring-rolls

To fry the Spring rolls:

  1. It’s best to use a deep fat fryer (and funnily enough healthier as a DFF can get to much hotter temperatures and cooks the food much quicker, meaning that it absorbs less oil) but you can also shallow fry them in a wok – just get the oil as hot as you can without burning the house down!
  2. You want them a lovely golden brown colour with crisp pastry – depending on the size of your DFF or pan, you may need to fry them one at a time or in pairs
  3. When they’re cooked, make sure that you either put them straight onto kitchen towel or a cake rack so that any excess oil can drain away. They hold their heat quite well so if you have to fry them individually they should all still be hot

recipe-homemade-chicken-spring-rolls-with-garlic-chilli-courgetti-spiraliser

For the Courgetti:

  1. Either using a fancy spiraliser, julienne peeler or simply cutting long very thin strips with a sharp knife, slice up your courgette to make noodle shapes.
  2. Heat up some butter in a pan and add crushed garlic and chilli to taste
  3. Gently saute the courgette strands in the butter for a few minutes (you can serve it raw, but for this dish we wanted it warm)

recipe-homemade-chicken-spring-rolls-with-garlic-chilli-courgetti-close-up

To serve we added a drizzle of soy sauce, some organic ginger  yogurt (because Adam’s version of chilli to taste is a LOT hotter than my version!) and decorated with a few splashes of some delicious raspberry cumin and chilli dressing we bought from Exeter Food Festival. (to see that post, click here).

There you are – a really delicious and light dinner that looks far trickier than it actually is to make, and tastes incredible!

If you are interested in a spiraliser, they’re pretty cool contraptions that make getting more veggies into your diet a lot easier! I got mine here, but Hemsley + Hemsley have been at the forefront of making them well known and theirs can be bought here (though they’re pretty much the same thing!) They also have some pretty fab recipes for courgetti which I’m keen to try – have a browse here.