It seems no matter what you put and fry in egg rolls wrappers, it will be inevitably delicious!
Lumpias are Filipino Fried Egg rolls and there are countless combinations of what people put in there. The filling reminds me a lot of what people put in dumplings, except there is a lot of extra garlic! Pork, cabbage and carrot seem to be quite popular. As usual, I always use what I have available at the moment which were baby carrots, onions, garlic and ground turkey. Whenever I am out of onions, I leave them it. Sometimes, I do add in the cabbage. I’ve used chicken in the past when making it for a class gathering for my daughters Thanksgiving party (my husanad mentioned that chicken was probably a safer meat to use since some people may not like turkey or cannot have beef or pork). The eggroll wrapper you can find in the freezer section of the Asian Supermarket. I usually cook the filling before wrapping it to be on the safe side, especially since I am feeding the kids and the meat should be cooked thoroughly. I get interrupted with my cooking by the kids time to time, so I cook it first to prevent the likelihood of it sitting there raw, while I attend to the kids. I cook the filling and let it cool and either wrap the egg rolls right away or cover it at room temperature (as long as it’s not super hot out) to make it a little closer to dinner time.
Ingredients
1 package of ground turkey (Costco or BJs)
1.5-2 cups of shredded carrots (I used extra carrots because I’m trying to use them up, but feel free to cut down to even 1 cup if you don’t love them, or replace with celery or cabbage)
1/2 large onion
5-7 cloves minced garlic
1 tsp chicken powder (optional)
2 tbsp soy sauce
1 tbsp fish sauce
4 tbsp oil (divided)
Steps
1- Shred the carrots and garlic in food processor if you have (otherwise just once them).
2- Dice the onions.
3- Heat up 2 tbsp oil and fry the onions, carrots and garlic for about 4-6 minutes. Use aside to one side of the pan.
4- Add remaining 2 tbsp oil and cook the ground turkey until no longer pink.
5- Add soy sauce, fish sauce, chicken powder, salt and pepper and combine meat to veggies in the same pan.
6- Wrap Egg rolls. Wikihow shows a good demonstration of how it can be wrapped- I used the envelope method.
7- Set deep fryer or oil to 350F and fry until egg rolls are crispy (since the filling is cooked, you can’t really go wrong with how long you fry them as long as it’s before it’s burnt). I fried them for about 5-8 minutes.
8- Serve as is, with Thai Chili Sauce or with the Filipino Vinegar (I’ll be doing a post on this later on- pretty much vinegar flavored with garlic cloves, black peppercorns and birds eye chili). You can also buy them in the Asian Supermarket(see below).
*Note: I usually just toss in the shredded carrots after the meat portion is cooked, but this time, I simply forgot and cooked it first with the onions and carrots. The filling is a little sweeter this way because the carrots and onions are borderline about to caramelize. Don’t you just love how you can change up recipes however you want to?! That’s the beauty of cooking. Everyone has their own preference and twist on it to make it their own!
Picture Walk of How I Made Lumpia (see here on how to wrap them)
I don’t know one person that doesn’t like fried egg rolls. What are your favorite things to put in them?
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