Perfect Egg Rolls: Homemade vs Takeout

Having this great crispy outside is kinda key

to making your own egg rolls,

and your dreams can come true if you wanna do it.

[upbeat beat]

This is chef Harold, and this is Taking on Takeout.

[jazzy music]

This is what cooking is all about, you know what I mean?

Mm, really, really good.

[jazzy music]

[typing on keyboard]

[paper crinkling]

Okay, oh this is Chinese food, it's my favorite.

Egg rolls.

It's all iconic egg rolls in New York City.

I had a egg roll before I came in.

[Producer] Today?

Yup, literally outside, downstairs.

So we're gonna go ahead and crack all these open.

[egg roll crunching]

From this first one, it's all veggie.

Look like it's just the green cabbage itself.

[egg roll crunching]

Classic.

It looks like mostly the filling is celery and cabbage.

Oh, this one's a little bit different.

I think this has minced pork in it.

[egg roll crunching]

This is really traditional.

The crispiness of the wonton wrapper itself,

you have to find the right egg roll wrapper,

and you see that crispiness there, yeah,

they double fried the [beep] outta this.

If you're in New York City you're using soybean oil,

I know that for a fact,

'cause that's the cheapest oil you got out here.

These are straight up moneymakers, right?

'Cause white cabbage is super cheap,

they're abundant everywhere.

If I'm doing a pork egg roll, I would go ahead

and use the scraps from all the other pork products

that's in the space of pork fried rice, boneless rib tips,

and that's a plus plus on my payroll.

This is pork also.

[egg roll crunching]

Not as much as this one, these guys are cheap.

This one, a bit more greenage in it.

Mm, this one's seasoned really well.

Got a little spice to it.

Somebody put some love into this one,

you know what I'm saying?

It's super tight, you see how circular that is?

And this one was just like,

it wasn't rolled as tight too,

you see this little thing here?

They all look like they were handmade,

'cause they're all not uniform.

So that means that they're not brought frozen from Costco.

[Harold laughing]

This is the number one sauce there,

duck sauce, all right?

This is basically made out of apricots.

These are like pretty mass produced.

I go to a Chinese restaurant,

you remember my face, all right?

If you see my face at these Chinese restaurants,

I need 10 of these, all right?

Remember my face, all right.

This is like my new favorite.

Spicy mustard, it's super spicy,

but it still has that mustard taste to it.

And I usually mix it with a duck sauce

and then create like my own little mix.

[Producer] Why is that called duck sauce?

Look, my man, I have no idea.

[Harold laughing]

[jazzy music]

What I would wanna do is blanch the vegetables,

and then toss 'em in kind of

like a vinegar mix or something

just to open 'em up a little bit more.

I will do pork or other kind of meat product in it.

Just to get a little bit of umph,

I need to do a double fry on this

to give it the extra bubbly crust that you get here.

When you bite into it and it's crispy,

that's the best feeling.

I feel like there's a lot of modified stuff in here.

I wanna make them from scratch to really showcase

what a duck sauce for you would look like.

That's what I would do here.

[upbeat beat]

My eye falls first to the wrapper.

These are the exact ones that you need.

These cabbages right here,

I think what was in the egg roll was this one.

The reason why I say that is because these other ones

are a little more expensive.

Ooh, and then look, some Chinese celery.

This will give a great flavor.

The white onion, they'll give it a little bit of sweetness.

Look at these amazing proteins.

Some nice marbled ground pork, pork tenderloin here,

and then we have some shrimps.

I think I'm going to really use the pork chop

because I love the flavor of this meat.

[fan running]

Yeah, so now I'm gotta speak a little bit louder

'cause the [beep] fan is on now, so we won't die.

First, we're gonna go ahead and prep our vegetables.

You'll go ahead and shred your cabbage,

and as thin as you can.

It cooks faster, but also you can fit it

to your egg roll a little bit better okay.

I like onion, I love the flavor.

Slice it super thin.

We'll go ahead and get some of these green onions.

Chinese celery, just gonna take the tops off.

So you wanna have it kind of julienned,

kind of a longer, elongated form,

so when you roll it,

it's a much easier to roll the egg roll itself.

You wanna blanch these with boiling water.

Put a little bit of salt in here,

just to give it some seasoning.

Gonna give it 30 seconds to a minute.

All we wanna do is take away a little bit of that bite.

Let it rock for a little bit,

and then boom, we're gonna take it out.

It stops it from over cooking,

and then it gets this beautiful color still,

it still holds it.

So we're gonna let this rock for a little bit,

let it cool down.

All right, next we're gonna go ahead and prepare our pork.

This beautiful pork chop, I love.

So what we gon' do is we're gonna cut 'em into small dices.

The pork that we got from the egg roll,

but it looks like it was scraps

from the pork bi-product in the restaurant.

For us right now, just for kinda technical purposes,

we're gonna kinda showcase grabbing some nice pork.

The smaller you cut 'em, the faster they cook.

I woulda picked the ground pork,

but I think this is way better to kind of give it texture

in a sense where you can taste the pork

when you bite into the egg roll.

Gonna season it, a little bit of salt,

white pepper, soy, to give it a nice caramelization

and a little bit of vinegar.

Pork always needs vinegar,

it's such a fatty product

that it always needs something like that to break it up

and open it up a little bit.

So we're gonna go ahead and start searing it.

We've got a nice canola oil here.

And I love using cast iron pans for searing meat

because they also have a great tendency

to keep the heat and then give you nice color.

[pan sizzling]

So what you wanna do is you don't wanna move it too much.

You wanna just keep it on that one side,

give it a nice color.

Once this pork is sauteed up, we're gonna add it,

and we're gonna season this thing a little bit more.

What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna squeeze

some of this liquid out.

You can't have too much water.

What happens is if you're filling is soggy,

you're not gonna have a nice, crunchy egg roll wrapper.

When you bite into it, it's gonna fall apart on you,

it's not gonna look good.

Trying to just mimicking what they do at the restaurant,

and what they do with their meat.

The coloration is gonna be a little bit different

than what they do,

because they're gonna add a few more things

to kinda give it that reddish color.

But what we're gonna do is we're gonna get as close

as possible to the flavor profile.

I got trolled on the last time

for using a metal spoon on a cast iron.

I don't wanna get trolled, all right guys,

my feelings get hurt.

Don't yell at me, okay buddy?

So I think this looks great.

I'ma go ahead and toss it into my mix.

[pan sizzling]

I'm gonna taste where's this at

to make sure we're on the same page here.

[jazzy music]

A little salt, white pepper,

little bit of vinegar.

Give it a little bit of sugar

because the sugar is a great divider

and also a great balancer of very acidic

and very seasoned food.

And Chinese food, there's a lot of sugar

being used in Chinese food.

Cooking wine.

Touch of soy just to tie everything back in.

[jazzy music]

Yup, there it is.

I'ma put this to the side,

and then we're gonna make our sauces,

and then we're gonna fry it.

We're gonna go ahead and make our mustard sauce.

This super simple, okay.

The ratio usually is one to two with this.

We're just gonna eyeball it, 'cause [beep] it right,

you know what I'm saying?

So it's basically just mustard, and a little bit of water.

Yeah, I think this is the viscosity

we're looking for right here.

Ooh hoo hoo.

All right, next,

we're gonna go ahead and make our duck sauce,

which is basically I'm eyeballing this [beep], all right,

I don't know the [beep] recipe.

Put our apricot jam in.

I'm gonna add a little bit of soy, vinegar, salt,

a little bit of white pepper.

And then I'm gonna add a little bit of water

just to open this up, and then kind of smooth it out.

You always have to have salt, a little bit of acid,

a little bit of heat to kind of open things up.

So as long as you follow those kind of steps

when you're creating a sauce or creating a dish,

I think you're fine.

This is what cooking is all about, you know what I mean?

Just making it up along the way.

No recipes.

All you home cooks out there that are scared to cook.

As long as you don't give a [beep],

I think that's really key to life.

Just make sure that you put your love into it

and that the food that you put out

is something you stand behind, and that's it.

We'll put just a little bit of sugar,

'cause I think it's needs a little bit more of a sweetness.

[Harold laughing]

Not bad son.

When you cool it down, the pectin from the apricots itself

is gonna go ahead and coagulate it a little bit

so it's gonna get super glossy, it's gonna get super sticky,

and then we can dip our egg rolls in it.

Now we're gonna go to frying now.

I'm gonna go ahead and use cornstarch

and make a little cornstarch slurry, right?

That's more cost effective,

but also I think that's what they use

at the Chinese restaurants overall

to create the binding agent to roll up the egg rolls.

We ended up using peanut oil.

That's what they use, the restaurants,

at the Chinese place?

[Producer] Yeah.

Okay, so we have peanut oil.

[Harold laughing]

So we're gonna go ahead and open our egg roll wrappers here.

This is the brand, the item that you go get

at the Chinese place to build these things,

you know what I mean?

The ingredients is wheat flour, barley flour,

water, salt, egg, and that's about it.

And that's why it's probably given

that yellowish color already, from the egg itself.

Put a little bit of our cornstarch slurry here

on the outside of this thing.

This how we make our lumpias.

My grandma used to make me do this [beep] job.

But, I'm not weighing this out, I'm just gonna eyeball it.

It's gonna be a fat boy joint.

So what you wanna do is you wanna take it in,

and then you wanna pull it in tight.

Bring this in a little bit.

Then you want to tuck, tuck, tuck, tuck,

tight, tight, tight, pull it back.

And then you wanna roll, roll, roll, and then boom,

you got your egg roll right there.

It's so important to get it tight

is because you want it to stay consistent when we fry it,

but also you want it to look nice when you cut into it,

the cross section,

and you don't wanna look like you're skimming people

out of the egg roll situation.

I'm gonna go ahead and fry these up.

[oil sizzling]

The first fry is gonna cook everything through,

gonna give you that nice base color.

But the second fry is really where you're gonna finish

this dish and give it that crunchy element that it needs.

This is gonna be crispy.

So now it's getting this beautiful, beautiful brown color.

That's also key about squeezing the filling.

Some of that water's coming out right now,

that's why it's bubbling like that.

So I didn't do a really good job

of squeezing the cabbage out.

So I'ma pull this one out.

Oh, look at that, look at that beauty.

So now it's going up to like 380,

we're gonna go ahead and dump 'em back in,

give it that double fry.

[oil sizzling]

And give it that nice golden brown color.

Do it for another two minutes.

All right, cool.

We'll pull these out.

Look at these bad boys, woo ee.

That's it.

As number one rule, anything that comes out of the fryer,

you gotta hit it with salt.

I don't really care what you're doing,

you gotta hit it with salt.

[upbeat beat]

As you can see, we have the egg rolls that I made,

and then the egg rolls we got from the Chinese restaurant.

They're both super nice and crispy on the outside,

nice and blistered, I think the double fry

really got us to a great position.

So we'll go ahead and cut mine and see how it compares.

[egg roll crunching]

Yeah, still crunchy, not bad on the roll,

it's pretty tight spiral.

Everything is there, you can see it.

[egg roll crunching]

The pork one, and as you can tell

that's some scraps of pork

that was already in the restaurant,

there is fresh pork that we put on ours.

I think I coulda cut my cabbage a little bit thinner,

theirs is super compact.

But I think we got it as close as possible

to this thing, right?

From looking inside they're both pretty tightly packed.

I could have done a better job here in the back end,

whoever did this one did a really great job,

and I'll work harder next time.

Call me if you need me, Chinese restaurant,

I'll make you egg rolls.

So I'm gonna go ahead, taste mine first.

[egg roll crunching]

That's good.

I think the best part is I seasoned the cabbage,

again, with all those kinda flavor profiles,

the pork also is seasoned so it's all coming together.

[egg roll crunching]

This might be a little old.

The cabbage is a little stale,

there's something chalky in it, I don't know what it is.

With my egg roll compared to the restaurant egg roll,

there's a huge difference.

There's great acid here.

I made sure that I added vinegar,

Chinese cooking wine, seasoned it,

tasted it a couple times.

And I think here it's a little bit flat on that end.

So there's the restaurant pork roll with their duck sauce.

What I mean with our duck sauce,

this is New York duck sauce, this is [beep] New York made.

[egg roll crunching]

Kinda masks a little bit of the chalkiness,

and kind of the off putting kind of taste,

[upbeat beat]

[egg roll crunching]

Mm, that's good as [beep].

[Harold laughing]

That compliments the dish a little bit.

The sweetness and umami flavor profiles

of the duck sauce here,

opens this up a little bit more too

so there's another layer of flavors bursting through.

All right, so next we're gonna do the mustard.

[egg roll crunching]

Woo.

Yeah, that's spicy.

But it's good.

If you like mustard, that's for you right here.

I'ma go ahead and taste their sauce with their egg roll.

[egg roll crunching]

Mm, that's good.

Not as spicy, it's mustard forward,

and then there's a little spice at the end.

If you're gonna try to do this at the first time,

the one thing that you really need to pay attention to

is the technique of it all.

You need to understand

how you have to blanch the vegetables

so it wouldn't be too crunchy,

the temperature of double frying,

and then just making sure that the filling is seasoned,

I think that's what it just comes down to it.

As long as it tastes good for you,

don't be afraid to make mistakes.

'Cause making mistakes is kinda part of the whole process.

Like we always say at Bon Appetit,

never forget where you come from, you know the rest.

Otherwise you become a [beep] [beep].

Otherwise you become a [beep] [beep].

Otherwise you become a [beep] [beep].

South Bronx all day.

[metal clanging]

[Producer] Who is making this in the Chinese restaurant?

It's usually a guy with a tank top and a chain,

smoking a cigarette in the back somewhere, usually.

Sweatin' over it, especially this hot summer nights,

that extra little flavor, that's sweat glands.

So you know it's seasoned.

[Harold laughing]