If you have already tried his garlic-chilli potato dumplings, which we featured back in March, you'll know Joe Woodhouse's superpower: transforming the most humble of ingredients into dishes even meat eaters can love.
Joe taught himself to cook at the age of 10, shortly after becoming a vegetarian. Living on a farm, with not much to do and plenty of fresh veg at his disposal, he began experimenting with flavours and tastes. What was a boyhood pastime has become his life's work, but he maintains the same guiding principle: "have fun".
His third book, Weeknight Vegetarian, is built around that same ethos. According to Nigella Lawson, his books can “always be relied upon to deliver inspiration, reassurance and flavour, and his new one is no exception”.
As summer threatens to turn to autumn, these summer rolls are a good match for the August bank holiday weekend. Joe says: “I love Vietnamese summer rolls but these have a little twist: a zingy, fresh Chinese salad in place of the usual suspects.” He points out that in Chinese, the salad is known as lao hu cai, or “tiger vegetable”, “either because the mixture looks like a tiger’s stripes, or perhaps because the salad’s spicy flavours impart the strength of a tiger”.
Words by Bea Clarke
Photography by Joe Woodhouse
Joe’s tiger salad summer rolls with double-dunk sauce
Be warned, you will want to overfill these and I have learned the hard way: they just burst. Feel free to add marinated and roasted batons or strips of tofu for a little protein.
Makes 16 rolls
Ingredients
150g rice vermicelli
1 cucumber, cut into 7.5cm batons, or to taste
4 celery sticks, finely sliced, or to taste
25g coriander, leaves picked, stalks finely chopped, or to taste
1-2 green or red chillies, finely sliced, or to taste
1 scant tbsp rice vinegar, or to taste
2 tsps toasted sesame oil, or to taste
16 rice paper wrappers
Salt
For the sauce (all ingredients to taste)
75g tahini
4 tsps rice vinegar
1½ tsps soy sauce
1 tsp honey
¾ tsp fine sea salt
100g roasted salted peanuts, roughly chopped
Method
Bring a kettle to the boil and put the rice noodles in a large heatproof mixing bowl. Pour boiling water over the noodles and allow to soften for 5-7 mins or until they are sufficiently tender. Drain and cool under cold water, then drain well again.
Meanwhile, combine all the sauce ingredients except the peanuts in a serving bowl. Taste and add more of anything you think it needs. Put the peanuts in another bowl.
In a separate mixing bowl, mix the cucumber, celery, coriander and chillies and dress with the rice vinegar and sesame oil. Add a pinch of salt and any other ingredient you may think there needs to be more of.
Get a large dish that will fit the rice paper wrappers and put a 5mm depth of water in it. Soak a wrapper for 15-20 secs until pliable, then remove to a chopping board. Add a small handful of the noodles to the centre, spreading them in a rough horizontal line 10-12.5cm in length. Follow with an equal amount of the tiger salad, spreading it out in the same manner. Fold the bottom edge nearest to you over the filling. Then fold in the sides over the filling, too. Finally, roll the filling up and away from you to form a neat cylinder. Repeat to fill and roll all the summer rolls.
Serve with the dipping sauce, using the chopped peanuts as a secondary dip for crunch.
Weeknight Vegetarian by Joe Woodhouse is published by Kyle Books, £26; buy it at a discount at the Nerve Bookshop