Popiah
| Popiah | |||||||||||
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| A popiah vendor in Keelung, Taiwan and a popiah in the foreground | |||||||||||
| Closeup of a popiah | |||||||||||
| Traditional Chinese: | 薄餅 | ||||||||||
| Simplified Chinese: | 薄饼 | ||||||||||
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| alternative Chinese name | |||||||||||
| Chinese: | 薄皮卷 | ||||||||||
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Popiah (薄饼) is a Hokkien/Chaozhou-style fresh spring roll common in Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia. Popiah is often eaten in the Fujian province of China and its neighboring Chaozhou on the Qingming Festival. It is sometimes referred to as 'bao bing'.
A popiah "skin" is a thin paper-like crepe or pancake made from wheat flour (rice flour is sometimes used) which is covered with a sweet sauce (often a bean sauce, a blended soy sauce or hoisin sauce or a shrimp paste sauce (hae-ko, POJ: hê-ko)), and optionally with hot chilli sauce before it is filled. The filling is mainly finely grated and steamed or stir-fried turnip, jicama (known locally as bangkuang), which has been cooked with a combination of other ingredients such as bean sprouts, French beans, and lettuce leaves, depending on the individual vendor, along with grated carrots, slices of Chinese sausage, thinly sliced fried tofu, chopped peanuts or peanut powder, fried shallots, and shredded omelette. Some hawkers, especially in non-halal settings, will add fried pork lard. As a fresh spring roll, the popiah skin itself is not fried.
In China, Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan there are "popiah parties," where the ingredients are laid out and guests make their own popiah with proportions of ingredients to their own personal liking.
Similar foods in other cuisines include the Filipino variant referred to as Lumpiang Sariwa, fried spring rolls (Chinese) and fajitas (Tex-Mex). In Vietnam, bò bía is the Vietnamese version of popiah, introduced by Chaozhou immigrants. It is a common sight to see an old Chaozhou man or woman selling bò bía at their roadside stand.
Taiwanese Popiah/Spring Roll
In Taiwan, popiah are eaten in several varieties. We can classify them into fried and non-fried versions. The fried version is very commonly served year-round in Chinese restaurants. It is small, crispy and rolled with meat or sweet red bean paste. The non-fried version is much more complicated. The non-fried one is called “Runbing” (潤餅) in Mandarin ("Popiah" in the Hokkien and Chaozhou dialects), and it is a special food eaten by Fujianese people in spring on two different traditional festivals, either on “Cold Food Day”, or on “Tomb Sweeping Day.” Additionally, Some Hakkas have their spring rolls on March third in the lunar calendar. The reason why people have spring rolls on specific festivals is mainly to show respect to their ancestors.
For “Runbing”, there are two kinds of skins which roll the stuffing: one that is slowly heated until cooked is famous for being very thin; the other is baked. Furthermore, the way of cooking the stuffing is very different as well. In northern Taiwan, the stuffing is flavored, stir-fired, sometimes it goes with peanut powder, and the sauce is salty; while in Southern Taiwan, the stuffing is water-boiled or blanched without flavored, and then added with white sugar powder and peanut powder. For people who live in southern Taiwan, adding enough white sugar power is the key of spring rolls. Moreover, some people like to heat or steam the spring roll again after it is made. The stuffing itself is quite diverse among different places. The basic stuffing includes vegetables that grow in spring, meat and sliced egg skin. In some places, they also add noodles, Chinese sausages, stewed vegetables instead of blanched ones, tofu, seafood, sticky rice, and etc.
There are many different versions telling the origin of spring rolls. Even though many stories came from provinces in mainland China, each place has already developed and rolled its own characteristics into each spring roll among all those hundreds of years.
Nowadays, the spring roll has become a local representative for different areas, since people tend to put the most typical food as stuffing, and even every family has created its special recipe for making spring rolls. The spring roll not only indicates historical meanings but also shows local spirit and strong mental connection between people and the places they live. Rolling spring rolls has turned into a traditional activity with a pleasant ambiance for family reunion, and meanwhile, offspring roll up the love and lessons from the elders before taking a bite of the spring roll.
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