Come summer, we start craving spring rolls. They make an ideal meal on a sweltering evening. They’re fresh, cool, and crisp. Fortuitously, a Vietnamese place just opened down the street. We’ve eaten there a lot—like we’re singlehandedly keeping them in business. They have this incredible sweet pork which they use in their spring rolls. And, the peanut sauce!

This all sounds like a positive situation. We love spring rolls. There’s a new place that makes the best spring rolls. Perfection, right? Wrong! First, we’re going broke. Second, we operate a men’s lifestyle blog, which frequently features food that we’ve cooked. If we aren’t cooking, then we aren’t blogging. And, if we aren’t blogging, then we’re back to leading regular, productive lives. That’s unacceptable.

Our solution? We’ll make our own damn spring rolls with our own damn sweet pork. It took a little tinkering and testing, but we did it. We used our Instant Pot; we use it for everything.

These spring rolls taste as good as they look. Unless you think that they look bad. In that case, they taste better than they look. The point is that they are delicious.

Sweet Chili Sauce Braised Pork Shoulder Spring Rolls

Ingredients

Pork Shoulder

• One pork shoulder
• One tablespoon of vegetable oil
• One yellow onion, roughly chopped
• 1/2 cup of white sugar
• 1/2 cup of water
• Three tablespoons of sweet chili sauce
• Three cloves of garlic, pressed
• One tablespoon of sesame oil
• One tablespoon of fish sauce
• One tablespoon of hoisin sauce
• One teaspoon of ground ginger

Spring Rolls

• One package of spring roll wrappers
• Two cups of cooked soba noodles
• One carrot, matchstick cut
• Half a cucumber, matchstick cut
• 1/3 cup of red cabbage, chopped
• One plum, sliced
• 1/4 cup of fresh mint, chopped
• 1/4 cup of fresh basil, chopped
• Two tablespoons of fresh parsley, chopped
• Two tablespoons of scallions, chopped

Directions

Turn on pressure cooker’s “saute” function. Add vegetable oil. When hot, add onion. Cook until translucent. Cut pork shoulder into strips. Toss in white sugar. Brown pork in pressure cooker. Turn machine off. Add water. Mix sweet chili sauce, garlic, sesame oil, fish sauce, hoisin sauce and ground ginger. Pour mixture over pork. Pressure cook on “high” for 90 minutes.

When finished, remove pork. With a fork, tear into chucks. Let cool.

Prepare components for spring rolls. Soak wrapper for approximately three seconds. Remove from water. Lay on flat surface. In the middle of the wrapper, begin layering ingredients. We followed this order: basil, noodles, cabbage, carrots, cucumbers, plum, pork, mint, parsley and scallions.

Fold the excess rice paper on the left of the filling over the filling. Do the same for the excess rice paper on the right. Pull the excess rice paper from the top over the filling, tucking the edges under the filling and making the encasement snug. Roll to the bottom.

This recipe makes approximately 10 spring rolls. You’ll have plenty of leftover pork shoulder. Serve with peanut sauce.