Popiah
Popiah is a Fujianese/Teochew-style fresh spring roll filled with an assortment of fresh, dried, and cooked ingredients, eaten during the Qingming Festival and other celebratory occasions. The dish is made by the people and diaspora of Fujian province of China, neighbouring Chaoshan district, and by the Teochew and Hoklo diaspora in various regions throughout Southeast Asia and in Taiwan, The origin of popiah dates back to the 17th century.
Etymology
In the Chaoshan dialect and Hokkien language, popiah is pronounced as /poʔ˩piã˥˧/, which means "thin flatbread/cake". Depending on the regions in Fujian, it is also commonly referred to as /lun˩piã˥˧/, which is the etymological origin of "lumpia" in the Philippines and Indonesia. It is referred to as rùnbǐng or báobǐng in Mandarin, and also as bópíjuǎn.Wrapper and fillings
A popiah "skin" is a soft, thin paper-like crêpe or pancake made from wheat flour. The method of producing the wrapper involves making an extremely wet and viscous dough. A ball of this dough is held to the right hand, then quickly "rubbed" against a hot steel plate in a circular fashion, and lifted. Through this process, a very thin layer of the wet dough adheres to the plate and begins to cook. The upper surface of the crêpe is then usually cleaned of excess pieces of dough using the dough ball through a dabbing process. When the dough has been cooked to completion, it is peeled off from the hot steel plate before being removed. The rubbing is typically done over two or three plates at once, which allows the baker to continuously produce crepes and gives enough time for each crepe to be properly cooked.It is eaten in accompaniment with a sweet sauce, a blended soy sauce or hoisin sauce or a shrimp paste sauce, and optionally with hot chilli sauce before it is filled. The filling is mainly finely grated and steamed or stir-fried turnip, jicama, 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. Other common variations of popiah include pork, shrimp or crab meat. Seaweed is often included in the Xiamen versions. Some hawkers in Malaysia and Singapore, especially in non-halal settings, will add fried pork lard. As a fresh spring roll, the popiah skin itself is not fried.
Two common ways of eating this are holding them like a burrito, which some prefer, while others cut the popiah roll into slices and pick them up with chopsticks. It requires some skill to pick the pieces up with chopsticks. Spoons are seldom provided at the establishments.
Types
In China, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia there are "popiah parties" at home, where the ingredients are laid out and guests make their own popiah with proportions of ingredients to their own personal liking.Taiwanese
In Taiwan, popiah is called runbing in Mandarin, jūn-piánn in Taiwanese Hokkien.The stuffing itself is quite diverse among different places. The basic stuffing includes vegetables that grow in spring, meat and thinly shredded omelette. In some places, they also add noodles, Chinese sausages, stewed vegetables instead of blanched ones, tofu, seafood, sticky rice, and so on.
Furthermore, the way of cooking the stuffing is very different as well. In northern Taiwan, the stuffing is flavoured, stir-fired, sometimes it goes with peanut powder, and the sauce is salty. In southern Taiwan, the popiah stuffing is water blanched without additional seasoning, and flavoured primarily with sugar and peanut powder. For people who live in southern Taiwan, the addition of sufficient sugar is key for popiah. Moreover, some people like to heat or steam the spring roll again after it is made.
Some food stalls serve popiah filled with ice cream. This is a sweet and savory treat - the ice cream is commonly pineapple, peanut and taro flavored, or these three flavors swirled together. The vendor will have a giant block of peanut candy nearby. They will shave this in front of you to create a bed of peanut shavings on the popiah skin. Then the three scoops of ice cream are placed on the bed. It is customary to add a piece of cilantro before the whole thing is wrapped up and handed to you. Some people have dubbed it an ice-cream burrito.