MissoulaFoodie

Asian Lettuce Wraps, shown here with Bibb lettuce, savory pork filling, and optional vegetable additions of bean sprouts, mint and cilantro leaves. The wraps are perfect hot weather food. Photo by LINDA THOMPSON/Missoulian

By GREG PATENT for the Missoulian

The most popular item on the menu of the Asian restaurant chain P.F. Chang’s is Chicken Lettuce Wraps. It’s a seasoned mixture of cooked chicken you spoon into Iceberg lettuce cups, top with some hot or mild sauce, roll up, and scarf down. I keep wishing a franchise would open in Missoula just so that I could order them any day of the week. But in the event my hopes will be dashed, I decided to experiment, and I’ve come up with my own version that I must say is quite wonderful.
I’ve also expanded the flavor profile to include Southeast Asian and Japanese ingredients, giving the wraps a whole new dimension. If you’ve cooked Asian recipes much, you know how daunting the list of ingredients can be. So let me say at the outset that you’ll probably need to buy some bottles of sauces for your pantry. They keep indefinitely in the refrigerator, so you’ll have them the next time you decide to cook something Asian. Any well-stocked supermarket will carry canned bamboo shoots, canned water chestnuts, hoisin sauce, oyster sauce, fish sauce, soy sauce, toasted sesame oil. Dry sherry you buy at the liquor store, and it keeps forever. Do not, I repeat, do not use something called cooking sherry that you find in the supermarket. Fresh ingredients such as ginger, garlic, green onions, and fresh shiitake mushrooms, are available in just about every market I know.
A long list of ingredients does not necessarily mean a long prep time. On the contrary, in this recipe the ingredients are grouped into sections, and entire batches of them are cooked at the same time.
This is a perfect hot weather dish because the cooking is completed in about six minutes. You could even
cook the meat outside in a skillet on a hot grill. The wraps are terrific with ice-cold beer.

Asian Lettuce Wraps

This is fun food for everyone. Don’t be put off by the ingredients list because groups of them are added all at once during cooking. It’ll take about 15 minutes to prep everything and just a few minutes of cooking.
You can double or triple the recipe for an outdoor party. Just make sure you have a large enough pan to cook the meat.

Sauce
1 tablespoon hoisin sauce
1 tablespoon fish sauce
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon dry sherry
2 tablespoons oyster sauce
2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
2 teaspoons toasted sesame oil
1 teaspoon sugar
2 teaspoons cornstarch
Seasonings and meat
1/4 pound fresh shiitake mushrooms, de-stemmed, caps cut into thin strips
1 tablespoon fresh minced ginger
2 cloves finely chopped garlic
2 thinly sliced green onions
1/2 cup chopped canned bamboo shoots
1/2 cup chopped canned water chestnuts
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 pound ground pork, ground chicken, or ground turkey

Lettuce and other vegetables
12 large Bibb lettuce leaves or Iceberg lettuce leaves

Other vegetables (optional):
Fresh bean sprouts
Fresh mint sprigs
Fresh cilantro sprigs
3 tablespoons peanut oil or other vegetable oil

For the sauce, in a small bowl, whisk together the hoisin sauce, fish sauce, soy sauce, sherry, oyster sauce, lime juice, sesame oil, sugar, and cornstarch. Do this when you’re ready to cook, because if cornstarch is in contact with citrus juice for more than 10 minutes, it will lose its ability to thicken. Or, mix everything together ahead of time except the cornstarch. Whisk in the cornstarch just before adding the sauce in the recipe.
For the seasonings and meat, get everything together before cooking. Note that you can use ground pork, chicken or turkey with no change in seasonings.
Wash and dry the lettuce leaves and set them on a platter. Prepare small bowls with bean sprouts, mint, and cilantro, if desired, and set them on the table.
To cook, have all seasonings and meat nearby. Heat the oil in a wok or large skillet over high heat until very hot. Add all the seasonings and meat and cook and stir for 3 to 5 minutes, until meat loses its pink color and is cooked completely. Taste and add more salt and pepper, if necessary.
Whisk cooking sauce to combine well, remembering to add cornstarch if you didn’t a few minutes earlier. Add to wok or skillet and cook and stir about 1 minute until sauce boils and thickens. Remove from heat, taste carefully, and adjust seasoning as needed. Transfer to a bowl and serve as soon as possible.
To eat, spoon meat mixture into lettuce leaf and top with a few bean sprouts, mint and cilantro sprigs. Roll up and eat.
- Makes 12 appetizer servings or 4 main dish servings.

Greg Patent is a food writer and columnist for the Missoulian and missoula.com magazine. Visit Greg’s website at www.gregpatent.com. You can write him at chefguymt@gregpatent.com.