Aotearoa and Australia · Volume 02, The Ration, the Milk Bar and the Bush Table
The Chiko roll
Regional Victoria and NSW, contested
Illustration
- Time
- 45 minutes
- Researched
- Researched from 167 sources in the brief
Frank McEncroe (1908 to 1979), trained in Bendigo, invented the roll in 1950 to 1951 after seeing Chinese-style spring rolls sold at a football ground, and designed something sturdier and larger, holdable in one hand alongside a drink. Launched as the "Chicken Roll" at the Wagga Wagga Agricultural Show in August 1951 despite carrying no chicken at all, the company moved to Melbourne that year, merged with an iceworks firm in 1960 and listed publicly in 1963. Three towns claim it today, disputing three different things rather than one: Bendigo claims the recipe's actual development; Wagga Wagga claims the first public sale; Bathurst claims over three decades of continuous manufacture. The dispute is live enough that NSW and Victorian state MPs sparred over it publicly in 2016. By the 1970s the roll was selling around 40 million units a year through fish and chip shops nationally, a genuine fixture of surf culture.
As tradition built it
Makes 18. 30 minutes' preparation and 15 minutes' cooking, plus cooking the barley.
Ingredients
The filling
- 1 tbsp olive oil
- 1 onion, chopped
- 250g chicken, beef or lamb mince
- 30g butter
- 480ml shredded cabbage
- 240ml green beans, trimmed and sliced
- 1 carrot, chopped
- 1 stalk celery, chopped
- 240ml cooked barley
- 1 tbsp plain flour
- to taste salt
To roll and fry
- 18 square spring roll wrappers
- 1 egg, beaten
- as needed vegetable oil, for deep frying
- optional sweet chilli sauce
Method
- Heat the olive oil on high in a large frying pan. Fry the onion 1 to 2 minutes until tender.
- Add the mince and brown it 2 to 3 minutes, breaking up the lumps. Lift it out onto a plate.
- Melt the butter in the same pan over a medium heat. Fry the cabbage, beans, carrot and celery 2 to 3 minutes, until the cabbage wilts.
- Stir in the barley and flour and cook 1 minute. Mix the mince back in, cool a little, and season.
- Spoon 60ml of filling onto the bottom third of a wrapper. Fold in the sides, roll up firmly and seal the end with egg. Keep the wrappers under a damp tea towel.
- Heat the oil to about 160°C in a large deep pan. Fry the rolls in three batches, 3 to 4 minutes each, turning, until golden. Drain on paper.
- Serve hot, with sweet chilli sauce if you like.
Notes
The recipe is Take 5 magazine's; the barley is cooked in two parts water to one. SunPork's home version cooks the vegetables first with curry powder and a stock cube, binds the filling with a chilled butter and flour sauce, and uses far less barley. The commercial roll's formula is unpublished; both these use bought spring roll wrappers, and only Karen Martini, in Better Homes and Gardens, makes the egg pastry, of plain flour, cornflour, egg and water, rested 30 minutes and fried at 175°C.
What a modern chef changes
Our own technique work; no fine-dining precedent for the Chiko roll was found anywhere in this research.
Method
- Hand-cut every vegetable to a genuinely even dice, rather than a food processor's rough chop, for a filling that holds its structure through frying rather than turning to mush.
- Temper the egg-batter dough properly, resting it chilled before rolling, for a shell that fries crisp rather than doughy.
- Fry at a controlled, probe-checked temperature, 180°C held steady rather than guessed, the single biggest difference between a takeaway shop's roll and a genuinely well-made one.