Who doesn’t love rolled food? Simple, healthy, and a perfect gluten-free alternative, rolled goodies like steak salad rolls are pretty hard to beat.

Spring rolls, summer rolls, nori rolls…they’re pretty much always awesome. Especially when you avoid gluten, these happy little almost-sandwiches are easy to find and nearly always a great choice. Rice paper wrappers, sheets of nori, and even large leaves of lettuce, chard, and kale all wrap perfectly around any ingredient combination to create easy and delicious packages of happiness.

Today’s recipe is basically a fresh and healthy steak salad with a crunchy rainbow of vegetables all neatly rolled up into a deliciously gluten-free package. Bright, fresh, easy, and seriously yummy.

Today was all about steak salad rolls with crunchy fresh vegetables and spicy aioli. A carnivore at heart, any meal that includes steak is a great meal in my book.  Unfortunately, eating too much of it too often can be unhealthy. Also, making sure to find really good meat from cows that have been treated well can make big beefy meals a little too expensive to enjoy every day. However, if you treat your meat like an ingredient rather than the dish itself, enjoying meals with a little steak here and there can become a regular treat! With lots of fresh and raw vegetables and a small amount of steak (making this dish more of a steak salad than anything else!), these rolls become healthy, bright, and amazing.

That’s the idea that makes a meal like this one perfect. All of the flavor of great beef cooked rare and deliciously, but in a dish that makes a small amount go a very long way.

There’s nothing out there that says that you can’t take all of your favorite sandwich or salad ingredients and turn them into a healthy and even gluten-free roll, so don’t let convention stop you. Love a pastrami sandwich? Try a pastrami kale wrap! Are you a big fan of Rubens but want to avoid all of that bread? There’s nothing that says that you can’t wrap those delicious ingredients up in rice paper or greens or even use your sliced meat as the wrap itself. Even the steak salad from a few weeks ago could make an amazing roll, either in rice paper wrappers or rolled up in the radicchio from the recipe!

The best part of cooking is the freedom and creativity that you can have if you trust yourself enough to give your crazy ideas a try.

I’ve talked about the technique that you’ll use to roll up your summer rolls here in this recipe for crispy tofu vegetarian summer rolls, so I won’t go into all of that again.  Check it out if you’re interested!

Seriously sublime steak salad summer rolls with simple spicy aioli