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Secrets of a winning formula
A specialty noodle dish in Hoi An can be made only
with water from a thousand-year-old local well.
Hoi An on the central coast combines the old and the new in a way that draws
tourists from far and wide. Not so famous are the town’s homegrown culinary
delights, above all cao lau.
The people of Hoi An have been eating cao lau for a long time, yet the
delectable concoction of noodles, pork, shrimp and greens is only starting to
get known beyond the town’s perimeter.
The recipe for the perfect cao lau is not simple, and the selection of
ingredients must be done with utmost care.
It’s vital that the rice noodles be made from exactly the right grain, one that
is neither freshly harvested nor too aged in order that the noodles won’t be too
dry or too sticky.
The preparation of cao lau starts out with soaking the rice in a solution of
lye, which is made from the ashes of burnt trees. Different trees yield
different types of lye. For the noodles in cao lau, the lye comes from the ashes
of trees grown on nearby Cham Island.
After a good soaking, the rice is mashed into a thick paste. The water used to
mash the rice must be from Ba Le, a well dug by the Cham people a thousand years
ago, as it’s cool, fresh and not contaminated with alum.
The paste then goes into cotton bags to drain the excess water. When this is
done, the resulting dough is kneaded into a thin sheet and briefly steamed, cut
into strings and steamed again until thoroughly cooked.
The noodles, which should have a yellowish tinge from the lye, can be put into a
bowl with some artfully arranged scalded bean sprouts and slices of char siu
(barbecued pork) and some fried-shallot oil sprinkled on top.
A bowl of chicken soup always accompanies cao lau and can be spooned into the
mouth separately, or the two bowls can be turned into one at the table.
It’s the specially prepared noodles that produce the sweet, peppery, bitter,
acrid and sour taste that goes so well with fresh vegetables, fish sauce, soy
sauce and small pieces of fat that make cao lau melt in the mouth.
Even better is to add pieces of noodles that have been cut up, dried and
deep-fried to resemble a mini pancake.
Quite a few restaurants outside Hoi An have started to list cao lau on the menu,
invariably in tourist haunts like nearby Hue and Da Nang, and down south in Ho
Chi Minh City.
In spite of the great distance, these restaurateurs make sure to get their cao
lau ingredients from Hoi An so that their versions are authentic and have the
full flavor.
Of course, the true gourmand scoffs at these upstarts and says the cao lau in
Hoi An is still the best. The way to find out is to try one of Hoi An’s many
restaurants that cook cao lau then sample the fare at one of the following
eateries in Ho Chi Minh City:
Hoi An 1
308/26 Hoang Van Thu St., Tan Binh Dist.
Phu Chiem
52D Tran Binh Trong St., Binh Thanh Dist.
My Son
1019A Binh Quoi St., Binh Thanh Dist.
Cho Do Do
10/14 Luong Huu Khanh St., Dist. 1
Hoai Pho
288/94A Cach Mang Thang Tam St., Dist. 1
Source: VietNamNet/TN |
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