For years, I’ve been seeking the answer to a question that just wouldn’t leave me alone… And at the same time eluded me at every turn. What’s the secret to preparing Rice noodles – particularly deli-cate Vermicelli – without ‘mushing’ it?
It was a Grail Quest-like experience: Every time I thought I’d found a recipe that would include the knowledge I sought… It assumed I already knew the The Big Secret. I had come to accept that, if I was meant to know how to ‘ace’ Rice Noodles every time, I’d have been born Vietnamese. But my persistence finally paid off!
I say Vietnamese specifically because the central focus of my quest has been the ‘perfect Rice Vermicelli’ – like you get in in southeast Asian noodle soups and stir fries.
Perhaps the finest expression of that particular noodle ‘art and science’ is the ideal Vietnamese Pho (see photo, left).
What I was doing
Lacking expert advice, I had been pre-boiling or blanching Rice Noodles be-fore adding them to my dishes. I was following the instructions I had received from Italian and other cooks about how to handle thin wheat- and buckwheat-flour pastas. And it just wasn’t working. On the other hand, when I tried just adding dry Rice Vermi-celli to dishes I was other-wise ‘acing’, the ultra touchy pasta just broke into a million pieces and never reached al-dente stage at all.
What I SHOULD have been doing
You know how, when you’re looking for your keys, you often find the sunglasses you thought were lost forever? I was watching a video on ‘Southeast Asian Favourites’ hoping to refresh myself on the classic vegetable ensembles Vietnamese, Korean and Indonesian cooks traditionally use in their dishes…
And the Caucasian chef demonstrating an ‘authentic’ Oceanian Rice Noodle stir fry, out of the blue dropped the bomb: “As everybody knows,” she smiled patiently, “You should always soak your dry Rice noodles for 10 to 15 minutes in cold water, then let them drip dry before adding it to your [recipe]…”
It turns out that this cold-soak softens the noodle to a point where it remains strong but springy – perfect for stiring or tossing – requiring only a moment on the heat to reach perfection.
My take
One tip I can claim as a result of my own experience with the cold soak: It works beautifully for all sizes, shapes and thicknesses of Rice noodles. Though you’ll have to practice gauging how long to soak different thicknesses of pasta to ensure they are softened all the way through.
And, though I can’t claim to have any scientific or culturally-based evidence for this observation, it appears that the cold soak strengthens the bonds between starch molecules in the pasta, so that it actually becomes stronger at the same time as it becomes more flexible.
Whatever the chemistry, I can reliably predict, now that I’ve finally discovered The Secret, that you’ll be seeing a lot more Rice Vermicelli recipes here at the Fab Food Blog in the days and weeks to come!
~ Maggie J.