What are rice paper wrappers made of?
Vietnamese use rice paper as the wrapper to wrap the fillings into a roll shape. That’s why the food name is rice paper roll.
To understand well the nutrition of rice paper, let’s find out the ingredients people use to make it.
Rice paper wrapper is often made of rice flour, water, salt, and tapioca.Salt helps the rice paper wraps to be more elastic, become completely dry, and prevent fungus. Tapioca helps the rice paper to be thinner, more glutinous, easier to bend, and not easy to be cracked. Tapioca also makes the rice paper more translucent.
Image: traditional hand-made method to produce rice papers.
In the traditional hand-made method, Vietnamese people make rice papers with a special steamer pot. The cook lays rice papers on a long bamboo mat to dry them under the sunlight. This way is popular in Vietnamese villages. It does not achieve consistency and quality. Each batch of wrappers is different from other batches in thickness and shapes. The traditional method hence cannot make enough quality rice papers for a big demand in Vietnam and around the world.
Therefore, people use new technology-driven methods to manufacture a big number of rice papers to get consistent quality. Businesses nowadays have deployed an engineering method. A machine replaces the traditional way. The machine mass-produces the rice papers. We cannot differentiate a sheet of rice paper from the others in the same package or in the thousandth package. They are almost identical in texture, thickness, and shape.
