While spending some time on a boat tour in the Mekong Delta, we took some time out to learn about making rice noodles. Have I mentioned we ate a lot of rice noodles in Vietnam, I mean A LOT. Anyway still very impressive. I apparently didn’t feel the need to take photos of how you get the sauce that forms the noodles, but oh well, clearly wasn’t too interesting. Once you’ve got the sauce stuff, you put it on this drum-like burner, let it sit for a minute or two, then pull it off using a bamboo roller. You then place it flat on a mat to dry out and once dried send it through a shredder. They were even gracious enough to let us try it out. Suffice it to say we were not as good, as is indicated by the very nice gentleman helping to fix my terribly not flat paper that I put down on the mat.
The remarkable thing about the process to me is how efficient it is in terms of resources. The rice husks are leftover unused from the extraction to make the noodles, but then they are used as a fuel for the oven/burner to make the noodles. The ash from the oven is then reused to make fertilizer as well to help on growing more rice. Talk about reduce, reuse, recycle!