9 recipes that use rice vermicelli, with photos, step-by-step instructions and cook times. The quickest, Vegetable pancit bihon, takes 25 minutes. It is most often cooked with garlic, sugar and bean sprouts.
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Golden, crackly spring rolls made with the book's home-made samosa pastry and filled with rice vermicelli, capsicum, carrot, celery and spring onion seasoned with chilli sauce and coriander. They are served hot with a sweet, sharp dipping sauce of vinegar syrup, cucumber, red chilli and peanuts. A party favourite: make 15 and watch them go.
Curry laksa, or curry mee, is the coconut-rich laksa of Kuala Lumpur and the west coast, a hawker breakfast as often as a lunch, ladled from huge pots into bowls of noodles. The broth is a fried spice paste of chillies, lemongrass, galangal and candlenuts loosened with coconut milk, so it's spicy, creamy and fragrant at once. Stalls top it with chicken, cockles or prawns; ours is all vegetable: tofu puffs that soak up the soup like sponges, soft aubergine, long beans, crunchy bean sprouts and mint. Chef's tip: once the coconut milk goes in, keep it at a gentle simmer; a rolling boil splits it and leaves the broth greasy and grainy.
No Filipino birthday is complete without a big tray of pancit, because long noodles stand for a long life; aunts arrive at the party carrying it in foil trays, and it sits on the table next to the cake. Pancit bihon uses thin rice vermicelli tossed with sautéed vegetables and a soy-seasoned stock until the noodles drink up every drop and turn light brown and glossy. This version is vegetarian, with fried tofu standing in for the usual chicken, shrimp and sausage, and vegetable stock in the pan. Squeeze calamansi (or lime) over each plate; the sharp citrus is what lifts it. Chef's tip: never cut the noodles before serving, for luck, and cook them in the stock rather than boiling them first.
In Hanoi, bún riêu is a mid-morning bowl bought from street sellers who set up on low plastic stools: a tangy red tomato broth with rice vermicelli and soft, floating curds that are normally made from pounded paddy crab. Vegetarian cooks and Buddhist temple kitchens make bún riêu chay instead, folding crumbled tofu, egg and chopped shiitake into the same loose, spongy curds, and seasoning the broth with fermented tofu rather than shrimp paste. It arrives with fried tofu, lime, chilli, shredded water spinach and perilla, so each spoonful is sour, savoury and fresh at once. Chef's tip: let the tomatoes fry in the annatto oil until they collapse into a jammy paste before any stock goes in; that is where the broth gets its colour and depth.
Ketoprak is a Jakarta cart dish, made to order: the seller grinds peanuts, garlic and chilli in a wide stone mortar, loosens them with water and sweet soy, then tips fried tofu, rice cake, rice vermicelli and bean sprouts on top. It is a cousin of gado-gado but simpler, with no egg-and-greens platter, and the raw-garlic sauce is the whole point. Eat it at lunch with plenty of crackers. Chef's tip: grind the garlic with the hot fried peanuts so the garlic mellows slightly; a raw paste made with cold nuts is harsh.
At Tết, the lunar new year, a plate of nem rán sits on almost every family feast tray in Hanoi and the north, and the same rolls turn up at weddings, death anniversaries and Sunday lunches all year. Northern cooks wrap a filling of minced pork, crab or prawn, glass noodles and wood ear mushroom in thin rice paper, which fries into a pale golden, bubbly shell quite different from wheat-wrapped spring rolls. Southerners call the same idea chả giò. Serve them cut in pieces with rice vermicelli, lettuce, herbs and a warm sweet-sour fish sauce. Chef's tip: fry them twice, first gently to cook the filling through, then briefly in hotter oil to crisp; they stay crunchy far longer.
In Cần Thơ and Sóc Trăng, lẩu mắm is the hotpot friends gather round at weekends, and it is at its best in the flood season, when wild greens, water lily stems and yellow sesbania flowers fill the markets. The broth starts from mắm, fish fermented with salt and roasted rice, which is simmered and strained, then softened with coconut water, lemongrass and a little sugar. Everyone cooks their own slices of pork belly, fish, prawns and squid at the table and eats them with rice noodles and whatever vegetables are piled beside the pot. Buy mắm cá linh or mắm cá sặc in jars from a Vietnamese grocer. Chef's tip: add the strained mắm gradually and taste as you go, because jars vary a lot in saltiness.
After the rice harvest in the Mekong Delta, farmers would catch snakehead from the flooded fields, skewer each fish on a stick, stand it in the ground and pile dry rice straw over it before setting it alight. When the straw burns away the blackened skin peels off to reveal steaming, sweet white flesh, which is rolled in rice paper with herbs, cucumber and rice noodles. Countryside restaurants around Cần Thơ still serve it this way. Snakehead is hard to buy outside Asia, so use sea bass, barramundi or tilapia and a barbecue or a hot oven. Chef's tip: push a long metal skewer from mouth to tail so you can turn the fish over without it breaking.
Kuching wakes up to laksa Sarawak, ordered at coffee shops before work and reaching its peak on a lazy Sunday morning. It looks nothing like curry laksa: the broth is a russet, gently creamy soup built on a complex paste of chillies, shallots, galangal, toasted sesame, peanuts and warm whole spices, cooked into a chicken and prawn-shell stock with tamarind and a little coconut milk. Thin rice vermicelli is topped with shredded chicken, whole prawns, ribbons of omelette and bean sprouts, and every bowl comes with lime and a dab of sambal belacan. The work is in the paste, which keeps well and makes several batches. Chef's tip: toast the spices, sesame seeds and peanuts separately in a dry pan before grinding; it gives the broth its deep, roasted aroma.
