I have a bunch of rice papers in my food stock for long time. Actually that’s a memory of previous company I belonged. A Vietnamese coworker showed me foods uses rice paper.
Then I like that and thought of trying by myself, however, did not find any good cooking with those. Now it will be wasted after months.
Staying home gave me a chance to think that again. So I tried to make a famous Vietnamese noodle, Pho from these rice papers.
Pho is a dish made from beef and rice noodle. Generally it uses particular noodle, however, I exchanged that into rice papers.
Rice papers are so thin than noodle, so I thought of sticking ones to make thickness. Water make its surface glue-like, I knew, tried some times by changing amount and temperatures.
Then I got an answer, brushing hot water make enough sticky. After that, I cut the paper into about one centimeters by scissors.
The next process is making soup. Pho based on chicken soup and taste of beef. I boiled water in pan and put chicken soup powder, first. At that time, I unconsciously thought that Vietnamese foods use fish sauce called Nuoc Mam.
It pointed to me that fish flavor would work well. So I put Japanese fish seasoning, Katsuo-Bushi. And beef was added into the pan. After boiling enough, I got rid of scum and leftover of Katsuo-Bushi roughly.
Some vegetable are needed, too. Fortunately a salad of cabbage, onion, and cucumber was in fridge. I put them into the pan and boiled more. Well, the pan looked like Pho I remembered.
I boiled water in other pan and put rice papers into it. Too much boiling made it melted, but with too short, paper was still hard…after trying a few times, found about forty seconds or so make enough, however, minutes after taking from the pan, noodles turned sticky each other.
So I poured the soup into a bowl, first, and moved noodle into it to keep the figure. Well, the looking was similar to real Pho.
As a result, this pseudo Pho was delicious, hooray! This soup had good tastes of chicken, beef, and fish at once. The noodle from rice papers was thin than real Pho, however, enough chewy. Katsuo-Bushi surely made an effect on the flavor like real one.
Wife like this and asked me to make again. This is a fake, but good dish to us. We can buy rice paper easily in grocery store, and choose thickness of noodle by gluing papers as we want. Not bad.
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