Chronicles of Noodlemaking, Week 7: Failure!!!

It had to happen sometime. And actually, as failures go, this was fairly unsuccessful, in that it wasn't all that bad. For one thing, I made the failed noodles the same day that I pulled a 16-hour kitchen marathon, so that I was too tired to care whether they tasted good or not, I was just happy to stop making food. And for another reason, they didn't qualify as a kitchen disaster. Disasters, like my attempts to make dosas and injera, have to make a horrible mess that takes hours to clean up, or at least ruins some piece of kitchen equipment. Or at a minimum, they have to use up ingredients too costly to replace. All that happened here was, I made the noodles, and they didn't taste good. Moving on!

The noodle in question was the Hand-Rolled Rice Noodle, and I actually really enjoyed making them. I kneaded together the dough of rice flour, salt and water, before starting the cake layers for my mother's fancy birthday cake. The blob of dough sat resting while I worked my pastry wiles, then I did the shaping and cooking all in the time that the egg whites and sugar syrup for the buttercream were being combined and cooled in the stand mixer. So, another quick and easy recipe.

They were fun to shape, too. With slightly oiled hands, I pinched off pieces of dough, rolled them between my hands into a ball, and then into a tapered cylinder, fat at the centre in the space between my palms and thinner, pointed at the edges. This technique also felt pleasantly intuitive, except that despite repeatedly re-oiling my hands, the dough kept unpleasantly sticking, and didn't seem to be of the right texture. Sure enough, when it came to the boil, I just couldn't cook them to a pleasant texture. It's possible I missed the crucial window, but I think they segued gracelessly from undercooked to overcooked and mushy, with nothing of the spring and bite you'd expect from a rice noodle.

I had made a quick salsa to go with them, Market Stall Fresh Tomato Salsa also from Beyond the Great Wall, which was flavoured with sesame oil and chives and was really delicious. So I mixed my mushy sad little blobs of noodle with the salsa in a bowl and tried to eat them. The flavour wasn't bad, but I had this unpleasant insecurity about whether or not I was eating raw rice somehow, so I eventually gave up. After sampling syrup, curd, ganache, cake batter, buttercream, and meringues all day, it's not like there was much room left for real food anyway.

I have two theories about the failure. One is that right from the get-go I knew the dough was too wet. The instructions explain that it will be stiff and hard to work and mine wasn't - maybe I put too much water in, and if I'd kneaded in more flour as I thought of doing initially, it might all have been ok. The other problem is that I was using schmancy organic brown rice flour from the US rather than standard white rice flour. The former was probably long or medium grain instead of a stickier shorter grain Asian rice, so maybe it was just not great for the recipe. I've now acquired some plain rice flour and I'll be sure to try again...

Planting out the seedlings

I don't know what it's like all over Indonesia, but the fertile equatorial islands of Java and Bali not only host three full harvests a year, but there is no season to the cycle (though rice is best planted in the wet season, and crop rotation is often practiced in the dry season - maybe sweet potato will be grown then, or soy).

So it was that along one small country road in one day, I was able to see all the steps of the cycle - harvest; the mature grains ripening; tall green shoots with no grain yet; delicate small shoots; the planting out of the new seedlings; a bed holding the seedlings in their first days; and ploughing the muddy fields.

It's hard work planting out the new seedlings, which are tied in little bundles and flung into the drowned paddies, then separated and planted painstakingly by hand. It's work mostly done by women, who in old age are often permanently bent, with rounded spines. These women were working cheerfully and energetically in the heat of the day just outside of Yogyakarta in Central Java, stopping to wave and smile as I called out Terima kasih! (Thank you).

There are seasons to other things though, and seasonal beauties just now are avocados, rambutan, salak, sirsak (soursop), and durian. It would be fun to come back when the cloves ripen on the trees - but whatever time of year it's incredibly green here. And full of friendly smiles.

Sticky rice mountain

Winter and the dry season and the dead rice in the mountaintop fields.

Luang Prabang province, Laos.

Tremulous green

Tender young shoots of rice in the mountains, Luang Prabang province, Laos.

Khao niaow

Sticky rice steams over a charcoal fire in a clay pot. Outside a cafe along the Nam Khan river, Luang Prabang.

Rice fields of Bali

Trappings of a culinary culture

Photo: Rice paper wrappers on a bed of herbs, My Tho, Vietnam.

Once I was sitting around with some friends and we were joking about our cultural heritages. Mostly my French-Jewish friend and I were commiserating with each other that our ethnicities predisposed us to depression. To lighten the mood, our Vietnamese friend piped up with: "You can tell I'm Vietnamese because I like to wrap things in lettuce and dip them in sauce!"

I'm not sure what, if anything, this says about "the Vietnamese psyche", but these delicious roll-your-own options are certainly characteristic of the cuisine. Everywhere we went in southern Vietnam, anyhow, every meal was accompanied by a vast and generous pile of foliage, with just the right combination of herbs and greens for each dish.

Besides lettuce and mustard greens, we often were given these transparent rice wrappers to contain various foods. So thin and delicate they don't need to be dampened, the papers held together noodles, meats, herbs, and sauce without spilling, yet melted into the mouth. Ngon (delicious)!

Ricefields of Bali

Rice cultivation in the town of Ubud (Pengosekan). I did yoga at a studio that overlooked these fields.

Congee

More highlights of the breakfast buffet in Siem Reap.

Omu raisu

Omuraisu, or omelet rice, from a mall food court in Kagoshima City, where I ate lunch with what appeared to be the entire teenage population.

Omuraisu is total comfort food, fried rice with a thin egg omelet draped overtop. It's often served with curry, demiglace, or ketchup, but this version unusually has the okonomi toppings of brown sauce, mayo, bonito flakes and shreds of red pickled ginger.

Beside the "white diaspora", the other tourist group catered to in Bali is Japanese, and I was amused to see a sign outside a restaurant advertising "omu nasi"!

Ine

On the farm in Fukushima.

Ine, Kome, Gohan

Rice, of course, is the staple food of Japan and as such has great cultural importance. So much so, that there are different words for it in its various stages. I went north to Fukushima prefecture to stay on an organic rice farm and among many amazing experiences, learned a few new words.

Ine is the rice plant. I arrived in the last days of the rice harvest on the farm, so I was able to work with bundles of ine that had already been cut. The host farmer built a frame of wood and bamboo and then we twisted the rice stalks and hung them over it to cure for a few weeks before they can be threshed. I went crazy taking photos of the gorgeous green and gold bundles! The wild pigs who come out at night also go crazy for the ine, so one of my tasks was to help raise the electrified fence to preserve the carefully placed rice stalks.

Kome is the uncooked rice grain. While it was too early to sample this year's crop, there were huge bags of the farm's rice still remaining from last year. The small farm, which is totally organic and largely tended by one person, with sporadic volunteer labour coming and going (much of it, like me, totally unskilled), produces about 1200kg of rice per year. Most of the farmers in the area have their own threshing machines, but they tend to store the grains whole (as brown rice). Vending machines are of course practically a symbol of Japan in their omnipresence, but rice-producing areas have their own particular kind. There are apparently small machines dotted over the country roads that, for a 100 yen coin, will polish a bag of rice from brown to white! Sadly I didn't actually get to do this myself as I really loved the idea of it.

Gohan is the word for the cooked rice, as well as basically meaning meal or food, as it does in many Asian languages. And we ate gohan every day, sometimes three times a day.

Coming as I do from Canada, I've never before been able to eat rice where it was grown. Here, I could look out the kitchen windows and see the fields that it came from. I can't possibly express what it was like to eat this rice. I could have happily eaten it on its own with no seasoning at all, and needed no more to my meal. It was so full of flavour, so bright and shiny, each grain soft and sticky yet retaining a subtle chewiness, a feeling of being alive. We ate it polished white, we ate it brown, we ate it cooked with a few grains of black rice, so that there was a scattered purplish colouring through it. We ate it in the mornings with miso soup, and at lunch patted into little onigiri and flavoured with tsukemono (pickled vegetables).

Rice.