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A specialty noodle dish in Hoi An can be made only with water from a thousand-year-old local well. Hoi An on the central coast combines the old and the new in a way that draws tourists from far and wide. Not so famous are the town’s homegrown culinary delights, above all cao lau.

The people of Hoi An have been eating cao lau for a long time, yet the delectable concoction of noodles, pork, shrimp and greens is only starting to get known beyond the town’s perimeter. The recipe for the perfect cao lau is not simple, and the selection of ingredients must be done with utmost care.

It’s vital that the rice noodles be made from exactly the right grain, one that is neither freshly harvested nor too aged in order that the noodles won’t be too dry or too sticky. The preparation of cao lau starts out with soaking the rice in a solution of lye, which is made from the ashes of burnt trees. Different trees yield different types of lye. For the noodles in cao lau, the lye comes from the ashes of trees grown on nearby Cham Island.

After a good soaking, the rice is mashed into a thick paste. The water used to mash the rice must be from Ba Le, a well dug by the Cham people a thousand years ago, as it’s cool, fresh and not contaminated with alum. The paste then goes into cotton bags to drain the excess water. When this is done, the resulting dough is kneaded into a thin sheet and briefly steamed, cut into strings and steamed again until thoroughly cooked.

The noodles, which should have a yellowish tinge from the lye, can be put into a bowl with some artfully arranged scalded bean sprouts and slices of char siu (barbecued pork) and some fried-shallot oil sprinkled on top. A bowl of chicken soup always accompanies cao lau and can be spooned into the mouth separately, or the two bowls can be turned into one at the table. It’s the specially prepared noodles that produce the sweet, peppery, bitter, acrid and sour taste that goes so well with fresh vegetables, fish sauce, soy sauce and small pieces of fat that make cao lau melt in the mouth.

Even better is to add pieces of noodles that have been cut up, dried and deep-fried to resemble a mini pancake. Quite a few restaurants outside Hoi An have started to list cao lau on the menu, invariably in tourist haunts like nearby Hue and Da Nang, and down south in Ho Chi Minh City. In spite of the great distance, these restaurateurs make sure to get their cao lau ingredients from Hoi An so that their versions are authentic and have the full flavor.

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