Travel Reference
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a fan on a floor stand, I saw nothing that used electricity. Fires crackled and steam rose from
pots. The few machines in use—to knead dough and cut noodles—were manually operated.
It felt as though I'd just stepped into a medieval workshop. I'd made it to the secret epicenter
of cao lau noodle production.
Ta Ngoc Em, 54, the family patriarch, came out to greet us, brushing powder from his
hands.Thaohandedhimacigarette andlititforhim,asifthatwerepartofthedeal,andthey
exchanged a few words. Em, who had an Uncle Ho-style beard and blackened teeth, then
went back to stirring a giant cauldron of bubbling dough. The cigarette dangled from his lips
as he pounded a wooden stick into the dough with both hands.
“Youcanaskthemanythingyouwant,”Thaosaid,fanninghisrighthandtowardthesilent
workers.
I was suspicious. Why did they allow me to come here? I suppressed my skepticism. I
should take advantage of my good fortune, I thought, and I began peppering Em with ques-
tions about the process.
Here's what I learned: Em had already mixed ash into the water (he burns wood to create
ashonlyonceeveryfewmonths,hetoldme)andthensiftedoutthelargerbits.Theashhelps
give the noodle its chewiness. Em pours rice into that ashy water and boils it and pounds it
until he gets a huge cauldron of thick dough that he stirs and works for 45 minutes. Then
he puts the hunk of dough on a broad flat basket in a huge fire-heated metal steamer for 75
minutes. The ash, the local water, and the steam all contribute to the unique character of cao
lau noodles.
At the end of the steaming, Em and his brother carry the dough into the next room, where
several women put it through a giant crank-operated mixer, like a preindustrial restaurant-
sized KitchenAid. After the dough is kneaded, rolled flat, and brushed with peanut oil, Em's
sister-in-law puts the flat sheets through a manual pasta cutter and slices them into six-inch-
long threads. But that's not the end. The noodles go back into the steamer again for another
75 minutes. Finally, they're covered in banana leaves to cool off. Then they're done.
Em said his brother—that's the second branch of the family that Ms. Vy referred to—also
makes cao lau noodles but in much smaller quantities. Between the two sides of the family,
he said, they supply all the restaurants in Hoi An with the precious noodles. He said there's a
guy just outside of Hoi An who figured out how to make them but he doesn't produce much.
When I asked Em, the fourth generation of his family to make the noodles, where he
thought cao lau originally came from, he shrugged and said, “China?” That's how his fam-
ily became the sole producers of the noodles, he explained. Someone from China taught his
great-grandfather the recipe, and the family has kept it a closely guarded secret ever since.
How, I asked, do they transport the water from the Ba Le well in the center of town out
to this house? Em stood up, took the cigarette from his mouth, and leaned against a pole.
“We stopped doing that during my father's time,” he said. “We dug our own well here”—he
