Now that you have a sense of how to buy rice paper and how to wrap rice paper rolls to create lovely summer rolls and cha gio imperial rolls, you may wonder if you should tackle making rice paper from scratch. It seems like an easy task as just a few simple ingredients -- rice, water, and salt are involved. So why not? Well, you may want to think again. I surely did when I first observed an artisanal banh trang producer in a small hamlet (it wasn't even an omelet!) outside of Phan Thiet (a city north of Saigon) in Vietnam.
She had been practicing her craft for decades and sitting in the same position for hours, day in and day out hurt, she told me. But, her livelihood and family depended on these skills, which she had honed to a seemingly effortless precision. Such level of culinary craftsmanship comes only from having done something tens of thousands of times. (You have to cook 1,000 steaks to know how to do them just right!)
"Our rice paper is made by hand and are bigger than normal so we can sell them at a higher price than the factory-made ones," she told me. We ate some of the fresh, hot rice sheets and they were delectable. I could not bring any back to the U.S. with me and now regret it. Here is how this woman makes Vietnamese rice paper:
Rice grinding: Soaked raw rice is ground with water into slurry by this very simple machine. The trough at the bottom of the bucket is made of stone. The grinding mechanism, which the family had obtained just a few years before, spins very quickly, so much so that the walls are splattered by the rice and water mixture.









