Viet World Kitchen

Rice Paper Gadget Wars: Mr. Spring Roll vs. New Star International

Vietnamese business people can be hyper-entrepreneurial and competitive. When an idea succeeds, copycats and rivals inevitably appear – springing up practically overnight like mushrooms.

That, my friends, is happening with the plastic Vietnamese rice paper dipping bowl that I recently wrote about. Vinh, Mr. Spring Roll’s maker, commented in the post and thanked everyone for supporting his product. He also apologized for the hiccups in distribution. He was working out of his apartment!

Not long after that post, a Viet chef friend, Terrence Khuu, pointed me to a rival product, New Star International, which had a fledgling Facebook page but no website. (The first 100 people to like their page get a chance to win a dipping bowl.)

New Star’s to nhung banh trang (bowl for dipping rice paper) comes in three colors and is fashioned from “high-quality PVC” (PVC is a type of plastic that I typically associate with plumbing pipes but it has many industrial uses). Terrence’s friend is distributing New Star International and sent a lime green one for me to test drive. The other options include blue and clear.

My first thought was, “Mr. Spring Roll works fine. Who needs another one of these?” New Star thinks that its rice paper water bowl beats out Mr. Spring Roll. This week, I compared the two on these points:

Mama Says: For Neat Spring Rolls, Use Chopsticks (video)

Ten years ago I launched Viet World Kitchen. I wanted to create a hub for information on Vietnamese food, cooking and culture. There wasn’t much out there so I spent weeks working in Dreamweaver to build the site. Each page was constructed with very little automation, as is the case nowadays with platforms like Typepad and Wordpress.

I toiled without knowing about search engine optimization. I just focused on publishing information that may be of use to people. If someone liked it, they would email me and I would post their comment.

One of the Viet World Kitchen pages I made was called “Mama Says,” a repository for kitchen tips that were taught to us by someone older. Mine were primarily from my mother so I created a cute icon dedicated to her.

I posted Mom’s culinary tidbits and she liked it. When I moved VWK over to a blog platform, I moved “Mama Says” onto a post called “Tips for Cooking Vietnamese Food.”

New Rice Paper Gadget: Mr. Spring Roll

When I serve a “roll your own” rice paper meal, one of the biggest pains in the butt is the water bowl used for softening the papers. This type of semi-DIY meal involves a lot of stuff on the table -- platters of  lettuce, fresh herb sprigs, bun rice noodles, grilled meats, seafood, or tofu. Little bowls of dipping sauce too. The requisite large vessels of warm or hot water used for softening the banh trang rice paper take up a lot of prime real estate. They have to be wide enough to make dipping easy. Plus, if the water cools too much, you have to replenish it in the middle of the meal.

Enter Mr. Spring Roll, a new gadget from Vietnam. I have Tuyet Nguyen to thank for the tip. She wrote me about it, asking if I’d seen or used it. No I had not but I wasn’t looking for Mr. Spring Roll either. Then I spied it at one of my favorite Viet markets in San Jose, Thien Thanh. It sold for about $7 and the cashier said that it was a new and popular item.

I was skeptical at first because it seemed flimsy. The packaging and plastic didn’t instill confidence. The fact that the Vietnamese “To Nhung Banh Trang” (bowl for dipping rice paper) looms largest means that it’s geared for the solid Vietnamese market, not for outsiders.  The distributor’s name is Evershing Trading Incorporated (maybe that’s suppose to be Everything Trading Inc.?) However, Mr. Spring Roll does have a website  and Facebook page – he’s marketing savvy.

How Vietnamese Rice Paper is Made

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.

  

How to Wrap Rice Paper Rolls

Two methods for wrapping rice paper rolls.
(Top) Closed-end rice paper rolls. (Bottom) Opened-end rice paper roll.

Rarely does a week go by when I don't use rice paper. Called bánh tráng, rice paper is among the main staples in the Vietnamese kitchen. Think of all the goi cuon rice paper rolls (a.k.a, summer rolls and salad rolls) and the sinfully delicious fried imperial rolls called cha gio that you've eaten. They're encased in translucent rice paper. If you're new to Vietnamese food, chances are that someone else pre-rolled the rice paper rolls for you. Ever thought of rolling your own? 

If you’ve never wrapped with Vietnamese rice paper, don’t be daunted. Wrapping rice paper rolls is like making a burrito and you don’t have to be perfect. Buy some good rice paper (see rice paper buying tips for guidance) and then review these helpful hints before diving in:

Have water handy. To make rice paper pliable and usable, just use water. I typically fill a wide shallow bowl partway with water; a baking dish may be substituted. The water temperature depends on the type of rice paper. In general, thinner rice paper requires cooler water. When making hand rolls at the table, set out one or two communal dipping bowls for guests. If the papers require hot water, consider using a portable electric burner. Warm it up in advance and boil the water on the stove first. Then pour the hot water into a wide shallow pan and set it on the electric burner.