The art of noodles: Seattle companies weave strands of perfection for their discriminating customers

Making the perfect noodle is an art for John Cao, whose fresh rice noodles must be thick but not too thick, and chewy but not too chewy, to satisfy some of the most demanding noodle eaters this side of Hong Kong.

Cao owns King's Oriental Food, one of two companies in Seattle making the silky smooth noodles essential to authentic Chinese and Southeast Asian dishes.

If his noodles are too thick, they don't appeal to Vietnamese customers, who like a gossamer-thin noodle for rolling and dunking into fish sauce, or serving in a salad.

If his noodles are too thin, they fall apart when stir-fried, upsetting Chinese customers, who prefer a thicker, slightly chewy noodle.

"So I need to compromise, make something in between," the easygoing, 40-year-old American of Chinese-Vietnamese descent said with a smile and shrug.

Having any fresh noodles at all, thick or thin, in local stores is a luxury of living in a community with an Asian population large enough to support a noodle factory.

Asian noodles come in a bewildering variety of sizes and shapes, from delicate bundles of bean threads to dense buckwheat soba from Japan, but fresh rice noodles are something altogether different. Like a baguette or a ripe cherry, they age poorly and freezing damages their magical texture.

In Seattle, the snowy-white noodles retailing for $1 to $2 a pound are sold at markets in the International District and Uwajimaya stores.

The noodles come in wide sheets folded into pillowy bundles about 8 inches wide. Some are pre-cut like fettuccine for soups, and others are flavored.

For stir-frying, cooks slice the wide sheets into strips about 2 inches wide.

Whole sheets may be used like tortillas to wrap around shrimp or meat to make a steamed snack. They also can be rolled and sliced into bite-size pieces. These can be fried or steamed and eaten cold, after being dunked into fish sauce.

The noodles are inexpensive and easy to cook once you get the hang of separating the individual sheets.

They also absorb sauce like a dream, and give stir-fries and soups heft without heaviness.

"They're kind of addicting once you get to eat them," said Rick Yoder, owner of Wild Ginger restaurant in downtown Seattle.

Fresh rice noodles are made from powdered rice and water mixed into a milky batter and cooked on elaborate machines that require as much attention as a steam locomotive.

At Cao's factory, the noodle machine resembles an Edwardian Rolls Royce, with a long boxy hood in which the noodles are cooked with steam.

The machine is set to produce a noodle slightly thicker than the blade of a table knife.

Tending the steaming, purring machine is Cao's uncle, Dung Tao, a born mechanic who has run noodle machinery for more than 20 years.

Dung Tao used to run noodle machines at the Cao family factory in Saigon, which was seized by the Communists in 1975.

Three decades earlier, the family had fled Communists in its native China and rebuilt its business in Vietnam.

After leaving Vietnam, the family eventually settled in Colorado and opened a series of restaurants, including a pan-Asian place like Wild Ginger.

For Cao, who studied engineering at Oklahoma State University, the restaurants were a means to an end: They created capital needed to restart the manufacturing business lost in Saigon. This time the family started in Seattle, opening King's Oriental Foods near the Goodwill store in 1994.

"We had that dream since we came to the U.S., that we wanted to do a manufacturing business that we have experience in," he said. "We have been dreaming about this for a long time."

They chose Seattle because it had only one competitor, the Tsue Chong noodle company on South Weller Street, and a growing Asian population. For Tsue Chong, rice noodles are part of a larger business making wheat noodles, fortune cookies and other Asian food products.

King's Oriental Food makes only fresh rice noodles, although it also mixes custom batches of soy sauce and sells restaurant supplies. Noodles are its flagship, however, and the main reason its five trucks make daily deliveries as far as Portland.

Although more Asians are settling in Seattle, Cao said business is growing mostly because of the proliferation of restaurants serving noodles to non-Asians.

Rice noodles and other foods from Thailand and Vietnam are becoming so common they have gone from obscure ethnic foods to part of a widespread international cuisine, said Charles Keyes, a University of Washington professor of anthropology and international studies and director of the Northwest Regional Consortium for Southeast Asian Studies.

Keyes said noodles are primarily a lunch or breakfast meal in Southeast Asia, generally eaten at restaurants and food stands, while rice is more often served with dinner.

At Tup Tim Thai restaurant on Lower Queen Anne, owner Terry Pramoulmetar said fresh rice noodles now account for 25 percent of his business.

Most commonly the noodles are stir-fried with meat, vegetables and sauce or gravy.

Cao also makes a version flavored with dried shrimp and scallions for Vietnamese customers. The noodles come rolled into cigarlike cylinders, which are sliced into small mouthfuls and eaten with fish sauce or as part of a salad with lettuce and julienned carrots.

As with any persishable product, health experts recommend keeping fresh noodles refrigerated. But it can be intimidating to cook refrigerated fresh rice noodles because they may stick together and be hard to handle.

Before refrigerating the noodles, Cao suggests separating and slicing them first.

They also come apart in hot oil, so don't be overly concerned if you can't separate every layer.

Yoder suggests putting a little oil in a pan with the noodles and shaking the pan to coat and loosen the noodles, sprinkling on sauces so they are distributed evenly and aren't absorbed by a single noodle.

Scraps left over when separating the sheets can be thrown into a stir fry or soups.

Some cooks first rinse the noodles by placing them in a colander and pouring over boiling water, or by soaking them in a bowl of warm water. This removes traces of vegetable oil they are coated with and helps separate the layers.

At Asian restaurants around Seattle, where fresh rice noodles have become a mainstay, it's not always clear which noodles are being served. Thai menus often call them "wide rice noodles," and serve them in stir-fries such as rard nah or phad see iew.

On Chinese menus the noodles are usually called fun, and a classic dish fries them in a satiny sauce with meat and vegetables.

At Chinese dim sum restaurants, one of the tea snacks served by waiters wheeling steam carts around the room are noodle rolls. Individual sheets of fresh rice noodles are rolled, burrito-style, around shrimp or spiced beef or pork and steamed, then drizzled with soy sauce.

Brier Dudley can be reached at bdudley@seattletimes.com.