Cao lầu

Courtesy of Jeannette Monteiro

In the early hours before Hội An awakens, a dim noodle workshop pulses with quiet and tireless labour. Inside, the air is thick with hot smoke from wood-fired steamers. Layers of soot cling to moisture-stained walls, marked by decades of steam. It is 4:30am, yet four family members have been working since 11:00pm, moving with alert precision while the city rests. 

Their labour is steady and unrelenting. The dense, boiling mixture of ground rice and nước tro (lye water) is stirred evenly and pounded into dough. Slabs are steamed over fire, cooled, kneaded, rolled out by hand, cut into noodles, and arranged on bamboo baskets lined with banana leaf for a second steaming; a sequence that runs like clockwork. By 6:00am, trays of fresh noodles must reach breakfast stalls before the streets fill with hungry crowds. Movements are synchronised and fastidious, a choreography rehearsed over generations. At seventy-two, patriarch Mr. Em has carried out this ritual 364 days a year since age twelve. He is the fourth generation to tend the craft of hand-making Hội An’s cao lầu noodles. 

Mo noodles are the heart of Hội An, kept alive by the town’s natural resources. Dough is made with water from local wells, rich in alum and calcium, blended with the ash of native Melaleuca cajuputi trees. These elements give the noodles their smoky, earthy flavour, yellow hue, and distinctive chew. In their true form, cao lầu noodles cannot be replicated outside of Hội An. 

The noodles themselves bear marks of the careful, hand-made process; each strand varying in length and thickness, some tinted with a soft green from being steamed over banana leaves. 

But in the shadows of the noodle workshop lingers a quiet unease, a weight that sits on Mr. Em’s hunched shoulders. His family is one of the last to make cao lầu noodles this way, the next generation is unlikely to continue. The greater prospects of Hoi An’s modern economy pull young Vietnamese away from the sleepless, backbreaking work of a cao lầu maker. Even once-loyal vendors and restaurants now choose cheaper factory-made noodles: perfectly uniform, coloured with artificial dyes, and bulked with tapioca starch. To those who grew up on real cao lầu, the imposters are obvious. But for passing tourists, these differences slip by unnoticed. And with factory production that can be done anywhere, there is a future where cao lầu is severed from the wells, trees, and workshops that once bound it to Hội An.  

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