Noodling on Noodles

[By Kai]

Noodles are a big (and my favorite) part of Thai cuisine. But how are they made? We went to a noodle factory in Mae Saliang, and, well, here's how.

It all starts with the rice. Huge baskets of it. Farmers from various villages collect it and store it under their houses in these:

It's all brown rice, though, and noodles are made with white rice, so they have to manually remove the husks to get at the pure white rice inside. They do that with machines like this:

Stepping on the lever lifts the pounding log up, and stepping off drops it, sending it falling down on the bucket of rice below. The constant pounding smashes the rice out of the husks relatively quickly, but they still have to spend about an hour stepping on and off of the machine.

Once the rice is separated, they have to get the husks out. They do this using an awesome technique where they put the rice in a flat basket and throw it in the air repeatedly. The heavier rice flies higher than the light husks, and the wind created by the rice landing pushes the husks out of the basket. It looks a little like this:

Even then, they have to go through another step and manually pick the larger husks out of the basket. Once that's finally done, though, the rice is ready to be made into noodles. The rice is first made into a paste by mysterious methods that I have no knowledge of. The paste is then put in metal canister at the noodle factory.

They heat a huge pot of water up until it boils, using sawdust as their fuel, because it's much cheaper than wood.

Not that the price really matters, though, because they have such a ridiculous stockpile of sawdust I can't imagine they'll ever run out.

Next, they use a device a little like a shower handle to suck up the rice paste and spray it into the pot of water. The rice solidifies as soon as it hits the boiling water, turning into noodles.

They mix the noodles a bit, then package them and move to another batch. They take a handful of noodle and wrap it into a plastic bag. Six of these bags together make a larger bag.

Next, they sell the bags of noodles to restaurants, who turn them into things like this:

(In case you're wondering, that's blood soup. Apparently blood solidifies and turns into a brown blob when you fry it, and is eaten in a noodle soup. Don't ask me.)


All that work for a bowl of noodles...