Muot Cakes – A Friendly Food of Nghe An People

There are plenty of places you can have muot cakes on the streets in Nghe An, from early morning to late night. Some areas really got their names on this simple specialty, such as Gam market (Xuan Thanh, Yen Thanh), Lam Trung village (Hung Lam, Hung Nguyen), Dien Chau (Do Luong township), or Quy Chinh village near Sa Nam farm market (Nam Dan township). In such places, muot cakes are fresh made and sold all year round and the recipes have been handed from generations.

Muot cakes can look simple but the process actually requires lots of work, in which choosing the right rice is the most attentive step.

The main ingredient of muot cake is rice flour from Ve grains (a type of rice raised in Quynh Luu district) or Khang Dan rice (moderate texture, not too dried nor moist). The mixture of rice flour and tapioca flour in certain ratio would make the sheets thin yet elastic, tender yet limber.

Rice grain should be soaked in cold water from 9pm to 3am then waited for 2 more hours to get cleaned, squeezed, and grounded. They used to manually ground rice with stone mortar but recently, modern machines do help this step easier. Grounded rice would be added more cold water to get a perfect mixture.

The liquid dough would be poured and spread on a sheet of mesh fabric, which is strained on a steamer. The below stove runs by woods and they always maintain a big stable fire so that water in steamer can vaporized through the sheet and cook the flour.

Steaming time is usually from 1 – 2 minutes, depending on the thickness of flour sheets. Experienced cooks do not need a timer but they always know how much time should be enough for a sheet. They relentlessly pour liquid dough onto the fabric, cover, and roll cooked flour sheet. After rolled, they brush rolls with oiled scallions and line them up in a basket lined with fresh banana leaves.

They cut muot rolls into bite-size (around 3 – 4cm) and sprinkle them with oiled crispy onion. Nghe An people usually have muot cakes with different types of broths, such as stewed beef broth, duck or chicken broth, side dishes as pork paste, grilled pork, fried pork, boiled pork belly, and diverse vegetables (cucumbers, bean sprout, lettuce, and herbs). Indeed, they love to simply have it with shrimp paste or with sweet and sour fish sauce and fresh chili.

However, personally I prefer muot cakes with different types of broths. Rolls are soaked in hot and aromatic broth and had with duck, chicken, or fatty pork pluck.

To make a basket full of smoothly white muot cakes, the women in traditional villages really have to work hard, from choosing raw rice to firing steamer stoves. In average, a household consumes about 30 – 40kg rice grain a day to make muot cakes and this specialty has contributed a major part of their income. Life has changed but muot cakes have still maintained their role in daily meals, in friendly and even formal parties.

Nowadays, although muot cakes have changed a lot from traditional ones, such as rolling with grounded pork and mushroom or using grinders, they’re still an irreplaceable food of Nghe An people. Despite the hard work, there are passionate households that have been trying their best to save inherited family job and traditional tastes of Vietnamese culinary treasure.

By Linh Nguyen/ SGTT