Rice noodle - Bún

To be honest, I don't know how many kind of bún (white rice noodles) we have: big, small, straight, curving (bánh hỏi) ... and it would be more difficult to count how many dishes we have with this "bún"!

Rice noodle without soup: with pork and onion (bún thịt heo xào)

Rice noodle with soup: canh bún, similar to bún riêu but served with cooked water spinach

This white & made from rice noodles can be translated as rice vermicelli, but I keep call it in this blog as "bún". 
Bún can go with soup and without it!  


With soup: we have famous bún bò Huế (with pork in Hue style), popular for Vietnamese in the South - bún riêu (with crab, what I had today with friend), bún mắm (quite special with strong flavor soup), bún măng vịt (with duck and bamboo), bún mộc from Hà Nội (is it?), bún thang... and many many more, each province probably has different and special for that area dish...


Without soup we have bún chả giò ( with spring rolls), bún thịt nướng (with grilled pork), bún nem nướng (i didn't eat for very long!), bún chả Hà Nội (dish from Hanoi!), bún thịt xào (with stirred meat: beef or pork!)...

Huge basket of bún 

Soup for bún riêu, dark cube is blood, yellow cube is fried tofu!

Ok, let's try the first "bún"! Few days left to our Lunar New Year, I have a friend from Hanoi, and he is going back home tomorrow, so we decide to try "bún riêu" at Võ Văn Tần place, I knew this place few years ago and quite like it!  Sharing the same soup for bún riêu we can have another dish called "canh bún" (99% similar to bún riêu, but the noodle itself is bigger and we eat with cooked water spinach).

Shrimp paste, only for Andrew Zimmem from Bizarre Foods! 

When I was kid , bún riêu was quite simple, it have been cooked mostly with dried shrimp (tôm khô), tofu and a lots of tomatoes...and without "riêu" (crab), but today its taste much richer: with crab, snails, tofu, blood cake (blood?) chả (a kind of our Vietnamese pork sausage...), but the most important ingredient  to make the taste "unforgotten" is shrimp paste (mắm tôm)!

This paste could be big problem for many Westerners but surely no problem at all for Andrew Zimmem from Bizarre Foods! The flavor is very very strong even for Vietnamese, if just a little little drop of this paste on your shirt, better go back home, lock yourself in the bathroom for at least 20' hot shower, and your shirt straight away to washing machine! 

Bún riêu is cheap, it costs only a bit more than 1 USD/ bowl, and due to its flavor, we only have for lunch, no way for breakfast (if you don't have tooth brush with you in the office!), and as a favorite dish for many families, from time to time we prepare at home for week-end with different variations!