Pancit Bihon (Stir-Fried Rice Vermicelli)

Variations

• Pancit sotanghon: the same method with mung bean glass noodles instead of rice. The fifth tip below is about that difference — one drinks the stock, the other only wears it.
• Pancit bihon guisado: the full name, from Spanish guisado, "sautéed". The name writes down the order of the dish: fry first, pour the stock in after.
• Bihon and canton together: many cooks mix in wheat egg noodles half and half. The two absorb at different rates, so allow a little more stock.
• Vegetarian: vegetable stock seasoned with soy and mushroom soaking liquid. With the fish sauce gone the stock has to be seasoned more decisively, not less.
• For a birthday: long noodles are eaten for long life, which is why the strands are not cut.

Tips

• There is no pot of noodle water here, and that changes every rule. Cooking noodles is written around a pan of salted water and records two dishes where that premise does not bind — pasta e fagioli, where "it goes in dry, into the bean broth", and soba, which takes its seasoning afterwards from the tsuyu. This is a third: the strand is softened in cold water and then put into fully seasoned stock that it drinks to the last spoonful. It is cooked by absorbing flavoured liquid rather than water, which is the method cooking rice is built on.
• Why it must be cold water is the thing pad thai does not say. That page only tells you to soak rather than boil "the noodles so they don't turn mushy when stir-fried; hit the pan while still firm." Here is the reason: cold water fills the strand without gelatinising its starch, so the noodle arrives at the wok full of water and still uncooked, and the cooking happens inside the stock. Boil it first and it turns up already full of plain water, with the sauce left sitting on the outside.
• So the stock has to be seasoned before it is poured. The same guide draws that conclusion for pasta e fagioli — "there is no later chance to season the noodle", so the liquid must be right before the noodle meets it, and "Salt added afterwards only makes the broth salty and leaves the pasta blank." It holds here for a different reason: there the dry pasta cooks in the broth, here the soaked noodle drinks it.
• The quantity of stock is the recipe. 500ml to 250g of noodle is the ratio; more and it is a noodle soup, less and the strands dry out and break. The surer test is step six — drag the tongs across the base of the wok and nothing should pool behind them.
• Rice vermicelli is the opposite of a glass noodle. Yam wun sen states the glass noodle's weakness in one line: "A glass noodle has nothing on its surface to hold sauce, so a diluted dressing is simply a bland dish." Rice vermicelli is porous and takes liquid into itself, so a thin seasoned stock is a requirement here rather than a fault. It is also why japchae never puts its noodles in broth and seasons them in oil instead.
• Why the meat and vegetables come out and go back in. Once the stock is in the pan, everything in the wok runs on the noodle's clock. Six to eight minutes of it turns the cabbage limp and the prawns rubbery. Taking them out is not convenience; it is how two different cooking times are kept apart in one pan.
• Calamansi at the table, not in the pan. Acid works against the salt of the soy and fish sauce (balancing flavour), and added during the frying it simply boils off, leaving the dish flat. Squeezed by each person it lets them set their own balance.