In My Tho, a town on the Mekong Delta, we visited a rice noodle factory making bun noodles. We were so impressed here - not just because of the noodles but also because it was one of the most beautiful examples of permaculture I have ever seen.

The bun noodles are made by grinding soaked rice in the same way as you do for rice paper. The ‘milk’ that is captured is transferred into pillow cases then left to sit for about a day, allowing the water to seep out. What is left behind is essentially one great big grain of rice. This is then boiled which turns the crumbly and grainy rice into a starchy wobbly rice cake. In Chinese/Malay food this cake is chopped and used in many different dishes including one of our favourites, char koay kak, but to finish the noodles the cake is shaped into a round pipe then pressed through what looks like a play dough spaghetti maker. Made from an old bench drill, the cake is forced through little holes into a pot of boiling water. The noodles, which are about 20 metres long, are cooked for about 2 minutes then washed in four different baths to ensure all the starch is rinsed off. Each of these batches of noodles, weighing about 5kg, is allowed to dry until slightly sticky then sold in bundles wrapped in banana leaves. Watching this family produce the 300 – 400 kilos they make each day was inspirational. We were told that 1kg of rice yields about 3kg of noodles.

More impressive than watching the noodles being made was how the farm reused every little bit of spare energy. The boiler used to cook the noodles is fired with the outer husks from the rice. When these husks have burned the ash is cooled and collected for use as pot ash on the patty fields. Alongside the noodle factory the family farms pigs. The pigs eat off-cuts from the rice cakes and the broken noodles. They also drink the water the noodles were cooked in and eat the scraps from a local noodle restaurant. All these noodles make lots of poo which is hosed through a series of small channels into a sealed well where it ferments and produces ethanol. A plastic pipe running from the well into the kitchens of four homes supplies them with constant free gas for cooking – usually noodles! It was permaculture not for the purpose of saving the world but just because that is what you do. I love it.

The rice patties painted across the entire Vietnamese landscape grow another staple which is consumed daily. Morning Glory, rau moung (Vietnamese) or kangkong manis (Malay) is often called water spinach and can be found in every restaurant in Vietnam. Similar to watercress except with large green leaves, the flavour is slightly sweet and peppery and is usually stir fried with garlic and oyster sauce, although morning glory lends itself to many other dishes and is used in many salads and soups. It goes beautifully with rice!

Part III: Herbs, The Son

Herbs were described to us on two different occasions that showed just how important they are in Vietnamese food. Firstly it was Ms Vy in Hoi An who said “Without them it is not a meal”. And secondly it was one of our tour guides who talked about one role of herbs so beautifully. “Mother nature is very fair” he said, describing the relationship between the role herbs play at masking the flavour of meat that is slightly old while they grow so well in the heat of tropics, where meat is more likely to spoil.

In no way though are herbs used solely to mask bad flavours. The wonderfully colourful and floral aromatics of herbs are often used alone to create some of the most simply brilliant dishes. Herbs are more prolific in the south but all across Vietnam the dishes are either laden with fresh aromatic herbs or there will be a plate of different types of basil or mint sitting on the table to be eaten with every meal. They add both visual excitement and provide so many of the different flavours and textures that are found in Vietnamese cuisine.

One of the most unexpected surprises along the way was finding a lot of dill being used in Northern Vietnamese cuisine. One very famous dish using a lot of dill was cha ca Hanoi - baked fish Hanoi-style. Prepared at Cha ca La Vong restaurant in Hanoi for over 200 years, a small fry pan with marinated fish cooking in butter is sitting on a charcoal burner that is delivered to the table with a plate of fresh dill. So much dill is added the dish should be called baked dill. At all of the other places we ate in Hanoi at least one dish in every meal contained dill. Two of the best were baked tomatoes filled with fish and dill, and rice noodles with dill, beef and chilli.

One different use of herbs we saw was not for eating but rather for cleaning your hands. A Vietnamese delicacy is eggs with fully formed ducks or chickens inside but they leave your hands smelling a bit, so you rub Vietnamese mint between your fingers to take the smell away.

The abundance of herbs across the whole country is testament to just how well they grow here. Every morning tons and tons of coriander, shisho, peppermint, rice patty, Vietnamese mint and basil are sold at markets by the shopping bag. I was amazed watching the motorbikes arrive every morning to the restaurants to deliver bags and bags of herbs that would cost hundreds of dollars to buy in Australia.

If rice has the place of god in Vietnamese food then herbs are the trilogical equivalent of Jesus. The only question then is what left? (pun intended).

Part IV: Fish Sauce, the Holy Spirit

Thinking of rice, herbs and fish sauce as the holy trinity of Vietnamese food makes so much sense. Rice is undoubtedly god, no argument. The herbs, well just like Jesus, God needs him to zest things up; keep the people interested; no one wants to eat a plain bowl of rice. But to think of fish sauce as the Holy Spirit is so accurate because this honestly portrays what nouc mam is. It is the spirit of the flavour of Vietnamese food.

In the same way I am in awe of the genius which first turned rice into noodles, I stand cowardly before the first person who had the courage to drink the liquid flowing from the bottom of a barrel in which fish had been fermenting for about a year. Not much has changed since then either. Fish sauce is made by adding about 3 tonnes of salt to 7 tonnes of small fish in massive wooden barrels, weighing it down then leaving it to sit for about a year. A tap on the bottom is then turned on and the clear liquid gently flows out.

As well as being used during the cooking process nuoc mam is found on the table in every restaurant in Vietnam to be added like we use salt. Like any of the elements which form the harmony though, fish sauce works best when complimented with another. My favourite example of this is when the saltiness of nuoc mam is balanced with a squeeze of fresh lime juice on top of a great big bowl of pho.

Phu Quoc, a small island in the Gulf of Thailand is the home of nuoc mam, but if you’re flying out of there don’t try and take it on the plane. Vietnam airlines have banned fish sauce because it smells too much. If your thinking it might be possible to smuggle some out in your checked bags think again. I felt a bit like Schapelle Corby when I had to empty the contents of my bag because x-rays showed up a good 6 litres.

We weren’t able to find out a great deal of the history of fish sauce; we even had to give ourselves a guided tour of a fish sauce factory on Phu Quoc, but what we were able to find out was it has been made here for ‘long time’ and it was first designed as a way of getting the protein out of fish without enough flesh to eat. I dispute this theory though as size is not a determining factor when it comes to eating everything else that moves here, so my guess is fish sauce is a way of preserving fish, especially when the size of the catch is so big that it would spoil before it’s all eaten. What is undisputable though is this amber fish nectar is the essence of Vietnam.