If rice sticks have turned up in a recipe or caught your eye at the store, here's what you need to use them with confidence and how to choose them, cook them, store them, what to substitute, and 14 recipes to try them in.

What are rice sticks?

Rice sticks are dried noodles made from rice flour and water, with nothing else in them. They range from hair-thin vermicelli to flat ribbons the width of fettuccine, and they are the backbone of stir-fries, soups, salads, and spring rolls across Southeast Asia and southern China.

Dry, they are brittle and chalky white. Once soaked or boiled they turn slippery and translucent, and they carry sauce well without ever becoming gluey the way wheat noodles can.

You will see them labeled many ways: rice vermicelli, bun, bee hoon, banh pho, or plain rice noodles. The thin round threads and the flat wide ribbons cook a little differently, but both start from the same rice-flour dough.

Cooking With Rice Sticks

How you hydrate them depends on the dish. For stir-fries and salads, soak the dry noodles in hot (not boiling) tap water for 8 to 15 minutes until they are pliable but still slightly firm, then drain.

For soups, a 1 to 2 minute dip in boiling water is usually enough.

Remember that the noodles keep cooking after you drain them, and they cook again in the wok or the hot broth. So pull them while they still have some bite; fully soft noodles before the second step turn to mush on the plate.

This soak-then-stir-fry rhythm is exactly how pad thai works. My Pad Thai and Egg & Pork Pad Thai with Rice Sticks soften the noodles first, then finish them in the pan with sauce, where they absorb flavor and firm up again.

Flat wide rice sticks are the noodle for soups like Hanoi Beef & Rice-Noodle Soup (Pho Bac), where they go into the bowl barely cooked and the boiling broth poured over them does the rest.

Thin vermicelli suits Pancit and lighter stir-fries, and softened then tossed cold it makes the base of a noodle salad.

Pairing and Common Mistakes

Rice sticks are a blank canvas, so they take big, bold sauces. Fish sauce, lime, garlic, chili, soy, and peanuts all read clearly against the neutral noodle, which is why Thai Noodles with Vegetable & Curry Sauce and Cantonese Chicken Salad with Cashews lean on them.

The most common mistake is overcooking. Rice has no gluten, so the noodles go from firm to falling-apart fast, with no chewy buffer in between.

Soak in water that is hot but off the boil, then taste early and stop while there is still resistance.

The second mistake is letting drained noodles clump. They stick into a solid mass as they sit, so toss them with a little oil if they are waiting, or rinse stir-fry noodles briefly under cool water to loosen them.

For a crisp dish like Mee Krob (Crisp-Fried Noodles), do the opposite of soaking: drop the dry sticks straight into hot oil and they puff into a crunchy nest in seconds.

Substitutes

Cellophane noodles (also called bean thread or glass noodles) are the closest-looking swap, but they are made from mung bean starch, not rice. They turn fully clear and springy rather than tender, so they behave differently in a stir-fry, though they work fine in soups and spring rolls.

Fresh rice noodles, sold refrigerated, slot in for the dried kind with almost no soaking; just rinse and separate them. For a flat-noodle dish, wide dried rice sticks and fresh ho fun are interchangeable.

In a pinch, thin wheat noodles or even angel hair pasta can stand in for vermicelli in a stir-fry, but they bring gluten and a different chew, and they will not give the light, slippery result that defines a rice noodle dish.

Buying and Storing

Rice sticks come in cellophane packs sorted by width, from thread-thin vermicelli up to broad ribbons. Buy the width the recipe calls for, since thin and wide are not interchangeable in cooking time.

Look for noodles that are evenly pale and not cracked into dust in the bag.

Dried rice sticks keep almost indefinitely. Stored in a sealed bag somewhere cool and dry, they hold their quality for a year or more, which makes them one of the most useful dry goods to keep on hand.

Once cooked, rice noodles are best eaten right away. They firm up and clump in the fridge, so if you must keep leftovers, store them up to 2 days and revive them with a quick dip in hot water or a splash of liquid in a hot pan.

Quick facts

In Chinese

大米棒

British (UK) term

Rice sticks

en français

vermicelles

en español

palitos de arroz

Recipes using rice sticks

There are 14 recipes that contain this ingredient.

All 14 recipes