PANO – A made-in-Vietnam appliance to make steamed rolled rice pancakes, created by Bui Do Hau in Thanh Luong village, Ha Tay province, has been exported to industrial countries in Europe and the Americas.

Wishing to alleviate villagers’ hardship in making steamed rolled rice pancakes, Bui Do Hau, in 1977, took an engineering course with the intention of inventing such a device.

Once, when seeing a flour-grinder imported from China, Hau figured out its operation and eventually succeeded in making the same machine after several failures.

He earned a lot of money from selling them. During that time, Hau did a study of how to make an appliance for steamed rolled rice pancakes. After trying from 1990-1993, his effort paid off. The appliance in 1995 was completed and could produce 100kg of rice pancakes per hour, replacing 8 to 10 manual labourers.

His compact, light, easy-to-use device has been widely sold in Thanh Luong handicraft village and exported to China, Poland, France and Russia and even to overseas Vietnamese in the US.

In addition to that appliance, Hau has assembled another device to make rice sheets with an output of 5,000 to 8,000 sheets an hour. He is trying to make a machine that produces rice sheets, then dries and packs them.

Translated by Mai Huong