Pho is not French, but Vietnamese. It's beef noodle soup, but very different from what you might eat in the U.S. It's a soup that's very fresh and comforting.
Since I had cooked a capon that was glazed with soy sauce and other Asian flavor ingredients, I had plenty of soup broth to work with. I took the last of the meat off the capon carcass, and then I boiled the carcass to make broth. For the pho, I added some beef bouillon to it. I had about four liters of broth. I just needed to add a few more flavor ingredients. Below is a non-comprehensive, non-exclusive list.
- 2 medium yellow onions (about 1 lb. total)
- 1 four-inch piece ginger (about 4 oz.)
- 5 star anis pods
- 3 or 4 allspice berries
- 10 or 12 black peppercorns
- 1 or 2 dried hot peppers like cayennes
- 6 whole cloves
- 1 cinnamon stick
- 4 Tbsp. nuoc-mâm fish sauce
- sugar (sparingly, to taste)
- 1 or 2 bay leaves
Since the broth cooks for several hours, you'll have plenty of time to taste it and adjust the aromatics and seasonings until you think you've got the taste you want. At the end, strain out all the spices and aromatics so that you have a clear, flavorful broth for the soup. (The lettuce and mint leaves in this photo are for eating with nems.)
The main ingredient in pho soup, besides broth, is cooked noodles. In fact, I'm pretty sure the word pho means noodles. Any Asian noodle will do, and you could even use spaghetti or angel hair pasta. The other soup ingredients go in raw: bean sprouts, grated carrot, thinly sliced onion or shallot, thinly sliced mushrooms, and strips of tender raw beef.
While the cooked noodles are still hot, put them in pre-heated soup bowls. Put the sprouts, carrot, onion, mushrooms, and beef on top of the noodles. Ladle boiling hot broth over all, and let the hot soup sit for just a minute or two to cook the vegetables and beef. Obviously, the most important ingredient is a hot, flavorful broth, along very tender beef that needs minimal cooking.
At the table, add more fish sauce and some hot sauce, soy sauce, or sesame oil to taste. We also had some of the nems (crispy spring rolls) that Walt made recently as a side dish with our soup. Here's a recipe but I didn't really follow any recipe closely when I made our pho.
I've never made this, but I certainly think I should try. I'd have to figure a way to have a broth even a tenth as flavorful as yours sounds! But what a perfect winter meal.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure you could make broth as tasty as mine was, assuming you can get the flavoring ingredients. We're having pho again for lunch in a few minutes.
DeleteIt is not immediately clear what the word pho exactly means depending on critical marks on the o and, also, its pronunciation. For those interested, Wikipedia has a very informative but lengthy article here.
ReplyDeleteMy understanding has been that pho is pronounced like "fun" if it were a French word — un with an initial F. In San Francisco, we often ordered food from a Chinese restaurant in our neighborhood, and one of the best dishes was called chow fun — stir-fried noodles with aromatics and spices. I think Vietnamese pho and Chinese fun must be related terms.
DeleteLe fin du fin, c'est le pho quand on a faim?
DeleteThree times today, I've written comments on this blog, pressed Publish, and realized that my comment has just vanished into thin air. The same thing happened to me on a friend's Blogger blog yesterday or the day before. I wish I knew why. Beware. I will copy this comment to my device's clipboard before I press Publish — just in case.
ReplyDeleteI write my comments first in the Notes on my iPad mini, then copy them on your blog using Chrome. It is time consuming but safer if my comments, like yours disappear. So far what happened last year didn't repeat itself (yet?). For some reason, my iPad stubornly refuses to memorize my user names and passwords for all except Google!!!! Why sometimes it is out of whack, I have no idea.
DeleteYour soup looks delicious. I always thought pho was made with rice noodles, never thought of using wheat noodles in it.
ReplyDeleteSeveral years ago, the Lowe's grocery chain had in its soup department a ready-made pho base, the kind that's sold in those probably environmentally horrible boxes. It was pretty good, but last time I looked for it, no luck.
Walt found some rice noodles at SuperU yesterday but we didn't have any on hand when I decided that making pho would be the best way to use all the broth I had in the refrigerator. So we used Asian — Chinese, I guess — wheat noodles. They were good.
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