Authentic Cooking Experiment: Pho

One of mine favorite dish of all time is Vietnamese beef noodle soup, otherwise known as Pho. Even though there are a number of good restaurants in Philly to get a nice steamy bowl anytime you want, there's nothing more satisfying than to be able to make it yourself. The ingredients are pretty simple and straight forward, however I was surprised to see that there really wasn't many consistent recipes on the web. I think the main reason being most places are smaller mom and pop restaurants that have their own proprietary version. Hence after browsing through a few online recipes I decided to combine 3 that sounded the most promising.

Ingredients:
3lbs knuckle bones
3lbs marrow bones
3 lbs brisket
2 small onion charred
1 piece of 4" ginger charred
1 bulb of garlic charred
1/4 cup fish sauce
1 oz rock sugar (yellow)
- Spice pouch
- 1/2 tbs cumin
- 1/2 tbs coriander
- 1/2 tbs fennel
- 1 tbs black peppercorn
- 2 stick Carissa
- 8 cloves
- 5 star anise

First things first, the 6lbs of bones needs to be parboiled vigorously for 10mins so the scums can rise to the top. Next dump the dirty water, scrub the bones and pot before putting it back into with a new pot of water to boil. As stated in the previous blog, this process will provided a clear broth at the end. When the water is again boiling, put in the brisket to simmer in the broth for an hour before removing. In the mean time, char the onion, ginger and garlic on the stove for about 10mins or until the outer skin is blackened. This will make them more fragrant and sweeter in the soup. Then remove the skin and chop into coarse pieces.


As for the spice, they also need to be heated in a pan over light heat until fragrant and then grind up and put into a spice pouch. By grinding up your own spice when you need it, the aroma is stronger and more flavorful for the dish. Place both the spice pouch and the charred vegetables in the broth once it is boiling along with the fish sauce.


Turn the heat down to a bare simmer and let the soup cook for at least 4 hours or until it has reduced by almost half. At this point the soup is covered by a layer of fat floating on top. The easiest way of removing this is to actually place the whole pot in the fridge, let it freeze and use the broth the next day. Otherwise you can just skim off the top, which can be a pretty tedious task.


The assembly of the soup is by far the simplest part. Just ladle some broth into a pot and bring it to a boiling. In the mean time, boil some water to cook the clear noodles, which really just required a quick dip in the boiling water. Place the noodles in a bowl and ladle the hot soup on top. Top off with thin slices of the brisket that was cooked and chilled from the broth. Dress the bowl with scallion, cilantro, hot pepper and salt to taste. The result is a nice hot bowl of pho that was pretty darn close to restaurant quality. However as with all recipes tested for the first time, a few tweets was needed for perfection. First I found the spices to be a little overwhelming and would cut it in half. Next, both the flavors of the fish sauce and sugar could be a little more pronounce and should be increased by 50%. Despite these two minor issues, the noodle was still good and definitely worth the time and effort!