Pho soup what is

That Indianized civilization, which lasted until the early s before being conquered by the Vietnamese, overlapped with a period where the city was flooded with merchants from France, China, and Japan. Traces of each group remain in Hoi An, which boasts a traditional Japanese-style bridge and French colonial architecture, as well as its principal dish.

The Vietnamese answer to Chinese nian gao, or rice cake, this dish uses fat, round noodles cut directly from uncooked sheets of rice tapioca flour. While the broth is seasoned simply with various bones, fish sauce, black pepper, shallot, and garlic, the proteins make it a true surf-and-turf: it typically comes with shrimp and pork, but can also be trussed up with beef, chicken, and fish.

Light yet savory, the soup is served in homes during the Lunar New Year, as well as on the anniversary of a funeral or passing of a loved one. Die-hard southerners swear by this explosive vermicelli-and-pork soup made with tomato broth, shrimp and crab paste, tamarind, and eggs. To achieve its signature nuclear-red color, some Vietnamese cooks add annatto seed oil or tomato paste along with fresh Thai chiles for spice. For garnish, mint, water spinach, and banana blossoms add freshness and crunch to the otherwise heavy broth.

The sleeper hit of the dish is Chinese chive, which adds a slightly bitter, onion-y flavor that seeps into the hot soup.

Optional toppings include quail eggs and shrimp. In the interest of completeness, I made broths using both whole spices and ground spices. I do not recommend using ground spices, unless you want to be sipping on cloudy, gritty soup. The only other elements in a pho broth are onions and ginger— deeply charred onions and ginger, that is. It not only adds an appealing smokiness and complexity to the broth, but the onions also begin to cook, adding a sweetness that's essential to a well-balanced soup.

Traditionally, they'd be charred over a grill or directly in the embers of a fire. Many recipes recommend broiling them until they char. What you end up with is this:. Onions that are only mildly charred and ginger that is more shriveled and dried than blackened. It doesn't make for terrible soup, and if it's your only option, it'll do you fine, but there's a better way if you have a gas burner:.

Charring them directly over the flame results in deeply blackened vegetables that still retain all their moisture and flavor. You can use a pair of tongs to hold each one over the flame, but it's a slow process.

I just use a wire cooling rack set directly over the burner I'm not kind to my cooling racks. When split, you should be able to see the layer of blackened skin on the exterior, followed by a few layers of sweet, translucent, semi-cooked onion, followed by a raw core.

All these various levels of cooking make for a more complex finished broth. Now all you need is to simmer, simmer, simmer away, making sure to remove the brisket and chuck about an hour and a half into cooking to prevent them from becoming too stringy.

I found that for optimum flavor, a boil time of at last 5 hours produced the best flavor. You can go as long as a day and some recipes call for it!

The broth traditionally gets finished off with a shot of salty fish sauce, and a hunk of yellow rock sugar you can find this in most Asian grocers, sometimes sold as rock candy. Like Halloween or a good bondage party, half the fun with pho is in dressing it up. Rather than serving the pre-made bowls of soup you get in restaurants, I like to serve bowls of plain noodles and broth, letting diners pick and choose exactly what to put into it.

If you've done everything according to directions up to now, you should have some or all of the following:. See all the different textures? Chewy and gelatinous, moist and tender, slick and raw, oozy, beefy, what have you.

This is what makes you go back bite after bite. If you're really in the mood to stir up trouble, you can add a handful of ribbon tripe to the simmering broth. Most Vietnamese restaurants will serve both hoisin and sriracha on the side to squirt into your pho, but I've never been a fan of either—my working theory is that they started out as a way to add a much-needed jolt of flavor to a poorly-constructed broth, which is definitely not what we've got here.

Then again, I'm not the kind of guy to stop adulterators from adulterating. Moral of the story: put the stuff out, but make sure that your guests taste the broth that you've worked so damn hard on before they go and mess it up with that rooster sauce. Put it all together, and boom:. Pho-king phabulous. Sorry for that. Actively scan device characteristics for identification.

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Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Pin Share Email. Beef Pho Vietnamese Soup Recipe. Featured Video. Read More. More Serious Eats Recipes. Your Privacy Rights. After adding the meat, add fresh garnishes of your choice. I prefer adding the aromatic herbs first, such as basil and cilantro, to allow the flavor of the herbs infuse with the broth. Next, I add the garnishes that provide extra texture to the pho, such as bean sprouts, radishes, and chilies.

To top it off, I add any sauces or lime to my dish. I like adding chili paste, hoisin sauce, and a squeeze of lime.

Not a fan of beef? No worries! There are multiple variations of pho. The most common variations are pho ga chicken pho and pho chay vegetarian pho. It is important to note, however, that not all Vietnamese noodle soup dishes are considered pho. For example, Bun Bo Hue is a pork base broth with rice noodles from the Hue region of central Vietnam and Hu Tieu is a pork and seafood noodle soup that is common in Southern region of Vietnam.

Although these other dishes may look similar to pho, they differ in their flavors and are not always served with banh pho noodles flat rice noodles. Now that you know the answer to the question of "what is pho," you are ready to explore and create a pho that is unique to you.