Pho Blogging

I had been craving for good Vietnamese food or a decent bowl of pho. We had planned a visit D.C. again for the 4th so I was really looking forward to it — a hot steaming bowl of pho that I don’t have to make. We never made it to eat Vietnamese food but did order pho from Pho Tay Ho on Route 7. It was not the best bowl of pho but it did satisfied my craving. However, it was a carry-out order which is never as good as eating at the restaurant where you can have a nice drink of soy milk or café su dua (iced Vietnamese coffee with condensed milk) and pick from your plate of bean sprouts and other accompaniments. Nevertheless, the broth was still piping hot in the container. I’ll have to have another “fun pho weekend’ and make a batch with my Oldest Aunt’s ingredients — the one that includes dried tangerine peels.

Not to toot my own horn but I make a pretty decent bun bo hue.  Last time I made it (a couple of weeks ago), it was my best ever.  Well, all good things must come to an end, or at least I’ve learned a lesson or two.  I made a batch today that was horrible.  Yes, no flavor!  How did it happen?  I kind of knew as the soup was simmering that I put too much water.  Of course I knew that one has to put enough bones to make a soup flavorful but I was hoping to make a large batch and would make do with what I had.  Should’ve known better.  In any case, the secret to a good bun bo hue is lots of shallots and of course, lots of beef bones and meats.

Ok, so I know this blog is not the most exciting blog in the world but I hope to keep up with it and eventually provide some good insights into soup making.  This weekend, I made a noodle soup that I thought was pretty good and so did others in the household.  It starts off similar to pho by using beef bones and onions.  To get a good depth of flavor, the onions should be charred over flame but I usually just place it in the oven long enough to brown the bones or in this instance I just seared the bones and onions before pouring water over it.  I also added about 1 pound of pork butt and salt, and half an hour before serving, I added about ½ - ¾ pound of ground pork.
1 lemongrass cut into ½ inch pieces and bruised
1 lb pork butt (or any pork meat
5 pieces of garlic cloves crushed
½ inch piece of ginger sliced
water – enough to just cover the meats
5 cardamom pods
6 cloves
1 tsp sugar
about 4 T Fish sauce (to taste)
rice noodlesCondiments: thai basil mint, bean sprouts, cilantro, green onions, fried garlic
Optional: any kind of Chinese vegetables such as bok choy, napa cabbage or Chinese watercress.

As with pho, the longer you can simmer the soup, the better it will be.  This recipe is somewhat similar to pho except for the pork meat and ground pork and the spices used.  The result is a lighter tasting broth because I only used cardamom, cloves and lemongrass. I would consider it a cross between pho and hu tieu so you can use rice noodles as I did but egg noodles would work fine as well.Not that I’m biased but I thought it was a pretty good tasting noodle soup. Something different. You can add whatever condiments you wish but I always like to load it up with whatever I can get my hands on Vietnamese coriander, thai basil, green onions, cilantro, etc.Remember to add the ground pork when the soup is almost done and break up the pieces as it’s cooking. I also added the fish sauce at this time and when the ground pork is done, you can more to taste.  The soup should be a bit saltier than what you are used to since it will be eaten with the noodles which is bland tasting.  And as with any recipe, tweak it to your liking.

Surprisingly it’s hard to find really good Vietnamese food in the Boston area. Granted, numerous Vietnamese restaurants have cropped up over the past few years and I have not tried all of them, the ones I have visited were just OK.  Pho Lemongrass is one that I have frequented in the past and is still one of my top choices along with Pho Pasteur in Allston which is now called Le’s.  As many Bostonians know, there are several Pho Pasteur locations with the original one in Chinatown.  However, not all the locations serve the same quality pho. Apparently, I believe all the Pho Pasteur’s are now called Le’s due to some transfer of ownership?  I’ll have to look into that…..

I’m from the Washington D.C. metro area and there are many good Vietnamese restaurants around there so when I go back home to visit, one of my priorities is to plan and carve out a mealtime to go and eat pho and/or Vietnamese food.  On this visit, I went to the Four Sisters restaurant located at the Eden Centre in Falls Church, VA.  The food was OK, not as great as it used to be and the servings were much smaller than I remembered.  Needless to say I was disappointed since I only had a limited number of meals to eat during my visit and wasted one on Four Sisters.  Should’ve just went to Pho Tay Ho on Leesburg Pike – the pho there is still good, although not as good as they used to be but good enough and close enough to where I usually stay to just grab a decent bowl of pho which is still better than what I can get in the Boston area.

A new restaurant recently opened in Boston called Myers + Chang.  It has been mentioned recently in the Boston magazine and newspaper and received fairly good reviews.  They offer a variety of Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai dishes . I was surprised to see that they have pho on the menu at a cost of $10 a bowl!  But I will include them in the justphoyou.com directory since they serve pho.  If anyone has tried it, I would be interested to hear your review on them.

I made pho with the usual beef marrow bones and decided to add beef brisket in the broth this time.  It definitely made the broth a bit richer but also more oily so I had to occasionally skim the oil out but not all of it since oil = flavor.  It was also unfortunate that I did not have any Thai basil leaves so we had to eat without it.  It is difficult to find Thai basil leaves sometimes and the only places I know that have any are at Russo’s in Waltham and at any of the Asian markets in or around Boston. 

I contacted various family members who I think are “pho makers.”  I know my oldest aunt has been making pho regularly for my other aunts in town because they all live in a small town in the Midwest without access to Vietnamese restaurants or many ethnic restaurants for that matter.  I believe the only Mexican restaurant used to be Chi-chi’s but since they closed in the early 90’s, I think Taco Bell is the only choice for Mexican food. I’m sure many of you who cook have gone through this process with obtaining a recipe from your mom or aunt or grandmother – “just put in a little bit of XXX and about two pinches of YYY, etc…”.  I have another aunt who lives in the same town so I asked her to speak to my Oldest Aunt to get her recipe.  When she emailed it to me, it was just a list of ingredients without any measurements.  While I wasn’t surprised I was kind of hoping to get a glimpse of how much she put of each of the spices.  She did however, include an ingredient that I have not come across from any pho recipes online: tangerine peel.  I guess that is her secret so I will have to try that at some point.  I won’t be posting her recipe since I’m not sure the exact amount of the ingredients but will post the results of the next batch of pho I make with tangerine peel.

OK, so it’s not a Grand Opening of a restaurant but of this blog so to kickstart this blog, I decided to make some pho.  What a novel idea!  I used the usual beef marrow bones and my usual recipe that I have posted.  I let it simmer for about 5 hours and it smelled incredible as usual.  However, upon tasting this batch, I found it to be good but still lacking something and the flavor was not strong enough (not for me anyways).  Maybe I’ll modify something next time to give it that extra oomph.

On another note, my blogging entries will only be about once a month if that.  So please check back monthly for new entries.