Pho Blogging

To continue from the previous post on Sriracha hot sauce.  What I’ve noticed when watching the cooking shows is that many of the chefs have Sriracha in their pantries and some are even using it on some of the dishes. I’m always impressed and take more interest in a celebrity chef who uses Sriracha and is a fan of pho.  Anthony Bourdain and Andrew Zimmern are definitely pho fans but I wonder if they know how to make good pho? Doing a Google search results in nothing on the topic.  Doing a search on foodnetwork.com with keyword “pho” came up with some recipes.  The first recipe that came up was a “Lobster Pho”??!?  Who? What? That would have never even crossed my mind. First of all, the recipe was from Emeril.  Perhaps that just says it all and I’ll stop right here. As a matter of fact, all the pho recipes from Food Network were all from Emeril. Surprising considering pho has been an up-and-coming dish over the past several years.  But getting back to lobster pho– I think is synonomous with “Vegetarian Pho”.  Yes it’s possible to make it but is it right to have a “seafood” pho? I guess I should be open minded and maybe try to make a “seafood” pho and see. Cooking IS about being creative and I’ve heard of worse things.

If you are a hot sauce fanatic most likely you already know about Sriracha.  If not, you are missing out. This popular brand of hot sauce sits at every table in pho restaurants but is not limited to flavoring just pho. Made by a company in California, Huy Fong, this spicy concoction does not compare to most of the other bottles of hot sauces available.  Found in a plastic bottle with a trademark green cap, the unique flavor has a hint of sweetness, garlic and just the right amount of spiciness.  The texture is more like ketchup.  As it says on the bottle, this hot sauce goes with just about anything, pizza, hot dogs, eggs and all kinds of noodle soups. Nowadays you can find some at your local American grocery store or at Whole Foods although they are a bit pricier than an Asian market.  If you cook at home, this is one item that always needs to be in your kitchen.

Little Saigon, a typical Vietnamese restaurant located on Colonial Drive in Orlando was one of our first stops right after deplaning in Orlando. It was a recommended place from someone who visited the area frequently and liked Vietnamese food. What a better way to start the trip than a bowl of pho. Ok, well I didn’t order the pho but my kids and my husband did. I ordered a bowl of bun bo hue, the next best thing. The pho was good and had enough flavor. The place is worth coming back to should we ever revisit the area and want a decent bowl of pho. The bun bo hue had a good deep flavor and was one of the better ones I have ever had. We would’ve gone back to this place except it’s always nice to try different places so few days later we went back to the area and tried Anh Hong. It seemed to be a more “authentic” by looking at the menu and the clientele that walked through the doors– more Asians than at Little Saigon. This time I ordered the seafood hu tieu with glass noodles. The dish looked so inviting when it came to the table. It tasted exactly how hu tieu should, a hint of seafood taste with a rich and flavorful broth enhanced by the Chinese chives and mint leaves that was abundant in the dish. Some people don’t realize how much condiments can make or break a soup dish. If you haven’t tried, eating pho without mint leaves is not the same. Though I’m sure there are people out there who don’t really care for mint leaves or condiments. To those people, you are really missing out. As for the pho, one of the other family members ordered it and it also looked really good. It looked and smelled better than at Little Saigon. I took a taste and the broth did taste better. Even though the pho was decent at Little Saigon, the pho here had a stronger flavor. If I had to choose between the two places after trying both, I would definitely pick Anh Hoang.

No, there are no eateries that serve pho in World Disney although they should.  Who wouldn’t want a bowl of pho instead of a ham and cheese sandwich or a turkey leg even though you may have to pay $15 for a bowl.  Why is it that those who love pho feel compelled to try and eat pho wherever they go?  My obsession is not just pho but noodle soups in general.  On our visit to the Orlando area, we ate at two places on two different occasions.  The first visit was to Little Saigon on Colonial Drive in Orlando.  It was a typical Vietnamese restaurant but this place was filled with mostly white people.  Does that matter? Well, it depends (see “Ate at Little Saigon and Anh Hong” entry). My young kids now like to eat pho, thank goodness! But what kid doesn’t, right?  So I ordered a small bowl for the kids with beef balls and nothing else– no onions, no scallions, no cilantro. It gets a bit messy for under 5 year olds but at least they are satisfied.  Maybe I should write to Disney to see if they can find a vendor to sell pho at the park, hmmm.

The package arrived, a pho blend from my oldest aunt — some cinnamon, cloves, cardamom pods, and tangerine orange peels.  It was a couple of weeks before I could get to making it.  Maybe it there wasn’t enough peels but the resulting broth was OK.  I didn’t even taste a hint of tangerine. Maybe next time, I’ll use more peels or use my own mix and add tangerine peels. I’ll need to do some research and see how tangerine peels affect dishes.  It can’t be the orange oil on the peel since it’s dried.  I would think it would give it a bitter flavor.   Will get back to that and post it.

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.

As the saying goes, some of the best food comes from places that are a “hole in the wall” or in other words, just a plain, undecorated, not-so-special place. However, that is not always the case. My family and I went on vacation in Florida near Tampa and tried a pho place in Pinellas Park for lunch.    It was a small café place off of one of the main roads, nothing special – a hole in the wall.  Plastic patio chairs, the usual Vietnamese café décor of a few Vietnamese themed print art work and fake electric plants, the ones with glowing flower tips.  Our group ordered a variety of dishes including a sliced beef pho, bun bo hue and hu tieu among some other dishes.  My bun bo hue was not so bad.  It had enough flavor and ingredients in it to make it enjoyable. However, the person who ordered the pho commented that it tasted as if were made from pho cubes. Yes, I do sell those pho cubes and they are quite good when you don’t have time to make it from scratch and are craving for pho and the closest place is about an hour and a half away.