What is Pho - Everything you need to know About viet soup

What are the pho ingredients, you may ask?  Well, depending on who you ask will give you various answers.  I have combed the internet and found many answers, but we will use the Pho Redbo approach to simplify.  The following is the list of ingredients that we use at Pho Redbo.

Beef Stock: The main ingredient in our soup (beef stock) is our Wagyu knuckle bones.  The amount of stock required depends on how much depth and flavor you want and how much time you want it to take to cook.  The more depth your broth is, the more time you will need to cook the bones.

What kind of bone do we use to make our beef stock?   We use knuckle bone and simmer it for over 12 hours to break down all the pores of the bones releasing all the nutrients and juice from the bones.  This gives our broth a really big boost and when slurping our pho, you will taste the depth and umami taste in it. 

Preparation before cooking. We wash our bones and try to get rid of any residues from the processing plant.   This will ensure our broth is clean and nice in color.  We also check the bone for quality prior to putting them in our pot to cook it.  This broth is crucial to our pho so we take this step really seriously. 

The final product that go into your bowl of pho is a many step process.  We combine the broth broth to the meat broth in order to create an interesting bowl of pho.  But before we go there we will go through additional steps.

After we have simmered our broth from 10 - 12 hours, we discard the bones but not after we strain out all the juice from the bones using a perforated tray.  We put it back into our bone broth. 

We then braised or roast the onion and gingers before put into the bone broth to cook for 2.5 - 3 hours.   During this time we also include our "spices", more in "SPICE" section of this article, in our broth which cooks in our bone broth for 1.5 - 2 hours. 

After the cooking time, we remove the ginger onion and spices.  We strained them in a strainer.  

1. Star Anise - Star anise is a spice that usually has many health benefits. It contains volatile oils and compounds which are beneficial for the digestive system, liver, heart, lungs, and kidneys. Important are anethole (a sweet-smelling oil) and methyl chavicol. 
2. Cloves -Cloves are the flower buds of a tree native to Indonesia and Madagascar. The spice is used in cooking for its warm, spicy flavor.
3. Coriander-  Coriander is a flowering plant in the family Apiaceae, native to the Mediterranean region. It is also known as cilantro and Chinese parsley. The leaves are fresh or dried, and the seeds are used as a spice. Coriander has an aromatic flavor that can be described as citrusy, spicy, or peppery, depending on how it's prepared. 
4. Cardamon Pods - Cardamon pods are the dried fruit of Cardamom. The seeds inside the pod are used for their aromatic properties. They have a warm, sweet, and pungent taste with an aftertaste that is similar to ginger or cinnamon. 
5. Cinnamon -Cinnamon is a very popular spice that comes from the bark of several trees. It has a sweet, warm, and spicy taste with notes of clove and nutmeg. Cinnamon is used in many foods like pastries, desserts, bread, confectioneries, and even beverages. The most common way to use cinnamon is adding it to your coffee or tea as an extra flavor boost! 

 How to cook the five spices in the Pho beef stock? 

We are cooking the spices most effectively and efficiently (scorching them on a pan or roasting them on a pan).  The Cinnamon needs to be broken down into small pieces for best extraction.  Cook them for 1.5 - 2 hours, depending on your pot size.    

WE remove the spice with a strainer and making sure that all the liquid falls back into the broth before trashing the spices. 

If you are cooking at home, please don't over cook the spice, if you do two things will happens:  1) your broth will be darkened and 2) your broth will be bitter.  

Bean sprout is a micro vegetable that comes from a bean (mung bean, black bean, green bean) and it only sprouting before harvest.  The following bean sprout are use in Pho.

1. Mung Bean - Mung bean sprouts because they taste better and look nicer.  We get our bean sprout from a company call Cosmo.  They make the best bean sprout.  They are fresh, clean looking at the roots and they don't go bad easy.  I think the shelf life is 3 days maximum.  I would be wary once it's past 3 days. 

2. Green Bean - green bean sprouts can also be use for pho.  I think we use this type of sprout back in the country.  I don't have anything against it.  If you are going to use them, just make sure the roots looks nice so your bowl of pho is good looking. 

You can grow your own bean sprouts.  I think it's really easy and fun to do.  Here a link to an article on how you can grow your own bean sprouts by  Kris Bordessa.   She is an author and certified Master Food Preserver, hobby farmer, gardener, chicken wrangler, and eternal experimenter. 

Also, remember that while these ingredients do not contain meat, they still count towards making this dish vegan friendly! So if you wish, then, by all means, include those as well 🙂 . Lastly, if there are any leftover herbs from chopping them up before adding them into yo Pho, then feel free to toss those veggies into a separate bowl once they have cooled down completely! That way, everything will stay nice and fresh throughout dinner time 😉
 

There are a few different variation of noodles for Pho.  We use only use two types of noodles:

1. Skinny (Regular noodles)

2. Wide (Fresh noodles)

The skinny noodles are well known and most likely everyone who had pho had the skinny noodles.  

The fresh noodles are wider and easy to break apart.  We called them fresh noodles because they are made fresh (same day as we order) and get deliver to our establishment.  It's a hint sweeter but the down side to it is it breaks easy if soak in the broth for too long. 

If you bring a long lost friend and you are going to have long conversation, I recommend the skinny noodles.  If you just there to enjoy pho and talk less, definitely try out the fresh noodles / wide noodles. It will change your perspective about Pho. 

Where to buy Noodles?

How to cook the noodles?

Types of Meats:

1. Rare Steak
2. Briskets
3. Rib Cubes
4. Meatball
5. Shank
6. Flank
7. Tendon

There are many meat options that you can use as toppings for Pho.  We cook our wagyu briskets for about 1 hours prior to serving. We do a taste test every batch to ensure that the meat are up to standard.

Where to buy?

How to cook?

If you follow me until now, top of the hat to ya!  The material I'm presenting not necessary an easy to follow.  But step 1 - 5 is to prepare for this final step before the broth becomes Pho broth.  

We pour the meat broth into the bone broth to create a one of a kind broth.  We bring in to small boil and then season to taste.  We measure our salt.  We do not use MSG.  

Once the broth is boil then we use a stainless steel strainer and remove any debris resulting from cooking.  The we filter the broth with a fabric filter before pouring them into container and bring them into the cooler to reduce the heat. 

And that my friend, that is the whole process of our Pho Redbo recipe and how we cook our broth.