Viet World Kitchen

Instant Pho Fixes? A tasting of Trader Joe’s, Pacific Foods and Happy Pho

One of the above bowls of pho was homemade and the other two were made from instant pho products. Guess which was which? I’ve written about packaged pho that I keep around for super quick pho fixes. They’re from Vietnam (see the Vifon sample in the photo below) and contain MSG. Nevertheless, they are quite serviceable when you want a bowl in say, 3 to 5 minutes. Not bad for about 50 cents at an Asian market.

Since that post, several other convenience pho products have become available. Pacific Foods, maker of boxed broths and soups, sent me their new chicken pho soup base. Trader Joe’s recently announced a frozen beef pho so I added that to my must-try list. I also found the Happy Pho kit in a box at Whole Foods.

It was too tempting. I had to check them all out – side by side with homemade chicken pho, which I made earlier this week. I already knew that the homemade would be better but my question was this:  Are there good instant or quick-an-easy pho products sold at mainstream markets that come close to the real thing? 

Reivented Pho Roundup in DC: For real, just faux, or cool?

This morning, Hong and Kim, the Vietnamese-Americans behind the terrific Ravenous Couple blog, alerted me to an interesting article in the Washington Post on upscale renditions of pho by non-Viet chefs. Staff journalist Tim Carman struts his pho knowledge in his thoughtful analysis of the chefs' efforts to present revamped version of the Vietnamese classic. Among the highlights of "Pho or faux? Area Chefs put their own spin on the Vietnamese noodle soup":

• Chef Nick Sharpe of the new Ba Bay restaurant makes a rendition that includes cuminy rice paddy herb (rau om) as a garnish. His first attempts didn't impress the Vietnamese Americans who own Ba Bay. But he subsequently sous vides rib eye, sears, and thinly slices it for each bowl. He doesn't serve pho with a garnish plate, which Carman sees as being unusual but that's how it pho is traditionally served. There is no fish sauce or charring of the aromatics in Bay Bay's pho recipe, which is part of the article.
• Esteemed and Beard award chef Michel Richard pulled his sablefish pho from the menu at Michel, a restaurant at the Ritz-Carlton Tysons Corner.
• Chef Haidar Karoum at Proof makes a pho terrine instead of a noodle soup. His veal-based terrine outsells the familiar pate de campagne (country pate) at the restaurant.
• Justin Bittner at Bar Pilar does a more or less regular pho based on a recipe from Secrets of the Red Lantern, a book by Pauline and Luke Nguyen based on their restaurant in Sydney. His beef broth includes daikon and sometimes chicken too.

What was also interesting about the Washington Post article were the comments that people wrote. Many of them directed readers to pho shops in the Viet hub at the Eden Center in Falls Church, Virginia. Others asked:

• Why do people have to tinker with something that's already perfect?
• What's wrong with revinventing a classic?
  

What are your thoughts? If you've experienced some of these new DC renditions, let us know your reactions. Or, if you have a tip of a favorite pho joint in DC or Virginia, weigh in.

I personally look forward to visiting DC and checking it out!

Related posts:

• Faux Pho: What is it and does it matter?
• Videos that fight the faux pho phenomena
• History and evolution of pho
• Beef pho recipe
• Chicken pho recipe

Hoisin Sauce for Pho vs. for Cooking

Asian food products never fail to keep me guessing. Not long ago, I was in desperate need of hoisin sauce for Vietnamese tuong, the dipping sauce that I use for salad rolls (goi cuon). My preferred brands of hoisin are Lee Kum Kee and Koon Chun, the former being easier to find in regular supermarkets than the latter. I don’t have an Asian market in my town, so I went to my well-stocked local health food market, Staff of Life. I discovered that they had squirt bottles of hoisin sauce that were labeled in Vietnamese as “tuong an pho” – meaning bean sauce for eating with pho.

For years, if I wanted a little hoisin sauce for dipping my pho meat balls (bo vien), I’d simply dilute some of my regular jarred hoisin sauce. I always use the jarred stuff and figured that pho restaurants did the same. I’m not one to squirt hoisin sauce into my pho bowl because in my mind, that’s sacrilege. Given that, my personal knowledge of the hoisin sauce used for pho is limited.

I took the squirt bottle of Lee Kum Kee hoisin sauce home and used it for my spicy garlic tuong dipping sauce. It didn’t quite taste right, was somewhat flat and strangely tart. On that day, I thought I was off my game.

But I recently bought a new jar of Lee Kum Kee hoisin sauce and realized that the contents of the jar and those of the squirt bottle are NOT the same.  Who can tell from the labeling at the top of this post? In either English or Vietnamese?

Vietnamese Noodles 101: Banh Pho Flat Rice Noodles

For decades I thought that the flat rice noodles that went into pho noodle soup and stir-fries were only available in dried form. That’s how we bought them in the United States. About 15 years ago, those “banh pho” rice noodles (named such in Vietnamese because they go into pho noodle soup) started being sold fresh in Cryovac packages at Asian markets. My mom still bought the dried kind. Then one day, I asked her about fresh versus dried banh pho rice noodles and she responded, “They were always fresh in Vietnam. We had no dried banh pho when we lived there.”

Wait, had I been living a faux pho life all these years? No, child, the dried ones available here are good and convenient to keep on hand when you have a neighborhood noodle vendor around the corner.  Duh, like pho. Indeed, go to Vietnam today and you’ll find freshly made noodles sold at markets and used at noodle joints. In the U.S., fresh noodles aren’t as readily available, but there are dried noodles that cook up wonderfully.

Our conversation earlier this week on defining faux pho spurred me to continue my (occasional) series of posts of Vietnamese noodles. Also, a couple of days ago, I noticed a young woman struggle with trying to find banh pho noodles at an Asian market. She got flat noodles but they were made of mung bean starch. I hope this guide will help you buy and use this ubiquitous Vietnamese noodle.

Faux Pho: What is it and does it matter?

Let me head this off at the pass – the word faux goes so well with pho. Faux is French for fake and putting faux near food is a nice way to denote inauthentic, wrong, not genuine food. Mon Dieu, there’s also the ‘shame on you’ French term faux pas. I’ve been simmering on the notion of faux pho (which has a whole host of wordplays that you probably already know) ever since I did a public radio interview with the Kojo Nnamdi show on the vibrant pho scene in Washington, D.C., and Virginia. One of the guests said that a local, critically acclaimed chef had prepared a faux pho.

Though I chuckled along with the other participants on the interview, in my mind I was thinking: What exactly is faux pho? There’s a whole industrial category of faux food that is used for displays; check out Fake-foods.com. In Asia, the Japanese excel at manufacturing fake plastic food. But I’m talking about the edible stuff that people are describing as faux pho. We're not talking window display here.