Viet World Kitchen

Pho Spice Blend Recipe

 

Imbuing pho broth with whole spices is to be expected but when you want to define as well as reinforce the pho imprint, use this spice blend. I formulated it for The Pho Cookbook to give cooks a tool that could help them make something more “pho-ish”, to help it say, “I am pho-like!”  

My initial motivation was to come up with a homemade hoisin sauce recipe on page 102 of the book. What’s bottled and sold as hoisin sauce for pho (tuong an pho) is incredibly sweet and lacking complexity. I wanted my condiment to take a turn toward the pho family of flavors (say that a few times). I analyzed the ratio of spices that I typically use for pho and came up with a formula for the recipe below.

The spice blend worked for hoisin but what’s the use of coming up with a single-use spice blend? That would be a disservice to cooks. So I played around and found that the pho spice blend was great in lamb meatballs (a variation of beef meatballs, bo vien, on page 96). Lamb is strong-tasting meat and the spice blend cut a bit of that and made the lamb pho-friendly.

Turkey Pho Recipe (Pho Ga Tay Quay)

Not long ago someone on VWK asked if I had a turkey pho recipe. I was working on it and it took a while for me to figure it out, primarily because I’m not a turkey lover. As you may recall my mentioning over the years, our family abandoned Thanksgiving turkey in the 1980s when my mom admitted that the big bird cooked up dry and that she preferred goose, duck, Cornish game hens, and chicken. For that reason, come each November, I walk right past the turkey in the butcher counter and freezer cases. I’ve trained myself to neglect supermarket ads and deals on natural, heritage, and Butterball turkeys.

Earlier this year I confronted my turkey issues. ChefSteps.com had invited me to partner with them on Shanghai soup dumplings as well as soy milk and tofu video tutorials. They asked me to share other cooking insights and I thought of turkey pho. If you roast turkey around the holidays, how could the remains be turned into pho noodle soup? Maybe turkey pho would be a gateway for people to craft pho at home? 

I didn’t include a recipe for turkey pho in The Pho Cookbook because it’s mostly a seasonal thing and plus, we didn’t have enough space in the book. To carryout the project for ChefSteps, I roasted several 11 to 13-pound turkeys to generate carcasses and other leftovers bits that would be used for developing a turkey pho recipe. 

One of the most challenging aspects of making good turkey pho (and perhaps another reason why I shied away from it) is how to downplay the strong turkey flavor, which wiped out the subtleties of the charred onion and ginger. Pho is a delicate dance of spices and aromatics. In the end, I dumped the charring and instead dry sauteed the onion and ginger. I also chose to add lots of vegetables to counterbalance the turkey-ness of the turkey broth. 

How to Freeze Pho?

I was on the road this week when I received this email from Mike:

I'm just finishing up your beef stock recipe -- it took a little while longer than I expected because my butcher gave me almost 14 lbs of great beef bones! I will be trying the Pho tonight!

I just got back from a two week vacation in Vietnam.  I had pho almost every morning for breakfast and a few times for lunch.  I just love it!

I do have a question:  I live by myself most of the time, so I can't eat 8 bowls all at once by myself.  Do you have any advice or hints about how to store things so I can pull the stock out of the freezer and just whip up a bowl whenever I want?  I'm going to try saving the cooked meat in small batches.  Same with freezing small chunks of the sirloin steak I bought.

You have a terrific website and I'm recommending it to all my friends.  I'll be getting your cookbook, too!  I got your dumplings cookbook last year and my daughter and I enjoyed great success with it.

What a flattering and great message to get. It’s so great to travel, eat something new and exciting, then return home to replicate it.

But wow, fourteen pounds of bones meant that Mike had enough pho for a reasonably-sized Viet extended family or a small pop-up lunch for 16 people.  Since those situations didn’t apply to him, and he wasn’t about to call his friends and neighbors over to share the wealth, he was on to the obvious answer: Freeze that pho!  

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? 

Pho Secret Ingredients: Dried Earthworms (Sa Sung)

If you read Saveur magazine, you may have seen the northern pho (pho Bac) article that I wrote for the March 2011 issue. One of the ingredients that I mentioned in the story was sa sung (Sipunculans), dried peanut earthworms that add a unique savory sweetness to the broth. My cousin Quyen, Metropole Hotel Chefs Nguyen Thanh Van and Nguyen Thi Kim Hai, along with other Hanoians that I interviewed for the story talked about using the worms for their pho broth. They spoke of cooking with sa sung in a matter of fact manner.

I’d read about sa sung in Chef Didier Corlou’s cookbook, Ma Cuisine du Vietnam, but he wasn’t clear about what the worms did to the broth. Plus, the dried worms are not available abroad. 

In the Saveur story (I know, it’s terrible that my surname was misspelled but it happens), I suggested dried scallops as a substitute. They work very well. However, sa sung is a nifty ingredient that I want to highlight on this site. For those of you visiting Vietnam, it’s a great food travel souvenir. Maybe there’s a food importer and distributor who will make them available for cooks outside of Vietnam! Below is information that I’ve gathered on the dried earthworms.