Viet World Kitchen

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.

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

How funky is Rachel Ray’s Phunky Pho?

I’m traveling right now in Asia, tasting and talking to lots of locals about street food, ingredients, and culture. Back in the States, my old friend Simon B. gave me a heads up on a recipe from this week’s Rachel Ray’s TV show: Phunky BBQ Pho with Pork.

Many of us on this site try to parse good food from bad, authentic food from inauthentic stuff. Standing in our way toward better informing one another are poor media productions such as this segment of the Rachel Ray.

Did you see it? Rachel Ray's pho recipe is described with this sell: “This Thai-inspired soup is loaded with exotic flavors!” She says on the show that it's Vietnamese but the recipe says otherwise.

With all the money that backs up the Rachel Ray Show, can’t anyone get the ethnicity right? Or, do all Asians look and cook the same?! Fact checkers, personal and research assistants to Rachel Ray should do their homework.

Pho is not Thai. It’s Vietnamese. Pho is in dictionary so it’s not hard to get the low-down.

I’ve got no qualms about people coming up with authentic and inauthentic renditions of food as long as they stay true to the original to some extent. Rachel Ray’s Phunky BBQ Pho with Pork calls for garlic, angel hair pasta, and plum and hoisin sauce, among other ingredients such as canned chicken broth and ginger.

The pork is seared and then cooked in the oven with broth. Is that the BBQ part? No, she puts hoisin on it at the end in the bowl.

No fish sauce, though the garnishes of red onion, mint, cilantro, bean sprouts, and Sriracha brings the pho a tiny closer to being pho.

Angel hair pasta? What decade do we live in? At least try a flat noodle like linguine to get the shape closer to banh pho rice noodles!

It’s a funky recipe all right and I’m rather appalled that the producers of the Rachel Ray show would such an injustice to pho noodle soup.

Ray touts the magic of EVOO (extra virgin olive oil) to making food extra good. I wish that her show producers would go the extra mile for Asian food. It doesn't have to be super authentic Asian cooking but at least teach people something valuable, not funky.

Rachel Ray’s fans deserve better. So does America.

For more on pho, check the pages in the Pho Essentials category.