Authentic Vietnamese Pho At Home

It's pronounced fuh, not foe. If you're gonna get the name wrong, you might as well get the recipe right. We're gonna begin by making our broth, and the first step is to get a cast iron pan as hot as you can possibly get it, and while that heats up, I'll chop an onion in half, and then do the same with a piece of ginger, and once your pan is ripping hot, no oil needed, go in with your onions and ginger. The goal is to get these almost black. It's gonna add sweetness and smokiness, and this step here is gonna mimic the old school street stalls in Vietnam that would've used an open flame to make the pho. I know it seems a little bit weird to purposefully burn something, but this is one of those steps in cooking where you just have to trust the process. By now, they should've become pretty jet black. That one's pretty good, that one's really good. This piece right here is what we're going for. Once they're nice and charred, go ahead and set this carefully off to the side. I'll come back in now with a big, giant pot, because it's time to bring in the bones. What we have here is beef knuckle and ox tail, and these bones here are important for getting that nice, beefy pho broth. For now, I'm just gonna cover these all up with cold water. There's no measurement here, just go all the way until you reach the very top of the highest bone, and then I'm gonna shift this carefully off to the side and bring this to a boil. While our bones simmer, we're gonna toast our spices. First, we have this Vietnamese cinnamon. This is a beautiful cinnamon that you can see so clearly is the bark of a tree. Then, a few cardamom pods, a sprinkle of fennel seeds, then some coriander, and finally, what is the most important spice for making pho, in my opinion, star anise. These, for me, are what give pho its pho flavor. It's a little bit of a sort of licorice-y, impossible-to-replace spice. We'll toast these spices now in a dry pan for about five minutes or until nice and fragrant over low to medium heat. I don't think I'll ever get over how cool it is to use real cinnamon like this, and not only does this look better, but the smell is just the strongest, warmest, most amazing cinnamon smell you could ever imagine. You'll know these spices are done once your whole kitchen starts to smell warm and sweet and toasty. It's a hard smell to describe, but it's definitely a beautiful one. I'll pour my toasted spices carefully off to the side so we can move back to our beef bones. It looks bad, which is good. What we're doing here is removing all the nastiness from these beef bones to get a nice, clean pho broth. Vietnamese chefs call this step here making it clean. Now that it's come to a boil, I'll set a timer for 10 minutes and leave this uncovered, and then we'll come back. While we let those bones finish boiling, we're gonna make what's called a sachet with all our spices. It's an easy way to get all the flavor of these spices into our pho broth without having to dig them out later. All you do is carefully add them to the center of a few pieces of cheesecloth, then grab the corners and fold it up to make a nice little pouch, and then using a piece of butcher's twine, go ahead and tie it all up, and that's it. There's your sachet. Now that our bones have been boiling for 10 minutes, go ahead and carefully bring this whole thing over to the sink. I'm going to first dig out all the bones and set those off to the side. Then I'll give the bones a quick rinse in cold water, pour out all the nastiness and gunk from my pot, and then clean it off so we can use it again. Once we've got our clean pan again, we'll go back in with all our clean bones, and then just quickly, I'm going to chop up some daikon radish. Daikon is amazing. It actually sweetens and gives you an even cleaner pho broth, and I'm just going to chop this up into nice little sticks, and then in we go with our daikon, all of our charred aromatics, some green onions, our sachet, which has all those nice toasted spices, then some fish sauce, a bunch of cloves of garlic, optionally a little MSG, one or two small pieces of rock sugar just to sweeten things up a little bit, and last but not least, a sprinkle of salt, and then cover this all again with water, but this time we're going to keep the water, I promise. Now, bring this up to a boil. It's a lot of water, so it'll probably take a bit. You can add a lid on to help it come to a boil faster if needed, and once it does come to a boil, turn the heat down to a very gentle simmer and let it go for six hours, occasionally skimming off the foam on the top to keep the broth nice and clean. Since I knew we had to wait six hours for our broth, I figured, why not have some fun cutting our beef and bring in a whole meat slicer? What we have here are two different cuts of top round. I did get slightly higher quality beef than you might normally see in pho, just because I know it'll look better for you to see on camera, but this is very much a traditional cut of beef that you would use for pho. The goal here with this meat slicer is to get nice, thin slices that are going to cook really quickly when we add in our broth, because remember, with pho, we'll end up pouring the hot broth over the beef to cook it just before we eat it, so get them nice and thin. You obviously don't have to do this with a meat slicer. You can buy your meat pre-sliced, which is probably the easiest and best way to do it, or you can even try using a knife at home if you really want to do this yourself, but I just love that the meat slicer gives you these really beautiful curls of beef. This meat here is thin enough now that it should cook right away when we pour that hot pho broth over the top of it. Let's fast forward a little bit. It's been about three hours now with our pho broth here. Even though we had a lid on here, quite a bit of that liquid is gone. The smell is much richer and more concentrated, and it's very important now that we add in more water until all the bones are covered, because that's where we're pulling a lot of that flavor. For now, we'll just cover this again and let it cook for about three more hours. Fast forward three more hours, and it's time to strain our broth. First, I'll take everything except for the oxtail and put it into a strainer over a bowl just to catch all those extra juices. And when you do eventually find some of that oxtail, you'll want to put that into a separate bowl because we're going to eat that in just a little bit with the soup. It should be difficult to transfer some of this over. It's going to be fall apart tender if you did this right. Once you've gotten out all the bigger chunks and made sure we get all that oxtail, go ahead and lift this up. You can take this and get rid of it. You're not going to use any of this anymore. And now using whatever method you want, carefully strain out that broth. I probably could have ladled it over if I wanted to, but I was just being a little bit lazy. And now, very important, taste that broth. This is your final step to season it up before you're going to eat it. So after all that cooking, your broth should taste clean, maybe lightly beefy with a little bit of sweetness and warm spice in the background. I'm overall happy with the sweetness in mine, but I'm going to add just a touch more of that rock sugar here. I'm grating it on a microplane just to get a little bit because I don't need much, as well as just one more pinch of salt. And that should do it. To finish this off, I'll add on a lid and place this in the fridge overnight, which will give all that fat time to rise to the top, giving us a nice clean broth. While our oxtail is still nice and hot, I just want to show you how incredibly easy it is to take it off the bone. I also think it's good to do now anyways, because you're going to have to take it off the bone regardless, but just look at how easily all that meat flakes apart after you cook it for that long. It should literally just melt off the bone between your fingers. And if you really like oxtail, you could always add more at the start of the recipe because it'll only make your broth more flavorful and give you more oxtail meat. With this, I'm just going to cover it and place that in the fridge as well. Hello. I hope you guys all slept well. It's the next day. As you can see, our broth is all jello-y and gelatinous, which is great. And what's even better than that is that we can literally take this whole piece of fat off the top like a lid. We're going to keep all the broth though. This we don't need. You can get rid of this. When it turns into jello like this, it means you got all the collagen out of the bones. More importantly, it means you'll have a really good pho broth. To prep this for our pho, we'll go ahead and heat it back up. And you'll notice that all that jelly is going to melt down really fast again into a liquid. And while that heats up, we can go ahead and cook our noodles. These are rice noodles. They cook a bit different than a traditional pasta noodle cooks. And all you do is add a bit of warm water over them and then let these soak for about 20 minutes. After 20 minutes, they'll have soaked up lots of that water and should look like this. Not fully cooked yet, but part of the way there. To finish off our noodles, toss them into some boiling water and we'll cook them for just a few minutes until tender. You do not want to overcook your rice noodles. When I went to a shop in Vietnam and had authentic traditional pho, they were cooking these very, very quickly. Just like any kind of pasta or noodle, they become much too soft. Once they pass the taste test, go ahead and toss them off to the side in a colander and then bring them quickly to the sink and give them a nice rinse in cold water to rinse off the starch and so they don't stick together. With our noodles done, we'll move on to make a quick sauce. Possibly the easiest sauce you'll ever make. All we need is a bit of hoisin, sriracha and the juice of a whole lime. Like I said, easiest sauce you'll ever make. Just whisk it all up until it's consistent, give it a quick taste and set this off to the side as well. For plating, I'll start by adding a bunch of my rice noodles into a bowl. And once you're happy with how they've been arranged, go ahead and add in your oxtail, that delicious fall apart tender meat that we spent so long making with our broth, as well as your raw beef. Use whatever kind you want for this. And next, some ice cold bean sprouts. Putting them in ice water like that makes them nice and crispy. Then some Thai basil, a few mint leaves, some Vietnamese coriander. It's an amazing herb, but if you don't have this, go ahead and use cilantro. Then a few slices of jalapeno, some sliced red Thai chili for a kick of spice, a few sliced green onions, then one lime wedge. And now to finish, we'll pour that hot boiling broth all over our pho. I love watching how the meat cooks right as you pour that broth over it. Quick squeeze of lime. It's like hot pot. Watch how quickly I can cook the beef in this broth. I like to eat the beef in the sauce and I've got to try the noodles and broth together. Mm. Burned my mouth. I don't even care. That is how you make pho. Just kidding. Pho.