Like any good multi-hour roast or complex recipe, you are preparing multiple components before assembling the final dish. Here is how this is organized, with colloquialisms that I will introduce here that carries throughout the document.
If we work backwards, is that easier for you?
If you skip to the end, I will list all the ingredients required.
But to give a tour to allow you to see how everything comes together, let’s work backwards:
The bowl itself is the final product of painstaking creation and excessive prep time/effort. Let’s divide it up into three main parts:
CONDIMENTS AND DIP (OUT OF BOWL EXPERIENCE)
On your chopsticks is a piece of beef that you dip into hoisin sauce and chili before you put it in your mouth.
You can also put noodles in your mouth, and sip some broth. If the broth remains too bland, you add fish sauce, or salt/pepper.
NOODLES AND GARNISH (IN-BOWL EXPERIENCE)
The flavouring of the broth is obviously consumed with the vermicelli noodles. Garnishing such as finely sliced green onions, finely chopped cilantro, red chilis, and thai basil are present. Bean sprouts are also popular.
There are beef parts present at this stage. You can thinly slice round eye or sirloin steak against the grain to get thin beef that will cook in the bowl as you drop into it. Or you can use other cuts (like tripe, ligament or larger strips of brisket)
Sprinkle the juice from a lime in
Can also garnish with raw white, sliced onions that will cook again once you put them into the broth
BROTH
The broth is a complex effort that is divided into the meat pot and the seasoning pot, as defined in the next section.
We continue to process the recipe backwards and we are discussing the broth pot. The broth pot is a combination of the hours-long simmering of the beef pot and combining (“pouring-in”) of the seasoning pot. This will be how I divide the section.
BEEF POT
The broth pot contains the main (and prime, as in “premium”) cuts of beef that you worked so hard to carry home on your bicycle. It will be simmered for hours to soak up all the flavour from the beef. Cuts will vary but I prefer a lean brisket and maybe one or two beef bones. Apparently you can also make legitimate pho from ground (!!!) beef, but I’ve yet to try.
You also add the uncooked onions into here. (the cooked onions are in the following section)
The beef pot was tasted partway through cooking, which added stuff like rock sugar, white sugar, salt, MSG (I personally don’t), chicken powder (I haven’t yet but will do so to salvage a screw-up)
The seasoning pot was prepared separately, as detailed below:
SEASONING POT
The seasoning pot combines several roasted seasonings and spices that you just pulled out of the oven, including, but not limited to:
This pot is boiled to create the general spice pot used for the final product.
We continue working backwards from the cuts of beef used to populate the broth pot. Whichever cut you choose, make sure you cut the into 1” strips (the increased surface area can help extract more flavour out). However, since we’re working backwards, PRIOR TO ALL THIS, you must soak the beef into a salt bath: wash the beef with water, then soak in salt, then crappily wash it off again. You have arrived at the start of the meat prep.
Peel a lot of onions (12 onions for 20 litres of product). Half will be roasted, half will remain whole. Roast the one half housed in aluminum foil until it turns yellow and smells sweet.
Grill strips of ginger or put them on a stovetop element face down until charred.
The cilantro seeds, star anise, tsaoko should be rinsed and then roasted.
This concludes the section. Sorry for writing it backwards.
Condiments
In-Bowl
Beef Pot
Seasoning Pot
Quantities