Daring Cooks Challenge: Vietnamese Pho

The October 2009 Daring Cooks’ challenge was brought to us by Jaden of the blog Steamy Kitchen. The recipes are from her new cookbook, The Steamy Kitchen Cookbook.

Whee! What a great excuse to make chicken stock! The details of that are in another post, but what I wound up with were 3 quarts of dark amber roasted chicken goodness. Good stock is essential as pho is very simple though endlessly variable.

I haven't had much from Southeast Asia and I've never had pho from a Vietnamese cafe, only from American cafes. We do have a "Little Saigon", so to speak, in Salt Lake, but honestly, I haven't had much occasion to trek down there and try the establishments. But, I did stop at a little market there a while back and picked up some rice stick noodles for some future dish -- looks like it was my lucky day to mix 'em up!

My homemade chicken stock, like all of my stocks, was very lightly salted, almost to the point of being unsalted. I do this because if I want to reduce one of my stocks for a sauce, I don't want it to be oversalted at the end. It also gives me more room to play with how I want that salt to be added. In this case, I opted for soy sauce to bring the needed salt and add a bit more flavor.

I'll be honest, though. I didn't have high hopes for this recipe at first. You see, it combines two flavors my husband absolutely hates: ginger and anise. He was a good sport about it and willing to try it. I promised him a pizza if he hated it (he demurred and said he'd cook something up for himself if he couldn't eat it). But when I tasted the broth, it didn't taste overwhelmingly gingery. It tasted really good -- which my husband confirmed!

When all was said and done and served, the verdict was as follows: Without reservation, this is fantastic and absolutely worth making. I will make this again. My husband wants me to make the broth again soon so that he can have it to drink with buljona pīrādziņi! He loved it! I loved it too -- it's a very clean, rich and intensely flavorful broth. (I will, however, take partial credit for this, as the broth was based off of a homemade chicken stock.)

We weren't given much license to play around with this, though I still managed a few little tweaks. :) I admit I didn't use anywhere near the quantity of noodles she called for because there's just only so many noodles I can handle.

The other half of the challenge, where we had full rein to play will be posted shortly.