Pho For Four in 45

Growing up in the midwest, I had never heard of Pho.  So when I moved to New York, this was a strange concept to me - noodle soup that was neither bland chicken noodle or an oversized bowl of wonton soup?  Blasphemy!  But you know what, Pho is a delicious part of Vietnamese culinary heritage, and I became addicted to as soon as I knew what it was.  A hearty, filling, spicy, rich, yet light soup that offers a huge amount of complexity, but is basically served on tap in Vietnamese restaurants, is cheap, and just makes you happy about life.  Whenever I am sick, the first thing I do is get a huge bowl of Pho, and that starts me on my road to recovery.  And when I'm not sick, it's even better.

Don't be fooled about a few Pho-related things.  First, it's not pronounced like "faux", it's pronounced like "fuh".  As in, the pun "pho on the floor" is technically improper, while the pun "what the pho" is valid.  I realize my title is therefore off, but it's the best I got.  Second, don't think you can wander into a Pho shop and just order anything on the menu.  It turns out the Vietnamese people eat a lot of strange cuts of beef (technically, I believe they usually use water buffalo), including 'tendon' and tripe (stomach).  But not me!  We're using top round, so don't give up on me, reader.

This recipe requires very little special equipment, though it can be helped by a meat slicer if you happen to have one (which you don't).  The premise of the dish is to get the broth rocket hot and then cook the thinly sliced beef at the last instant, so it needs to be as thin as possible.  My version uses meat sliced on a deli slicer, but you could partially freeze and slice by hand, or buy it thinly shaved at most Asian grocers.

The defining component to the Pho broth is anise seeds - don't omit these!  They taste like licorice and look like starfish, and without them the broth won't taste at all like it should.  For the record, I hate licorice, yet love this broth.

Star anise - the key ingredient in Pho broth

Most recipes for Pho call for making stock from beef bones for 4-6 hours, which I didn't want to do.  To make this soup at home, I was prepared to cheat slightly, but not to the point where I was buying Pho soup powder.  My version can be made in 45 minutes, which I feel is a significant improvement, and still tastes fairly authentic.  If you really want to, go ahead and take a day off to make this soup - it will be much better, and you'll feel like something was accomplished.  But if you don't feel like wasting a day, just try this recipe, which I have fused from 2 online recipes and my own observations.  The results are about 95% as good, plus you will have 5 extra hours of your life back.

Fast Pho

Adapted from Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table and Recipelink

Makes 4 servings.

• 1 cup thick-sliced onions, about 1 large
• 2 inches peeled fresh ginger, sliced into 1/3" thick rounds (skin on)
• 10 star anise pods
• 6 whole cloves
• 3 tablespoons sugar
• 5 cups non-fat, reduced-sodium beef broth
• 5 cups water
• 4-6 Tbsp. Asian fish sauce, or to taste

• 3 oz. dried rice stick noodles
• 6 oz. fresh bean sprouts
• 3/4 lb. lean beef (I used top round), sliced about 1/16" - 1/8" thick
• 1/4 cup each finely-minced packed fresh cilantro, basil (preferably holy basil), and/or mint leaves
• 1/4 cup finely minced green tops of scallions
• Sriracha (Thai / Vietnamese hot sauce, aka 'Rooster' sauce based on the label on the bottle)
• 4 lime wedges
• Hoisin sauce
• 1 jalapeno, sliced into thin rounds (optional)

Over a gas burner (your grill or stovetop), char the onions and ginger over an open flame, turning to get a good char on both sides.  Remove from heat, cool enough to handle, and peel skin from edges of ginger.  In a small dry pan, lightly toast the anise seeds and cloves.

Charring the onions on the stove

Place broth and water to a large pot and add the ginger and onion slices, as well as the anise, cloves, and sugar.  Simmer uncovered for 30 minutes while you prepare the remainder of the ingredients.

Simmering the aromatics in the broth.  I have since doubled the broth recipe, so pretend the level is higher

Boil enough water to cover the dried rice stick noodles, and place in a large bowl or shallow dish to cover.  Allow the noodles to reconstitute for 15-20 minutes, or as indicated on the package of noodles.  This can vary significantly depending on what size noodles you use, so be careful not to oversoak or the noodles turn to mush.

While noodles are cooking, prepare the beef - slice thinly, either with a slicer or with a knife.  If you need to slice by hand, freezing the beef for up to an hour will make the job significantly easier.  You want to get this as thin as possible without chopping off fingers by accident.

Slicing the beef paper thin.  Note that all of my fingers are still firmly attached

As noodles are finishing soaking, stir the fish sauce into the broth, and allow it to simmer for a few minutes.  Strain the broth through a strainer (potentially lined with cheesecloth if you're really inclined, which I wasn't) to remove the onions, ginger, and whole spices.  Return stock to pot and bring back to a boil.  Drain rice noodles, and portion into four serving bowls.

Strain the broth and return to a boil

Now here's where I diverge from most recipes.  To be safe, I like to throw the beef into the large pot of boiling broth rather than cooking in the serving bowls, which would otherwise seem like a recipe for disaster at home.  But seriously, don't leave the beef in for more than about 30 seconds.  Just toss it in, stir it around, and when there's no more raw color (pink is fine), you are DONE.  Serve immediately.

I added the beef for about 30 seconds and stirred it until I was sure it wouldn't be raw (NOT until it was fully cooked)

To serve, put 1/4 of the sprouts in each bowl over the noodles.  Ladle broth and beef mixture into individual bowls.  Garnish bowls with herbs (I used Thai basil and cilantro), green onions, jalapeno slices, Sriracha, lime wedges, and hoisin sauce.  If you want to let people have fun, put all of these condiments out at the table, and let everyone garnish as they see fit.  Now enjoy!  You've just made an easy Pho soup in 45 minutes - aren't you the lucky one.

The finished Pho, garnished the way we like it.  The meat is barely cooked, the broth is light and flavorful, and it didn't take 6 hours to prepare

The Meat Goes On

And on, and on.  I probably should have thought this through, because now I have 4 pounds of beef that's going bad, with increasingly less desire to eat it.  Last night was a decent steak salad, but I think I was forcing it.  The avocado was probably the best part of the whole experience.

I tried a new approach to the slicing, making sure to orient the roast so I was slicing against the grain.  This makes the resulting slices much more tender, since you're not gnawing on long muscle bits but rather a whole bunch of shorter fibers.  And if you didn't want to think about meat that way, sorry for ruining the mystique, but it's true.  Another good discovery was that if you look behind the blade to see what's coming out, you can control the speed a lot better, and get much more even slices that don't fall apart in the blade.  So I got a big tub of fresh sliced meat, ready to be made into sandwiches.  Now all I need is motivation to eat them.

Thin-cut, delicious looking homemade roast beef.  And this is just half of it!

Slices can get pretty thin once you know how to work the slicer

Anyway, salad recipe below.

Steak Salad
 

• 1/4 pound top round, sliced 1/4" thick and cut into strips
• 2 cups spring greens
• 1/2 tomato
• 1/2 avocado
• 1/4 red onion
• 1/2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
• 1/2 tbsp balsamic vinegar (good stuff, please - otherwise you're not getting the full experience)
• Sea salt and cracked black pepper

Prepare the greens, onion, and tomato.  Make sure the lettuce is dry, or else the salad dressing won't stick, and it's going to be a mess.  Slice avocado thinly just before plating, so it won't brown before you can get at it.

Toss greens, onion, and tomato with salt, pepper, oil and balsamic in a large bowl.  I find that the best way to do this is by hand, but only if nobody's watching.  A small bowl will result in greens on the table and on your shirt, so go big.  If you add the salt and dressing too early, the greens may wilt or lose their fresh taste - always dress your salad within a couple minutes of plating.

To serve, assemble the plate with all ingredients as you see fit.  Be creative!  Fan the avocado, or stand things up, or put everything in separate piles, or in a big tower.  If salads aren't fun to prepare, they're not going to be fun to eat, so enjoy it or you'll just be another one of those somber lettuce eaters, like a giraffe or the lonesome triceratops.

Steak salad.  Not bad, but I would normally prefer a different cut from top round here

Perfect Roast Beef

I ate some really bad meat the other day.  You know the kind - the 'turkey' you buy at the grocery store in the pre-sealed tubs.  But it's not turkey, it's some kind of loaf, and the ingredient list is longer than a graduate thesis.  I know how they get it - they take meat trimmings, grind them up, and then cook them slowly in a mold, letting the proteins coagulate into a kind of 'meat brick'.  But I'd rather be building houses with these things than eating them; the consistency isn't right, and you don't really know what you're eating.  This is why hot dogs and I don't get along - don't bother digging into what those things are made out of if you plan to keep eating them.  Also, just because we CAN make something doesn't mean we should.  So I'm taking a stand - I'm making my own deli meats.

Boom.  Homemade roast beef bagel sandwich.

As part of my 'you can do it yourself' mania, I decided recently that I needed to buy a deli slicer.  Like the ones at the grocery store, but probably less safe.  You know, one of these things:

My new finger / meat slicer

Like an addiction, I can't seem to get these ideas out of my head until they're done, so now here I am, proud owner of a meat slicer.  So now I've got this thing, and together we're going to draw a line in the sand at the deli counter and say "no!  I'm not eating meat where I can't see muscle fibers any more!  I'll start my own deli, at home, with more alcohol and better television".  And that's how we convinced ourselves to buy a meat slicer.

I bought a 4.5 pound beef roast, top round, choice cut - nothing fancy.  Granted, roast beef is typically one of the meats in the deli that actually is a real cut of meat, but I'm starting there anyway.  At least this way I know exactly what other ingredients went into my lunch meats - beef, and nothing else.  And to kick this adventure off right, I roasted it according to a new recipe my mom found for me in Saveur #137.  The idea is to get a roasted hunk of meat that looks just like the deli's cuts - red all the way to the edges, instead of your usual gray outer ring with a bit of red in the center.

2014-01-26 update: I'm updating this recipe to my own modified version, which gets even better results and employs the time-honored tradition of 'thinking about what you are doing before you actually start', which in this case required a couple of half-decent attempts and a working knowledge of thermodynamics.

Perfect Roast Beef

• Five pound roast, preferably top sirloin to avoid the need for tenderizing the meat
• Salt
• Pepper

Stage 1: Roasting

Season the roast with salt and pepper.  Take a large, heavy skillet, preferably cast iron, and heat it up dry,  getting it up not quite to smoking temperature, but pretty close.  You're going to sear this bugger on all sides, but do so in a very particular way.  What I mean is this: once the pan is hot, place the meat in the pan on one of its faces.  Leave it there for a few minutes, then take it out of the pan completely, and rest it on a plate.  Now let the pan get rocket-hot again, and repeat this process with a fresh face of the meat.  Why are we doing this, you ask?  Because we want the surface of the meat to be perfectly browned as an artifact of the delicious maillard reaction, which, like caramelization, develops complex flavor profiles (and does not "sear in the juices", as was debunked by Alton Brown on Good Eats), and we want to do it quickly.  The first time I tried this, I got a nicely browned outside, but it took longer than I wanted to, as the cool meat hitting the pan caused fluctuations in the pan surface temperature, which in turn had to keep heating up to searing temperature over a longer period of time in contact with the meat.  If one could reduce the time that the meat is being exposed to very high temperatures, which can somewhat substantially penetrate into the core of the roast, one could ensure that the browning of the meat would not get in any further than the outermost shell of the meat.  Look, it's hard to explain without a diagram, a series of videos, and a number of formulas, so just take my word for it.  Sear, remove, pause, repeat until browned on all sides.

I call this "meat mountain"

Look at how thin the depth of penetration of heat is into the meat.  Brown on the outermost 1/32", and then just starting to turn for the next 1/8"- 1/4".  Let's see what this looks like once fully cooked.

Now, place the quickly browned roast on a rack in a roasting pan in the oven and cook at 200 degrees (F) for 3 hours 20 minutes, until a probe thermometer in the center reads 130 degrees**.

**Raw meat alert: if you are the meat police, or know them, you are fully aware that all meat should be cooked to above 145 degrees to kill off harmful E. Coli bacteria and other food-bourne illnesses (I'm serious - see the Beef: It's What's for Dinner official guidance).  But if you want to eat good meat, you probably ignore this all the time and realize that whole muscle cuts can be cooked to pretty much whatever temperature you like, and you're probably going to be fine 99% of the time.  And come on, look at that guy in the video!  Who are you going to trust, him or me?

This is not a fast process.  Expect a cool 5 pound roast to take about 2.5 hours to fully come up to temperature.  On the upside, the place is going to smell like the best local deli restaurant kitchen you've  ever eaten at, and it's going to do so for the better part of the day.

After the final side is seared

Temperature once pulled: 130 deg F.  This is from my 2013 attempt

Stage 2: Slicing

The slicer works!  While I'm no expert in carvery, I was able to put whole meat in one and get sliced meat out the other, which is always a good thing.  Plus, I retained all my fingers.  Also, the roast beast came out looking impressive, and after one iteration came out perfectly.  I'll show pictures from both attempts.  Even on the first attempt, it was red almost all the way out to the edges, which is a first for me.  Photos below - thickness can get down to maybe 1/16" - 1/8" before it starts to disintegrate, but that's adequate for my kind of sandwiches.  You have to vary the speed with which you slide the meat past the blade as you adjust the thickness, which is an art that I will probably never be able to master.

The roast beast, 2011 attempt

Locked and loaded

Here's what an almost perfectly roasted cut of beef should look like... (2011)

And here's what a completely perfect roast looks like (2013).  The difference - pausing between searing each side, allowing the pan to come to temperature.  There's about 1/4" ring of meat that is kept more red and more moist by this method.

Another look at the improved method (2013)

Savoring the sliced meat on a bagel sandwich (2013)

Like the Seinfeld tip calculator: it does other things!

I had lunch and dinner plans the day of this experiment, but I was so eager to try the product that I made a breakfast roast beef sandwich.  Another valuable lesson learned - a breakfast beef sandwich is gross.  But it did give me an opportunity to see what else can be sliced well, such as tomatoes and onions.  Bonus.