Cooking For Engineers

[DrBiggles]

Favorite foods eh? Lately been the Pho, Vietnamese noodle soup. I've had Pho 3 times in the last week and today was the best ever, a Seafood Pho. For 5.50 you get a huge bowl of broff, a container of noodles and assorted meats, another container with bean sprouts, cilantro, sliced hot peppers and a wedge of lemon. Install this in to your hot broth, let steep and off you go. It doesn't seem to matter what meats or tofu you get, it's bright, rich (lots of fat in the broths) and enough for 2 people. Or one hungry Biggles. It takes every muscle I've got to drink the last teaspoon down there's so much. But it's so good, I have to.

Biggles

[Johneegeek]

[Michael Chu]

My wife likes pho (which my friends pronounce "FUH" - I say either "FUH" or "FOE" depending on who I'm with and which pronunciation will lessen confusion) but I've never taken a liking to it. The noodles taste a bit odd to me.

However, I've never had it the way Dr. Biggles has described it. It's always served already in the broth and never enough for two (although one bowl is a lot).

Do you have a particular pho shop you would recommend? I'd drive an hour to try pho a slightly different way... (and seafood sounds really good)

Michael

[Aileen]

Fortunately, here in SoCal, there are LOTS of places to get a bowl of Pho!

Seems to me that it is pronounced "fuh", as in "What the Pho?", the favorite T-shirt of my son's Vietnamese pal. My kid's fav T-shirt says, "Got Rice?" and features a rice cooker on the back, but I digress.

An episode of "Calling All Cooks" on the Food Network featured a woman who learned how to make pho for her adopted Vietnamese child. It was a time-consuming task, which is probably why it tastes so good.

I usually see it offered with various cuts of beef (the traditional version?), but Dr. B's seafood version sounds like another variation. Was it shellfish or fish or a combo?

[capstinence]

We should have a CookingforEngineers SoCal Pho Meeting!

[DrBiggles]

[Niko]

In Seattle the soup is pronounced "FUH", but no one really seems to care how you say it -- it's just wonderful. Pho joints are as ubiquitous as Starbucks around here. My favorite version is at a restaurant called Than Vi, on Jackson St. It is listed as "Beef Sate Special" -- basically a pho bac (beef), in a very spicy broth with crushed peanuts; rice or egg noodles, bean sprouts, basil leaf, lime wedges and jalapeno slices on the side. I love Vietnamese food in general, which is lucky since Seattle abounds with good Viet and Thai restaurants (and sucks with Italian and Mexican, but that's another story).

[sweet june]

we grew up calling it what our mom calls it-- "fah," with a down-then-up inflection.

anyway, it's my #1 favorite food that i can't find a decent vegetarian version of. especially when i'm visiting mom in SoCal. everybody always has to get all "authentic" on me and use beef or chicken broth...

best version imho is with chicken broth (chicken stock prepared w/ anise, coriander, ginger, pepper, etc), cellophane noodles (i know rice noodles are the standard-- but try them w/ the mung cellophane noodles sometime-- i love them), rare beef sliced so thin that the heat of the broth cooks them to medium-rare, thin-sliced onions, basil, cilantro, bean sprouts, scallions, lime and mint. nuc mam to taste. omg. my aunts like it with cartiledge, too, but that undoes the "omg" factor for me and turns it into "omg yuck."

[tinut]

i learned to pronounce it the same way as the above poster, from my vietnamese mother. say "fuh" as if you are asking a question, "fuh?" it has a rise at the end, a little extension.

[Jay Francis]

Pho is a vietnamization of the French name "pot au feu'

[Guest]

wake up and smell the (horribly adulterated with milk vietnamese) coffee. Pho is soup. I got a round-eyes (yeah that's what they call us behind our backs) strong suspicion that the ingredients depend upon what was left over from yesterday's entree's.

The Filipinos are just as bad. They have a dish they call sinigang. hey, it's soup.


I guess the next thing is gonna be: a wave of Iraqi restaurants opening all over america, with some hard-to-pronounce dish that sure LOOKS and TASTES like - soup. The ingredients will vary each day, depending upon what the owner found for cheap that day in whatever place gave him the best credit terms.

sites like chowhound.com will start filling up with chatter about which one has the absolute best hard-to-pronounce dish.

Disclosure. I actually live in provincial places in Asia. unlike the non-profit do-gooders, who parachute in for a couple of weeks, I haven't lost my common sense. The locals are just average people, same like you and me.


yeah, they do have a tendency to chow down on stuff that we would serve to stray cats, but even the peasants eat plenty of burgers and fries. I even seen bagels at one province capital. Of course, they forgot to boil them before baking. I tried to explain. didn't help.

[DrBiggles]