Pho Adventures

Chad and I have fallen in love with this little Vietnamese restaurant in Seaside called Pho King. And seeing as how my number one favorite hobby is cooking, I decided this week that I am going to attempt to make my own Vietnamese Beef Pho tonight for dinner. Because I'm crazy.

Now, after reading about this on several websites, the trick to making your own pho is the broth. I have never made my own broth because I didn't think I had the time or resources. So I bought a few cartons of Swanson beef broth when i did our grocery shopping for this week that I'll be using tonight.

Here is the recipe I'll be trying tonight (I made this up using several recipes online as a base)

Ingredients:
10 cups beef broth
2 limes
2 tablespoons Vietnamese fish sauce (I found a huge bottle of this for $2.79 at our local produce market. It's owned by a Korean family, and they have a wide variety of ethnic ingredients available there.)
7 oz Thai rice sticks (I found this in the Asian aisle at the grocery store)
6 green onions, sliced
1/2 yellow onion, sliced
1/2 bunch cilantro
1 lb lean beef, thinly sliced (our butcher actually sliced up a filet mignon for us using their slicing machine, so it's really thin)
1 jalapeno
Basil

Directions:
Bring beef stock to a boil in a large stock pot with the juice of the limes, sliced green and yellow onion, and fish sauce. Let stock boil for 15 minutes.
Prepare package of rice sticks, and divide into bowls. Top with broth and sliced beef. Beef will cook in hot broth.

This sounds easy enough. But I realize that we're basically eating store bought broth with some noodles, which might be tasty but is INSANELY high in sodium. Being the crazy health nuts that we are, we thought I'd atleast try this recipe to see if we liked it. And then this weekend I will venture into making my OWN beef broth.

Apparently, the trick to making beef broth is to roast beef *bones* in the oven with a bunch of cut up vegetables (such as tomatoes, celery, carrots, onion, and garlic) for a long time until they are all brown. Then boil them in water (or put them in a crock pot with water on high) with some spices, and let it go for a few hours. Strain everything out and you're left with sodium free beef broth.

Cool, but what the hell are beef bones? Can you actually BUY them? I had no idea what the hell they were or if you could actually buy them.
But, Yes! *Apparently* you can! Upon visiting Safeway's website, they sell something called Ranchers Research Beef Soup Bones for $1.79/pound. If I bought 5 pounds, it would cost ~$9, and the vegetables would be around ~$2 at the produce market. So basically, it would cost me about ~$11 to make 5 quarts of beef broth. Store bought broth costs anywhere from $3-$4 a quart. I think it's worth it.

I also learned that you can make chicken broth that same way as beef broth, but you replace the beef bones with chicken thighs.


I'll be updating during the next few days with my pho and beef broth adventures.