Pho Bo

Name: Pho Bo (Vietnamese Beef Soup)
Yield: Serves 6
Cuisine: Vietnam
Ingredients: 1 cinnamon stick; 1 pound raw sirloin, very thinly sliced; 3 scallions, trimmed and chopped (both white and green parts); 1 piece star anise; Fresh coriander sprigs (cilantro or, preferably, the more pungent variety with saw-toothed leaves called ngo gai in Vietnamese or culantro in Caribbean markets); chopped fresh green chilies; Lime wedges; 4 quarts cold water; 1 tablespoon salt; 2 teaspoons fennel seeds; 1 bay leaf; 4 cloves; 1 medium onion, unpeeled; 3 tablespoons bottled Vietnamese fish sauce (nuoc mam); 3 pounds beef shin or oxtail (with bones); 4 quarts water; Salt; One 3-inch piece ginger, unpeeled; 1 bundle Chinese rice vermicelli

Vietnamese Beef Soup

Preparation info

Serves
6

Difficulty
Medium

Appears in

The Cook’s Canon

By Raymond Sokolov

Published 2003

About

As an American newspaper food editor during the Vietnam War, I made it my business to seek out Vietnamese food. Had I been in Saigon, this would have been easy, but in America it was something of a challenge. There were very few Vietnamese in the country and no Vietnamese restaurants in the New York area. I did manage to locate a cluster of them around Fort Bragg, the North Carolina home base of the 82d Airborne Division and the Special Forces (Green Berets). A former military language inst

Ingredients

Asia
Vietnam
Ho Chi Minh City
Southeast Asia
Soup
Spring

Ingredients

Method