Try making pho (Vietnamese soup with a subtly spiced beef broth and noodles, herbs like coriander and eryngo, and beef). The time-consuming bit is making the broth, which is made really easy with a slow cooker. The remaining cooking steps are relatively straight-forward. I usually have a container with pho broth ready to go in the freezer.
Recipe, please!
Ingredients
- 1-2kg chopped beef bones. Try and get some with meat on, e.g beef shins. Oxtail is a good addition.
- 1 large brown onion, chopped roughly
- 5cm piece ginger
- 2.5L boiling water
- 6 star anise (aniseed star)
- 2 cinnamon sticks (or 1 stick cassia bark, if you have that available)
- 10 cloves
- 2 tbs coriander seeds
- 3 vietmamese cardamom pods (if you can find them. Different from normal cardamom)
- 60 ml fish sauce
- 60 ml lime juice
- 2 tbs brown sugar
- 200 g rice stick noodles
- 250 g eye fillet or other very quick-cook meat, sliced thinly (optional)
- 150g (2 cups) bean sprouts
Condiments- use selection of:
- ½ cup firmly packed fresh mint
- ½ cup firmly packed fresh coriander (cilantro)
- ½ cup firmly packed vietmanese mint (vietnamese coriander, eryngo)
- 2 long red chillies, sliced thinly
- Spring onions, sliced thinly
Method
- Place bones and water in slow cooker. Cook, covered, on low, for anywhere between 6 and 12 hours
o Bonus tip: Roasting bones, and/or char-grilling the onion and ginger (then taking off the black bits so it doesn’t colour the stock) makes for a better pho, but takes more time.
o Another bonus tip: there’ll be a bit of scum particularly the first few hours and skimming (like you would with stock) is a good idea. There will also be a bit of fat coming from the bones too that you may want to skim off at some point.
- Add onion, ginger, star anise, cinnamon, cloves, coriander seeds and cook, covered on low, for 3 hours. Add sauce, lime juice and sugar. Strain liquid through muslin. Pick off the bones any meat that looks tasty and reserve.
o Bonus tip: freeze or refrigerate as a soup base after this step.
- Place noodles in bowl with boiling water, stand 15 minutes, drain.
- Divide noodles, cooked beef, and eye fillet into bowls and pour the hot liquid soup base over it all (the eye fillet will cook). Liberally garnish with mint, vietnamese mint, coriander, spring onion and chilli to taste.
So this sounds like a fair number of ingredients but if you don’t have/want anything on the list you’re under no obligation to put all of this in. The recipe itself is relatively straight forward.