Pho Phundamentals and Calamari

In light of the fact that we only had one week before the next meeting, we decided to get on testing the pho dish before we had the meeting.

We went to Ranch 99 to get all of the ingredients. They had nice beef leg soup bones already in packages. We also got some beef flank for the cooked meat, and ready-sliced eye of round (they had them in packages for hot-pot) for the raw meat.

We parboiled the beef bones for 6 minutes.

At the same time, we charred the ginger and onions.

Once the bones were initially boiled, we took out the bones and washed the pot. This is when we realized that our pot was not big enough for the 6 quarts of water needed. So Andrew ran out to buy a new stock pot from the Marina Market.

Nice new stock pot, 20 qt capacity outta do the job. We were good to go with the spices and fish sauce. Actually it's amazing to me that this was practically all you needed for the broth. It was soooo fragrant while the broth simmered.


We let the stock simmer for 4 hours. After which, we strained the broth and then refrigerated it. The next morning the broth had a nice layer of fat on top which we took off with a slotted spoon.

Before we served, we re-boiled the broth and got all of the other ingredients ready in the bowls. We also added a lot more salt, another tablespoon of fish sauce and another half lump of rock sugar, to bring the stock to "a bit on the strong side" for seasoning, as the recipe suggested.

The pho turned out pretty good. We were surprised it tasted like pho, since the stock by itself smelled very anise-y, and we thought it'd never taste like the restaurant soup. But with all the ingredients together it indeed was a nice bowl of noodle soup. We also felt free to drink the broth since we knew there was only good stuff in there.

For appetizer, we decided to try the Salt and Pepper Calamari. We got the calamari and five-spice from whole foods, and proceeded to cut and batter it up.

We then made the spice mixture. But cut back a bit on the five-spice since it smelled very strong.

The recipe was a bit confusing at this point. It seemed like calamari should be deep fried until crispy, like many calamari appetizers elsewhere. However the recipe only called for 2 tablespoons of oil, which seems nowhere enough. We went ahead and followed the recipe anyway, but as a result ended up with something more like stir-fried calamari. However, the batter did not work well in stir-fry mode, and we ended up with a bit of a clump of calamari and spices all together. We think that next time will definitely dis-regard the recipe and deep-fry everything with more oil (like salt-pepper chicken style).