Interesting to see this posted, as it's quite an old recipe (the oldest capture I could find on the Wayback Machine was from 2015 although I'm pretty confident it's older than that; as an aside, can I say how annoying it is when websites only have an "updated on" or "edited on" date and not a date for when it was originally written?). It's also one of my favorites of Kenji's though and a regular in our home.
I think that Kenji's series of pressure cooker recipes are probably my favorites of everything he did when he was doing The Food Lab section. Almost every recipe is fantastic and they are mostly pretty easy. If I had to pick my single favorite, it would probably be the pressure cooker chicken enchilads [0], although that one is on the higher end of the effort spectrum
The article about ramen made me salivate, so I thought, hey, I know ramen is gonna put me in a comma, let me MacGyver pho - because the closest place to me that serves pho is named "Sushi Thai", so you know... :)
In this Florida weather, "Okroshka soup" [0] is more appropriate (Eastern European summer soup), but it's too much to chop and I already had nice bones for a pho.
Checking the source of the recipe page, there's a schema.org object in there that says
"datePublished": "2015-01-08T03:45:00-05:00"
So I'd believe it's from 2015
Always wanted to try pressure cooker recipes, they look so good, but haven't been able to justify the purchase yet
michaelsmanley 22 hours ago [-]
I had my doubts about my pressure cooker when I received it, as I recalled the monstrosity my mother used when I was a kid. But that thing gets used several times a week now.
Combined with a recipe from Kenji, I'm going to have to try it. I have yet to make anything from Serious Eats, and particularly Kenji's recipes, that I didn't enjoy making and eating.
fouc 6 hours ago [-]
I once bought a digital/electric pressure cooker for $50 CAD barely used off craigslist in Toronto. They're not that expensive.
jghn 20 hours ago [-]
One thing that's worth noting. I don't know about this one but a number of those old SE pressure cooker recipes don't translate to Instant Pots. I'm thinking of Gritzer's french onion soup in particular. For those who have an instant pot as their pressure cooker, check the reviews of the recipes.
MengerSponge 16 hours ago [-]
Plug-in pressure cookers like Instant Pots don't run at the same pressure/temperature as stovetop models. Electric models apparently run at ~12psi on high pressure mode, while stovetop models can run at 15psi. This means the timing is substantially different between the two.
Electric models can run unattended, so the slightly longer cook time isn't a deal-breaker. I'm a huge fan of Serious Eat's Colombian stew, which I can throw in the pot then go to the gym or out for errands and come home to a hot meal.
https://www.seriouseats.com/colombian-chicken-stew-with-pota...
cf100clunk 6 hours ago [-]
I hasten to add that an old school manual pressure cooker can be used on natural gas, propane, and electric stoves, any camp stove, or over a fire. With a bit of lye added, it can be used as a world class autoclave for sterilizing metal instruments and utensils with almost any available water that has not been chemically polluted. The caveat is that it must never be left cooking unattended.
I'll be trying this recipe.
mordechai9000 5 hours ago [-]
I also want to add something. The new pressure cookers, stovetop or electric, are much less risky than the old school version with the rocker switch. Those could get clogged with food and they had no backup relief mechanism, as far as I know, anyway.
The ones used now have a primary valve that controls the cooking pressure, a secondary valve that will release if the primary fails, and the silicon gasket for the lid, which acts as a tertiary pressure release if the first two fail.
I know some people, like my mother-in-law, have stories of pressure cookers failing and spewing soup at high velocity all over the kitchen. I think that was more of a feature of the older version. And probably required some carelessness to achieve even then.
netsharc 23 hours ago [-]
The "updated/edited on" date is so that it'll say "2026", and search engine and searchers think "oh a freshly written article".. although that hardly matters for recipes.
Thanks, SEO.
t-3 16 hours ago [-]
If you want less labor-intensive enchiladas, try stacking El Paso style instead of rolling. They have to be eaten on the spot rather than stored casserole-style, but I much prefer this style.
tclancy 21 hours ago [-]
Kenji’s stuff definitely goes back further. There was an article about Greek pizza that mentioned a place I loved in Newport, RI and I swear it was originally from 2002.
m4r71n 1 days ago [-]
In a similar vein, Chris Young has a fantastic video on making world class chicken stock in 60 minutes using a pressure cooker: https://youtube.com/watch?v=3k20zFlbFfE.
Cider9986 1 days ago [-]
I'm not convinced by his 350° searing temperature for steaks and his idea about searing from frozen doesn't turn out well because there's no time for the salt to penetrate.
His video showing that you can speed up a reverse sear starting at a higher temperature was really helpful though.
Haven't tried his pressure cooker video because I don't have one. I will get one eventually but probably not a multi cooker. I have heard great things about them.
Hikikomori 22 hours ago [-]
Salt won't penetrate much in even an hour unless it's very thin, overnight dry brining is better though.
what 23 hours ago [-]
You can’t actually do it in 60 minutes. It takes longer to reach pressure and then release pressure even with his tricks. At least with an instapot.
But I do generally follow this method. I put the chicken meat in a soup sock though, so I can pull it out and add it to a soup or whatever instead of throwing it away. It will be kind of dry chicken though.
julianlam 22 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I do the same. Soup sock in a vacuum cooker. It's the chinese way to make soup. The chicken does turn out dry. Perhaps it's worth taking the chicken mear out (leaving the bones) after an hour and adding it back after the soup is done.
simondotau 12 hours ago [-]
I would rather have the real chicken aroma in the stock liquid, and I consider bland meat a sign of a successful extraction. Why would I want to stop that happening?
I find that trying to keep the natural flavour of chicken meat in soups is a fool's errand anyway. I don't know if it makes a difference, but if I'm returning the meat into soup I will separate it, put the pieces in a small tupperware along with a ton of chicken stock powder, and just enough water to cover. It then sits in the fridge until the soup is 10 minutes from ready.
simondotau 12 hours ago [-]
My five-year-old Breville Fast Slow Pro has a menu setting for making stock under pressure, and follows the formula Chris Young describes precisely. 60 minute cook time with slow steam release.
Somewhat ironically, before I watched that video I had been manually increasing the cook time to 90 minutes. I thought I was being clever and would get better extraction. After I watched the video I realised that maybe the people who made the machine probably knew what they were doing.
vient 22 hours ago [-]
Just learned about Kenji by finding his "The Best Chili Ever" recipe [0] through Reddit and immediately his another recipe appears on HN. Baader-Meinhof strikes again.
Is this the one where he adds espresso and chocolate? So good!
sicvita 1 days ago [-]
Love that this popped up on HN. Been making this recipe regularly for going on 14 (?) years now.
stevenaenns 24 hours ago [-]
same here, one of my family's favorites
stasomatic 1 days ago [-]
There was a recent submission on HN about ramen. While I love ramen/udon/soba, I prefer pho. Perhaps I find pho more "crispy", I like the sprouts/lime/mint/jalapeno. Ramen puts me to sleep. Ramen definitely has more pedigree, this isn't about what's better.
Cider9986 24 hours ago [-]
They are both some of my favorite foods. I've made pho probably 4 times at this point. It takes 8 to 10 hours but is totally worth it.
Something I started doing was occasionally taking the rare thin meat out for use with the sriracha and sweet sauce. I never added then to the soup because I found it corrupts it.
There's also Northern Vietnamese Pho which I haven't tried but I'd like to. It's supposed to be less sweet and less spiced. In the US it seems southern sweet style is the norm.
jandrewrogers 18 hours ago [-]
Southern Viet Pho is not supposed to be sweet.
Northern Pho is in almost all ways inferior to Southern Pho. Even Northerners tend to prefer the Southern style. Something important to understand is that the Northern style is essentially the starvation version of the Southern style. The south is the main agricultural region of the country, so they had ready access to ingredients, like meat, that were difficult to come by in the North. The styles reflect this reality.
hvng24 5 hours ago [-]
Northerner here, and Southern Pho is sweeter. Probably not noticeable to non-natives, but we always detect a slight sweetness in Southern food. Pho originated from the North, and I don't know anyone who actually comes from the North and prefers Southern pho. They exist, I'm sure, but while living abroad, the most common complaint with Northern Vietnamese is the lack of Northern-style pho.
Not sure about being inferior, but we like our broth to be clear. If you want heavy broth, you'll need to tell the restaurant to give you "fat broth". Maybe it started with us being poor, but we're not anymore. We want the broth flavor to come mostly from high-quality bone broth, not overly spiced. Same for the meat; most Hanoi Pho restaurants don't serve meatballs. We prefer high-quality rare beef over a random mix of beef. Northern Pho always comes with fresh, flat, and wide noodles. Outside of Vietnam, restaurants usually use narrower noodles, and usually not fresh. Sometimes they charge more for fresh noodles. It’s very common to eat Pho with a fried dough stick in the North. We dip them into the broth.
Cider9986 14 hours ago [-]
Thanks for the info.
Yeah I don't like it sweet but it has sugar. Worse Pho places in the us will be sweet.
madhacker 23 hours ago [-]
The ubiquitous Southern-style pho in America is due to historical reasons, when Southern Vietnamese diaspora fled Saigon en masse in the aftermath of the fall of Saigon.
stasomatic 24 hours ago [-]
Do you mean after the meat sat a bit in the broth? I’m no stranger to tartar or raw meats, just not clear.
Cider9986 23 hours ago [-]
Yeah. Cook it to how you like it and then dip in Sriracha and or the sweet one. But you could also do it with the braised meat or anything as well
I love the meat straight from the broth so I mostly do that but the sauces are a traditional option it seems.
stasomatic 22 hours ago [-]
Thank you. If you have a Trader Joe’s near you (it’s a chain in the states for anyone wondering), they have a pretty good chilly paste named “Bomba Hot Pepper”. It has a punch, but it’s not EMP level, not too sweet, not too acidy. Half a teaspoon does it for me.
I do have some Asian markets near me within reasonable driving distance, but I can’t try all the sauces and the ones I have tried leaned toward the sweeter side, and that’s not for me. This Bomba hits me where it matters.
I'll check it out. Although I didn't like their sriracha or chilli oil.
Their peanut butter cups are my favorite sweet. The ones in the plastic bags are better than in thr large container. (Darker chocolate and more salt).
MomsAVoxell 1 days ago [-]
As a lover of both pho and ramen I feel I can compel with you on the crispy factor - like pho is more for a jungle - and also on the food coma factor of ramen - a meal for the monsoons, perhaps - but nevertheless need to point out to you that there are also crispy ramens, with sprouts/lime/mint/japaleno, too.
In fact there is no ‘one ramen’, it has to be said; there are regional variants where the “scrap food” of the area is used as the decoration to the base, where a noodle and boiled-meat leftover soups/stock are combined …
I have very sleepy pho’s in my neighborhood, also .. just sayin’. Both are great, you’re right, they are a wonderful branch of food.
fallinghawks 1 days ago [-]
Particularly tonkotsu, which basically has fat emulsified into it. My understanding is that ramen was originally a workman's meal -- inexpensive and calorie rich food for laborers.
markerz 1 days ago [-]
I had a Japanese teacher a few years ago who explained that Japan's ramen is the US's "burger and fries". It's calorie-rich processed food that's available everywhere. They are prepared in advance, served very quickly (usually within a few minutes), and people finish their meals within 15 minutes. It's far closer to "fast food" than most Westerners realize. The average ramen outside Japan is far more elevated than within Japan.
decimalenough 23 hours ago [-]
The average ramen, yes, but in the same way that many people in the US obsess about the perfect burger, there is a serious ramen scene in Japan with obsessive ramen devotees and chefs pushing the envelope.
bigstrat2003 22 hours ago [-]
I would say the average ramen in the US is instant ramen, so I think that the "cheap easy food" angle still goes on here.
bookofjoe 1 days ago [-]
Instant (4 minutes in microwave) tonkotsu @$2.79 is surprisingly good:
These come in a 6 pack at Costco (not black garlic though; Costco's comes with hot oil). They're surprisingly tasty for instant.
Hikikomori 1 days ago [-]
Best pho I had was in Tokyo, thinly sliced raw wagyu melted into the soup. Though theres as many ramen styles as there are cities in Japan, some style would likely suit you.
dcrazy 1 days ago [-]
Yes, tori paitan is one nice light alternative to the popular and heavy tonkotsu.
guessmyname 1 days ago [-]
I’m not entirely sure what makes this hacker news?
Is the hack that it’s supposedly doable in under 30 minutes?
Larrikin 1 days ago [-]
Kenji worship can be a little weird, but assuming because of his heritage means he can't cook Pho is ridiculous. His contributions to Serious Eats and America's Test Kitchen have immensely pushed food science forward.
eutropia 1 days ago [-]
the person cooking it is Kenji Lopez-Alt, who is an MIT graduate turned professional chef, and his wife is the one who's colombian.
He's got several excellent cookbooks (like the Food Lab and Wok) and is a regular contributor to serious eats and has youtube etc...
1 days ago [-]
malnourish 1 days ago [-]
Ex-wife. I was not aware he went to MIT though (got a degree in architecture)
jdironman 24 hours ago [-]
Still, doesn't really make sense to be here. Content not author is what matters usually.
dghlsakjg 19 hours ago [-]
He takes a scientific approach to cooking, and could accurately be described as coming up with techniques that are in the spirit of finding non-traditional ways of doing things.
He hacks food in other words.
Someone doing a technical write up about a new technique in their discipline is pretty hacker news to me.
stasomatic 23 hours ago [-]
OP here. Apologies if I overstepped, but it is kind of about hacking the prep. I was simply piggybacking on another thread about ramen, I wasn’t thinking of the hacking angle at that moment.
tptacek 19 hours ago [-]
You didn't overstep, the preceding comment did. Anything that's interesting is on-topic here; even if the recipe isn't a "hack", if it's interesting it's a legit submission.
sph 14 hours ago [-]
That’s such a nonsense rule that will eventually turn this site into cat and rage posting like the vast majority of social media. That’s no wonder the posts become more and more mediocre and inoffensive if the only validity metric is ‘what the majority decide is good enough’
I am interested in many things, most of them are not what I want to see on Hacker News.
tptacek 6 hours ago [-]
It's always been the rule, so you might want to start a different site!
CTDOCodebases 22 hours ago [-]
I appreciate the post if counts for anything. Cooking hacks to save time or elevate a dish to the next level or even allow me to make something without the proper equipment are always good to add to the toolbox. The coffee I am drinking right now is an example of that.[0][1]
I popped in here just to say I would fight anyone who asked why Kenji would be on HackerNews and yet I was too late.
Also, authenticity about recipes is the “but does it scale” of app discussions. It’s ok to just let people enjoy stuff. Not everything is a purity test.
fallinghawks 1 days ago [-]
Kenji Lopez Alt is a well known chef who writes a lot about the science behind making food (which might contribute to it being HN-worthy). Though I understand where you're coming from, his ethnicity (Caucasian and Japanese; the Lopez comes from his wife) is irrelevant in the light of the fact that he is a professional chef.
Pho bo (beef pho) typically takes at least 8 hours and is better simmered overnight, so cutting it down to 30 minutes and still having a good result is very useful.
jarvist 1 days ago [-]
The statement that electric pressure cookers measure pressure absolutely (i.e. not relative to local pressure) was news to me, and definitely a good hack to know if you're living at altitude.
MegaDeKay 1 days ago [-]
Electric cookers don't "measure" pressure. They are thermostatically controlled via a sensor touching the bottom of the bowl and, because they are sealed, that temperature directly translates to the same pressure no matter what altitude you're at.
defrost 19 hours ago [-]
The temperature at the base of the bowl is close to the temperature of the mass of liquid / solids inside and at the base of the bowl, sure.
I'm less certain the same transfer function always returns the gas pressure at the top of the sealed bowl "no matter what altitude you're at" considering that at the starting point, when first sealed, ambient room atmospheric pressure varies with altitude: for the same initial food mass to be cooked the standardised gas volume included will vary with altitude.
(Alternatively, no matter the altitude, there's always a constant volume to fill with atmospheric gas .. and the mass of that gas will vary with altitude)
Check out Kenji’s book, The Food Lab. (Also the name of his blog before it merged with Serious Eats.) You’ll get a sense of what makes him popular among nerds who like to cook.
He used to own a restaurant in downtown San Mateo called Wursthall. It has since closed. He lives up in Seattle now but I am not aware of him being involved in any new restaurants.
stasomatic 1 days ago [-]
My Instant Pot has AI and when I turn it on I hear Kenji Lopez guiding me through the recipe steps.
chickensong 23 hours ago [-]
I know I read HN for the world news and recipes...
Hikikomori 1 days ago [-]
Seems like you didn't read the article very well. Kenji is a well known chef that does a lot of testing of methods so many recipes come with a story but you can also just scroll to the bottom
sublinear 23 hours ago [-]
Farming for points.
stasomatic 7 hours ago [-]
That’s rather uncharitable. I shared something that I like because another submission made me think of it. Nobody was incentivized to read my post. If others found that useful, yes, I’ll bank the points. Use the downvote link, that’s what it’s for.
annexrichmond 22 hours ago [-]
I’ve recently discovered Galbitang and despite being far less popular, I much prefer it over pho. We make it in a pressure cooker as well and love how easy it is!
aaronbrethorst 21 hours ago [-]
We've been making pho ga from this recipe for years. It's been on weekly rotation in the fall and winter because it is so ridiculously good. Pair it with bone broth made in your instant pot for best results.
Normally we start making bone broth around 9am, it finishes by about 5pm, and then dinner is ready by 7pm.
bolt012 13 hours ago [-]
I haven't seen this written yet but I highly recommend Kenji's book: The Food Lab. It's the perfect book for HN Nerds that love to cook
Cider9986 12 hours ago [-]
The Food Lab is a great introduction to cooking. Could use some updates but it's still a staple for me.
I didn't like The Wok (his most recent real coobook) as much as the Food Lab. Although the garlic noodles with regular Italian pasta, oyster sauce, and Parmeggiano Reggiano are absolutely incredible and easy to whip up because it's all pantry ingredients.
Another cookbook I recommend is Meathead: The Science of Great Barbecue and Grilling. Also teaches the science and the guy who wrote it is one of the main people who debunked the resting meat.
bolt012 11 hours ago [-]
Thanks for the recommendation!
On the topic of nerd cookbooks recommendations: Cooking for Geeks. I found it way more approachable/readable than The Food Lab (which is a beast of a book, volume wise)
pverheggen 1 days ago [-]
Pressure cookers do reduce the cook time of some dishes dramatically, but the flavors don't meld as much compared with slow cooking. If you do a 30-minute recipe like this, it's probably worth letting the soup sit another 20-30 minutes in warming mode before serving.
MostlyStable 1 days ago [-]
One of the reasons why I loved The Food Lab was that very often Kenji would write several versions of a recipe at different effort levels, along with detailed reasonings about why and how he shortened a step and what one was giving up by doing so. While he didn't do that for the Pho Ga recipe, he did do that for his Beef Pho recipe, with a full blown 6 hour "traditional" version [0] and a faster (although still not as fast as the pressure cooker pho ga one) 1 hour version of the recipe [1]. My guess is that the write ups of the 3 recipes together probably give one enough information to dial in relatively precisely how much effort you want to give and which steps one can skip or reduce.
Dave Arnold’s Liquid Intelligence has instructions and popularized it with that specific brand of whipper (who also sell an infusion attachment).
JumpCrisscross 14 hours ago [-]
The meat angle is crazy! I wonder what happens at much higher pressures…
gavinsyancey 15 hours ago [-]
Pressure cookers get up to pressure by heating water until the steam pressure is whatever pressure they are trying to reach -- which means their temperature will necessarily be above the boiling point of water.
Low-temperature high-pressure cooking seems hard to achieve. You'd need a pump or something similar to pressurize with.
red_hare 20 hours ago [-]
Anyone else catch that he wrote this on an 11-inch MacBook Air (2016 at latest)?
koolba 20 hours ago [-]
Why couldn’t he have used the same laptop many years after its release?
dghlsakjg 19 hours ago [-]
I believe gp is noting that the MacBook couldn’t have been made after 2016 since that’s when that model was discontinued.
yewenjie 22 hours ago [-]
Since I became began I really miss good Pho, anyone knows a recipe that comes close?
milleramp 1 days ago [-]
I assumed it would use chicken broth. Obviously not a chef, but I am going to give it a go.
helterskelter 20 hours ago [-]
Oh man the the amount of fish sauce he wants you put in this will ruin it. Add a teaspoon or a tablespoon or something, but not 1/4 cup. The first time I made it I nearly threw it out.
jasonwatkinspdx 20 hours ago [-]
It's a tablespoon per serving which isn't that crazy at all. Also Vietnamese fish stock is milder than Thai fish sauce if that's what you're thinking of.
helterskelter 17 hours ago [-]
Go through the SE comments on this recipe. The amount of fish sauce makes the broth smell like asshole. I recall several Vietnamese scratching their heads over it. I love fish sauce, but Kenji went nose blind to it or something.
tclancy 16 hours ago [-]
A tablespoon of fish sauce per serving is wild.
SoftTalker 20 hours ago [-]
Site locks up my browser.
eps 12 hours ago [-]
It runs some sort of anti-ad-blocker script, which is likely the cause.
yuchtman 14 hours ago [-]
same ... well maybe not same: I can't scroll, can't click anything on the cookie banner, neither on FF with noscirpt, nor on vanilla Chromium. Weird.
I can click anything else and open stuff, but again, no scrolling.
20 hours ago [-]
t3hTao 22 hours ago [-]
[dead]
brcmthrowaway 18 hours ago [-]
Trigger warning - meat.
Anyone have a vegetarian version of this recipe?
niek_pas 11 hours ago [-]
I consider eating meat completely morally reprehensible but a ‘trigger warning’? What do you do when you enter a supermarket?
As for making the recipe vegetarian, the chicken you could replace with any protein of your choosing. There are vegetarian fish sauces but I’ve not found a good one. You might be able to use miso or marmite.
written-beyond 23 hours ago [-]
Kenji and Alton Browns first video together is a must watch, Alton was extremely insecure.
Rendered at 21:03:07 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I think that Kenji's series of pressure cooker recipes are probably my favorites of everything he did when he was doing The Food Lab section. Almost every recipe is fantastic and they are mostly pretty easy. If I had to pick my single favorite, it would probably be the pressure cooker chicken enchilads [0], although that one is on the higher end of the effort spectrum
[0] https://www.seriouseats.com/pressure-cooker-fast-and-easy-ch...
In this Florida weather, "Okroshka soup" [0] is more appropriate (Eastern European summer soup), but it's too much to chop and I already had nice bones for a pho.
[0] https://petersfoodadventures.com/okroshka-kvass/
Always wanted to try pressure cooker recipes, they look so good, but haven't been able to justify the purchase yet
Combined with a recipe from Kenji, I'm going to have to try it. I have yet to make anything from Serious Eats, and particularly Kenji's recipes, that I didn't enjoy making and eating.
Electric models can run unattended, so the slightly longer cook time isn't a deal-breaker. I'm a huge fan of Serious Eat's Colombian stew, which I can throw in the pot then go to the gym or out for errands and come home to a hot meal. https://www.seriouseats.com/colombian-chicken-stew-with-pota...
I'll be trying this recipe.
The ones used now have a primary valve that controls the cooking pressure, a secondary valve that will release if the primary fails, and the silicon gasket for the lid, which acts as a tertiary pressure release if the first two fail.
I know some people, like my mother-in-law, have stories of pressure cookers failing and spewing soup at high velocity all over the kitchen. I think that was more of a feature of the older version. And probably required some carelessness to achieve even then.
Thanks, SEO.
His video showing that you can speed up a reverse sear starting at a higher temperature was really helpful though.
Haven't tried his pressure cooker video because I don't have one. I will get one eventually but probably not a multi cooker. I have heard great things about them.
But I do generally follow this method. I put the chicken meat in a soup sock though, so I can pull it out and add it to a soup or whatever instead of throwing it away. It will be kind of dry chicken though.
I find that trying to keep the natural flavour of chicken meat in soups is a fool's errand anyway. I don't know if it makes a difference, but if I'm returning the meat into soup I will separate it, put the pieces in a small tupperware along with a ton of chicken stock powder, and just enough water to cover. It then sits in the fridge until the soup is 10 minutes from ready.
Somewhat ironically, before I watched that video I had been manually increasing the cook time to 90 minutes. I thought I was being clever and would get better extraction. After I watched the video I realised that maybe the people who made the machine probably knew what they were doing.
[0] https://www.seriouseats.com/the-best-chili-recipe
Something I started doing was occasionally taking the rare thin meat out for use with the sriracha and sweet sauce. I never added then to the soup because I found it corrupts it.
There's also Northern Vietnamese Pho which I haven't tried but I'd like to. It's supposed to be less sweet and less spiced. In the US it seems southern sweet style is the norm.
Northern Pho is in almost all ways inferior to Southern Pho. Even Northerners tend to prefer the Southern style. Something important to understand is that the Northern style is essentially the starvation version of the Southern style. The south is the main agricultural region of the country, so they had ready access to ingredients, like meat, that were difficult to come by in the North. The styles reflect this reality.
Not sure about being inferior, but we like our broth to be clear. If you want heavy broth, you'll need to tell the restaurant to give you "fat broth". Maybe it started with us being poor, but we're not anymore. We want the broth flavor to come mostly from high-quality bone broth, not overly spiced. Same for the meat; most Hanoi Pho restaurants don't serve meatballs. We prefer high-quality rare beef over a random mix of beef. Northern Pho always comes with fresh, flat, and wide noodles. Outside of Vietnam, restaurants usually use narrower noodles, and usually not fresh. Sometimes they charge more for fresh noodles. It’s very common to eat Pho with a fried dough stick in the North. We dip them into the broth.
Yeah I don't like it sweet but it has sugar. Worse Pho places in the us will be sweet.
I love the meat straight from the broth so I mostly do that but the sauces are a traditional option it seems.
I do have some Asian markets near me within reasonable driving distance, but I can’t try all the sauces and the ones I have tried leaned toward the sweeter side, and that’s not for me. This Bomba hits me where it matters.
https://www.traderjoes.com/home/products/pdp/italian-bomba-h...
Their peanut butter cups are my favorite sweet. The ones in the plastic bags are better than in thr large container. (Darker chocolate and more salt).
In fact there is no ‘one ramen’, it has to be said; there are regional variants where the “scrap food” of the area is used as the decoration to the base, where a noodle and boiled-meat leftover soups/stock are combined …
I have very sleepy pho’s in my neighborhood, also .. just sayin’. Both are great, you’re right, they are a wonderful branch of food.
https://www.doordash.com/products/nongshim-tonkotsu-premium-...
It’s just a very long recipe for Phở (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pho)
Is the hack that it’s supposedly doable in under 30 minutes?
He's got several excellent cookbooks (like the Food Lab and Wok) and is a regular contributor to serious eats and has youtube etc...
He hacks food in other words.
Someone doing a technical write up about a new technique in their discipline is pretty hacker news to me.
I am interested in many things, most of them are not what I want to see on Hacker News.
[0] - https://youtu.be/Odo0f9P2SgQ
[1] - https://youtu.be/WeNoDCWezls
Also, authenticity about recipes is the “but does it scale” of app discussions. It’s ok to just let people enjoy stuff. Not everything is a purity test.
Pho bo (beef pho) typically takes at least 8 hours and is better simmered overnight, so cutting it down to 30 minutes and still having a good result is very useful.
I'm less certain the same transfer function always returns the gas pressure at the top of the sealed bowl "no matter what altitude you're at" considering that at the starting point, when first sealed, ambient room atmospheric pressure varies with altitude: for the same initial food mass to be cooked the standardised gas volume included will vary with altitude.
(Alternatively, no matter the altitude, there's always a constant volume to fill with atmospheric gas .. and the mass of that gas will vary with altitude)
He used to own a restaurant in downtown San Mateo called Wursthall. It has since closed. He lives up in Seattle now but I am not aware of him being involved in any new restaurants.
Normally we start making bone broth around 9am, it finishes by about 5pm, and then dinner is ready by 7pm.
I didn't like The Wok (his most recent real coobook) as much as the Food Lab. Although the garlic noodles with regular Italian pasta, oyster sauce, and Parmeggiano Reggiano are absolutely incredible and easy to whip up because it's all pantry ingredients.
Another cookbook I recommend is Meathead: The Science of Great Barbecue and Grilling. Also teaches the science and the guy who wrote it is one of the main people who debunked the resting meat.
On the topic of nerd cookbooks recommendations: Cooking for Geeks. I found it way more approachable/readable than The Food Lab (which is a beast of a book, volume wise)
[0] https://www.seriouseats.com/traditional-beef-pho-recipe
[1] https://www.seriouseats.com/quick-and-easy-1-hour-pho
https://culinary.isi.com/en-GB/culinary/applications/aromati...
Dave Arnold’s Liquid Intelligence has instructions and popularized it with that specific brand of whipper (who also sell an infusion attachment).
Low-temperature high-pressure cooking seems hard to achieve. You'd need a pump or something similar to pressurize with.
I can click anything else and open stuff, but again, no scrolling.
Anyone have a vegetarian version of this recipe?
As for making the recipe vegetarian, the chicken you could replace with any protein of your choosing. There are vegetarian fish sauces but I’ve not found a good one. You might be able to use miso or marmite.