Streetfood: Pho gà (chicken noodle soup) from Vietnam

One of the projects I am working on for several years now, is streetfood, a collection of photos and recipees of food prepared by the ‘common man and woman’ I meet during my travels. Simple food I eat in the homes I have been invited to, or at the small road stalls when on my way. Eventually, these images and recipees will be published, but to make your mouth water, I will post a few already.

Pho is a soup they will often serve you for breakfast in Vietnam. Hot, steaming bowls of soup, which you eat with a spoon and chopsticks. If you have it with chicken, it’s called pho ga, with beef it’s called pho bo. There are several ways to prepare the soup, and below is one of them. For vegetarians: I prepared the soup with tofu as well: delicious! In that case, add some more spices to the stock. Want to enjoy your soup while sitting on a unique cushion like the one in the image below? I imported them and gave ethnic minority women work… see sidebar for details.

Green tea | Than Uyen, Vietnam

Preparing 'pho' | Lai Chau, Vietnam

Common kitchen in hospital | Lai Chau, Vietnam

Light vegetable stock | Than Uyen, Vietnam

Planting of Rice | Sapa, Vietnam

Shopping list | ingredients | preparations:

Serves two or three persons. Please note that your dish will not exactly look like in the photo! Sometimes, I adjust the preparations, but it’s still very similar.

2 free-range chicken legs
3 spring onions, cleaned and sliced
3 cm ginger, in slices which are not too thin
2 garlic gloves
2 whole Chinese star anise
1 cinnamon stick
a handful of dried shrimps
3 leek, chopped
2 spoons fish sauce
1 spoon limejuice
some mint leaves
salt and pepper
400 g thin rice noodles, boiled according to instructions

Preparation:

Put the chicken, half of the spring onions, the ginger, garlic, star anise, cinnamon and dried shrimps in a large saucepan and add light salted water untill all the ingredients are under water. Bring this soup base to the boil, and skim the stock.
Cover the saucepan and boil for about 25 minutes on low fire.
Once cooked, remove from the heat and allow to cool for 20 minutes, then take out the chicken and put on a plate.
Strain (filter) the stock and thus remove and throw away all flavouring ingredients
Remove the skin from the chicken and separate the meat from the bone. Add the meat to the stock again.
Add the chopped leek and heat the soup for another 5 minutes.
Add fish sauce, lime juice, and pepper to taste.
Put a small pile of noodles in every bowl and add very hot soup. Garnish with the rest of the spring onions and som fresh mint leaves,

Eat with chopsticks, a spoon and fingers if needed!

This entry was posted on donderdag, juni 10th, 2010 at 09:20. It is filed under Blog, Streetfood and tagged with cooking, food, pho, pho ga, recipe, Streetfood, traditional, Vietnamese. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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