Su's Vietnamese Beef Pho

I literally always have pho broth in my freezer. And I'll just sit there and drink it out of a mug. Hi, my name is Susan. I'm a recipe developer, and I'm gonna show you how to make Vietnamese pho. So pho is a traditional Vietnamese-style noodle soup. It's just the name for actually the noodles. Pho means rice noodles. One of the most important aspects of the soup is the stock. To make a really good stock, you have to start with good bones. We're gonna do something called blanching your bones. It helps to take out a lot of the impurities that you end up skimming later. My parents were both born in Vietnam, and I was born here in America. And when we came here, my dad was all about becoming Americans. But my mom would still cook us Vietnamese food because she felt it was important for us to always know from our culture. She would always make these big feasts that would revolve around something like a pho, just a big pot that goes up at the beginning of the day. Then we would have my cousins over or neighbors. When my mother first took me to Vietnam and living in America, we always had pho at lunch or dinner. I remember waking up in the morning, my mom was like, let's go to breakfast. And I'm sitting in Ho Chi Minh City, nearly on the ground as an 11-year-old child, eating pho first thing in the morning. It's the hottest, most delicious thing I've ever eaten. And I remember we never knew the name of the person that made this bowl of pho. We literally just called her the old noodle lady. And my sister and I still talk about it to this day. Like, do you remember those old lady noodles? God, they were so good. My parents had a store in downtown Seattle and right next door to it, there was a place called A Little Bit of Saigon. I was always super bored at my parents' store, so I would go next door to the restaurant. And I became friends with one of the servers and she kind of let me make the dessert sometimes or make drinks and deliver them to tables. That was my playground. My mother ended up going back to Vietnam when I was in third grade. So when I wanted to have a little piece of home, I would have to learn how to cook for myself. I love making pho at home because I think that making soups of any kind, especially ones that are a little bit labor intensive, it's as good as you want to make it. I take all these extra steps to make sure at the end of eight hours it's worth all that effort. I really love that I can have some for now and then I'll have some for later. I literally always have pho broth in my freezer. When I moved from Seattle, which had a really large Vietnamese population, I'd go next door to A Little Bit of Saigon and have the best bowl of pho ever. When I came to New York, not quite as large of a population of Vietnamese. I actually started cooking it more when I moved to New York because I was like, if I want a good bowl of pho, I gotta cook it for myself. In the Vietnamese culture, we place a ton of importance on food and how it can bring people together. I remember being younger in Seattle thinking that I was a little weird because I went to a school and most of my friends had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and my mom didn't know what peanut butter and jelly was so she would just pack me a bun mee. And I thought it was the most delicious thing ever and my friends were like, what the heck is pate? And I'd be like, it's so good. Now, 2018, bun mees are sold on every corner. It's really amazing to me how far Vietnamese cuisine has come and I really love that it's getting a little bit more recognition. It's really cool to see other cultures come to appreciate it and honestly makes it a little bit easier for me to find good food that reminds me of home. Food is memories and it's important and I can have a bun mee and a pho and it brings me back to eating pho on that stoop on Ho Chi Minh City. Mm, I just wanna eat the broth. The noodles are delicious but I just wanna sip the broth all day.