Vietnamese Chicken Pho - Marion's Kitchen

Noodle soup, one of my great loves in life. And chicken fur, can't wait for you guys to try this one. Beef fur is the one that most of you guys would know about and probably have eaten. But there's also chicken fur. Don't leave the chicken fur out because actually, it's way quicker to make at home and way easier. That's what we're going to do today. To start off with, what we want to do is create some aromatics, some nice roasted aromatics. I'm going to start off with some onion. I just want to cut that in half. That goes straight into the pan. I still want the skin on. I want to get some of that sort of char-y flavour on this. Into a dry frying pan. I want the same thing with my ginger. I'm just going to cut that in half and get that straight into the pan, skin on as well. You just want to be turning these over every so often. I want them in here for a good 10 minutes at least. You've got to be a little patient here. I really want some nice dark colour on my onion, onion skin and on the ginger as well. I've got some cinnamon stick and some star anise that's going in. Just move that pan around, get everything nice and toasty. The colour is looking good on these and this beautiful, fragrant aroma in my kitchen now, which is so good. I'm going to get these out onto a chopping board. I just want to peel off this first layer of onion skin. It doesn't matter if a little bit of skin sticks to the onion. I just don't want all of that skin on there. To help these aromatics release even more of their flavour, I'm just going to slice them in half again to get some of those juices going out into our broth. Chicken, I've got a whole chicken. That just goes straight into a large pot. You want enough water to cover the chicken and give you lots of nice, soupy broth. Now the onion and the ginger and those lovely toasted spices. Now just a little bit of seasoning here at the beginning so that we can get some nice flavour infused into our chicken. We'll do a little bit more seasoning at the end. I'm going to add some fish sauce. Because I don't want to colour the stock too much or have too much of a strong fish sauce flavour, I'm also going to season this with some salt. A good teaspoon. The secret here guys is that we don't want to overboil or rapidly boil this chicken. What we want is a nice, gentle simmer and that will give us the best chicken and the best broth for our finished dish. After a few minutes, I can see that the water is just starting to barely bubble. That's the kind of simmer that we want. What you'll find is you'll get a little bit of cloudy, scummy stuff that will rise up to the surface. At this point, you want to just take yourself a ladle and scoop that off as it rises to the top. I just keep a bowl of water handy nearby just to clean off my spoon each time before I go back in there. You can keep doing this as the chicken cooks. That way you'll end up with a nice clear broth at the end. This is the kind of gentle simmer that I want to keep going for another hour. I'm going to turn this down just a little bit and let that simmer away. This is smelling amazing. I love the smell of the star anise and the ginger. I'm just doing one final scoop of some of that stuff that's risen to the top, just to make sure we've got a really nice, clean, clear broth. Time to get my chicken out. Drain off as much of that soup as possible. Now I'm just going to start slicing up this chicken. Look at all that glorious chicken. This is the plus to cooking the broth the way we did. You could simmer the broth for hours and that would be great. You'd get more chicken flavour, but it would also mean that the chicken meat itself is kind of unusable because it gets quite tasteless. By just simmering it gently for an hour, we've got beautiful, tasty, moist chicken and a really nice chicken broth. Now for the soup itself. I just want to strain that delicious broth. Look at that lovely colour. Pour that stock back into a clean saucepan. Here's where we do our final seasoning adjustment. Let me taste the broth first and see what's going on. It's so delicious. You really get a beautiful, fragrant whisper of that star anise. I can taste all that chickeny goodness in there. So good. What we do need is a little more salt. Because we did just start with water, remember? You need to quite heavily season this broth to really bring out the flavours. Then I'm also going to add just a little bit of fish sauce as well. Oh yes, right on. That is tasting miraculous. Now let's get on with the rest of our noodle bowl. I've just got some rolling, boiling water. I'm going to add my rice stick noodles. These noodles are just cooked. Don't overcook them because that's when you get gluggy noodles. I'm going to drain those off. Time to assemble. The noodles go in and then I want some chicken. I like a mixture of white and dark meat, that's just my preference. Fine pieces of onion, just sort of sprinkle, spread those out. A really decent handful of finely chopped spring onion. Time to get that steaming soup into our bowl. Look at that, so satisfying. There you go, a chicken noodle soup you'll be coming back to time and time again. Let me show you how I like to eat this bowl. I grab myself some bean shoots. Then a really decent helping of Thai basil leaves. Pick those straight into there. Then a good squeeze of lime juice and a few little slices of chilli. Then you've got to give everything a mix. That soup is so good. And those noodles. Perfect. Do I have lipstick all over my face now? Probably. Oh well.