Faux pho

February 3, 2025 7:50 PM

The other day, I was at my friend's house and I was looking through all of her Hello Fresh recipe cards. She mentioned that she really liked the "Pho-Style Beef Noodle Soup", and I looked at it skeptically because almost nothing about it resembles pho. It comes with ramen noodles. The only thing about it that made it seem like pho at all was that it contains "pho stock concentrate" (whatever that is). But honestly, it still sounded like a tasty noodle soup, and she had two copies of the recipe card, so I took one.

I wasn't sure when I was going to make this, but just earlier this week, I saw a post in the "Aldi Aisle of Shame" Facebook group raving about their limited time offering "Pho Broth"! This is perfect for my fake pho. I told my Vietnamese friend about this and he just shook his head disapprovingly. Hey, not all of us have Vietnamese relatives that can make pho.

I didn't want to buy a bunch of stock concentrates for this, so I just used chicken msg. And I also had a single chicken thigh in the freezer so I used that instead of beef. So who knows what I'm even making at this point. But in order to stay somewhat true to this inauthentic recipe, I did use bok choy, mushrooms, and wheat noodles :P

What resulted was something that I guess kind of had the essence of pho? But it needed more flavor so I dumped in some fish sauce and extra lime at the end. To be fair to Aldi, I did essentially mix it with chicken broth, so I probably diluted some of the pho flavor. But if I don't think of it as pretending to be pho, it was a good meal. I don't think you can ever go wrong with a noodle soup.

Udon noodles with mushroom and egg

January 14, 2025 1:10 PM

Ever since I got back to Pittsburgh after the holidays, I've been wanting to make udon noodle soup, because noodle soup is really good when you're sick. But because I was feeling sick and because it's been so cold outside, I haven't been able to actually make it out to the Asian store. I have four grocery stores that are a 10 minute walk or less from my apartment, but none of them are Asian stores.

Well this past Sunday, it finally went up to a balmy 33°F, and I seemed to be feeling a little better. Plus I ran out of rice, so I really needed to restock that too.

When I've made this soup in the past, I've always included chicken, but the chicken is always my least favorite part of this, so I decided to replace the chicken with a soft boiled egg and also double the mushrooms. I wanted to marinate the eggs so I needed to start that the night before. And since I was boiling eggs, I kept some of them boiling for a couple minutes longer so I could put them in a salad!

I mostly followed this recipe for poppyseed salad dressing, but I cut the sugar a little, and I used white vinegar because that's what I had. It was delicious. I was able to use up leftover mushrooms from a meal that a friend made, and that fit perfectly in the salad. The egg yolks also added some nice extra creaminess.

So the next morning, I had some marinated eggs, and I just needed to prepare the veggies and the broth. I actually ended up buying ginger and shiitake mushrooms from Giant Eagle because the Asian store sells them in much larger quantities than I ever need. In fact, I grabbed such a small piece of ginger that it registered as .01 lb on the scale and I wasn't able to actually check it out! The machine kept saying "We are unable to process your item. Please keep scanning. Help is on the way". Except help was NOT on the way. I stood there at the self check-out wondering what to do, but the store was way too busy. I tried to scan the ginger again, but it just gave me the same error. I really didn't want to steal it, but I didn't know what to do!

Well, after I stood there for a minute, I just decided to pay for my mushrooms and I walked away with the tiny piece of ginger in my bag. At least now I know what's considered too small.

Preparing this dish was way easier without having to make the chicken, so I think I'm going to keep making it like this from now on. I didn't adjust the amount of soy sauce or mirin, but I think the mushrooms could have used a tad more. It was still very tasty like this though!

Most ramen places will only give you half an egg in your single bowl of soup, which is ridiculous. Eggs should always be given in whole quantities. Of course when I put both egg halves in my bowl, it starts to get way too filled up, so I should really get larger soup bowls. But it's okay, I just filled it up with more soup after I ate half of it.

Something that vaguely resembles pho

August 18, 2022 10:14 PM

Every once in a while I get a sudden craving for pho. I don't know how it hits me, but I just think about that pho smell and then I want some. I'm not about to spend 6 hours simmering some broth though, so I needed a shortcut. I remembered that Budget Bytes has a "faux pho" recipe, and it has decent reviews, so I decided to give it a try.

Her recipe uses chicken, and it just doesn't feel right to have chicken pho. I wanted beef. So I used beef broth instead of chicken broth and sliced beef instead of cooked chicken. I had a container of beef Better than Bouillon that expired earlier this year that I wanted to use up, and I bought the cheapest piece of beef I could find at Aldi, which was an "eye of round".

The soup is really simple. It's just broth and five spice. And so I mixed my beef broth with five spice and took a sip. It...felt like it was lacking something. I wasn't really sure what, but I ended up throwing in some bullhead barbecue sauce (hot pot sauce) and a little bit of hoisin, and, well, it didn't really taste like pho, but I guess it wasn't bad.

I ended up squeezing a lime slice into my bowl, and that made it taste a lot better. Still didn't really taste like pho, but it was some good noodle soup. Later that day, after I got back from a walk, I remember stepping into my living room and thinking "hey it vaguely smells like pho in here!"

I had some leftover broth and fixin's so I made more the next day, but I just went completely hot pot on it, and added cooked broccoli as well.

I really like noodle soup, and I want to give pho a try again. Maybe I'll actually use a recipe from an Asian person next time.

Udon noodle soup

June 1, 2022 9:41 PM

Speaking of slowly cooking, I spent a couple of hours making udon noodle soup a few nights ago. I think it was 11pm by the time I actually produced this bowl of soup.

Worth it. So worth it.

I wanted to make some udon noodle soup because I had gone to an udon restaurant a couple of months ago, and at the time I didn't think I really wanted noodle soup so I got a rice bowl. But everyone else was ordering the udon noodles, and by the end of dinner, I really wanted those noodles.

It was also a little more appropriate a couple of months ago because it was colder. Now we're hitting 90° outside and it is definitely not soup weather anymore. But I don't care. I made the noodle soup and ate it three times and will eat it again twice more because I still have leftover noodles.

I don't know if this is normal or not, but whenever I eat noodle soup, I like to make a nice little spoonful for every single bite. A little bit of noodle, some soup, a couple of other garnishes on top, and a wonderfully flavorful experience for my mouth.

I actually don't think I've ever had udon noodles from a restaurant before so I have no idea how they're supposed to taste, and the Woks of Life recipe I used even explicitly stated that it's not really authentic. But it is delicious.

I do know that restaurants often put soft boiled eggs in their noodle soup, so I wanted to do the same thing. I've been using this ramen egg recipe from Just One Cookbook for a while and it's always been great. I figured it would be really easy to make a few eggs to throw in my bowls of soup.

But I figured wrong. Holy crap I have never struggled so much in my life to peel boiled eggs. The ramen egg recipe calls for putting the eggs directly in boiling water, but I thought it would work just fine if I put the eggs in cold water and brought it to a boil. When I stopped cooking them and tried to peel one, it all broke apart and every piece of shell I tried to remove just ended up removing more of the egg white. I don't think I initially cooked them for long enough so I boiled more water and tried to cook them longer, but that was still a fail.

I can't end on a fail though, so I did some googling and was determined to make better soft boiled eggs. I made a few adjustments for the second attempt:

• boil the water first, and salt it (no idea if the salting made a difference)
• put the eggs in the boiling water, then turn the heat down to about medium
• cook for 6 minutes
• be very very gentle when cracking the egg for peeling
• the eggs might have been older?

And it was a success! It peeled so easily! Incredible.

Noodle soup

January 20, 2021 8:24 PM

Noodle soup has been on my "to-make" list for months, and I finally made some yesterday!

I used this Udon Noodle Soup with Chicken and Mushrooms recipe from The Woks of Life. I've made it once before, but last time I made it I didn't have any dashi. It turned out really well this time and was really easy to make.

I did have to use three different pots and pans though: one to cook the noodles, one to cook the broth, and one to cook the chicken and mushrooms. So that's kind of annoying. But it was worth it. The mushrooms added a lot of flavor.

I'm not sure I'd change anything in this recipe, except next time I'll buy smaller noodles. These udon noodles were really thick, and I think I want something a little easier to fit in a chinese soup spoon.

See that 油炸粿 in the corner? I didn't make that. My aunt did. She watched Youtube videos and worked on that recipe for two years perfecting it. That's above my level for now.