noodsletter #.0031
Happy new year, let's make some pho
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Book Bit
Anselm stood up and began to pace round the room. At last he stopped, between Jocelin’s face and the vaulting. He turned his stiff neck, looked Jocelin in the eye, then flinched away again.
“It’s so long ago. Perhaps it never meant much—and then, all the things that came after! No. I can’t say more. Amused and touched. And irritated. You were so—keen.”
“Keen. Just keen. Nothing more. You saw nothing and you understood nothing.”
Anselm cried out.
“And can’t you understand? You sat on our necks, on my neck, for a generation!”
“There was our work to be done. I thought so—and now I don’t know what I think—”
“That place was well enough for me; though perhaps not precisely what the founder intended. Then you had to come, flying like a great bird—”
“—to the master of the novices.”
“I am what I am. But to see you skipping up through purely nominal steps, acolyte, deacon, priest; to see you dean of this church when you could hardly read Our Father; and to be tempted, yes tempted—for where the horse goes, the wagon must follow—and one must admit that the great world is necessary since we’re none of us saints—tempted towards a sort of ruin. I admit it freely. I might have remained where I was and done some good. You tempted me and I did eat.”
From The Spire by William Golding.
The first time I read this book I must’ve been 19, and I loved it. I did not love it as much this time, and now I’m a little curious about Darkness Visible, which I read around the same time and haven’t read since.
Happy New Year!
2023 is upon us. Oh no.
I’m not going to do an end-of-year retrospective, since everyone and every brand seems to have done one. (I’m not sure we needed a recap of 2022 from the place I bought towels from, but we got one.) I’m 100% certain you do not need a recap from me.
Since I feel like I’m coming down with a cold as I write this, 2023 is off to a terrible start. I’m also supposed to be quitting smoking tobacco, so, frankly, from where I’m sitting it looks like this year is going to be awful. I did, however, just buy tickets for my family to go to Japan for the first time since 2018, which is the longest time I’ve been away from the country (and my family there) in my life. We’re all very excited, even if the tickets hollowed out our savings.
Thank you to all my paying subscribers, especially those who saw fit to re-up their subscription for a second year! (Thank you to my non-paying subscribers, too, for sticking around!) I’m very flattered, very humbled, and I hope to make this year’s noodsletter installments amazing. Well, maybe not amazing, but certainly better than last year’s offerings. I can’t promise that things will change all that drastically immediately, as I still have my day job and my early-morning-after-work job of working on this book (if my editor is reading this, I will have those promised revisions to you VERY SOON), but I will make an effort to provide more value and service than I have been.
To that end, today I’m going to write up a beef pho recipe. (It’s at the bottom, past all the bric-a-brac.) I’ve noted many times before that while I eat and make a lot of ramen, and have written extensively about making ramen, a bowl of beef pho is my favorite food in the world. I could eat it every day and be perfectly happy (and I once spent a summer in Hong Kong doing just that, and I was perfectly happy). I’d actually like another shot at writing about pho in the future, hopefully something decidedly less maudlin than the piece linked above. I’m sure the new management at my old workplace will one day help me out in that regard by deleting that old piece from the internet forever at some point, since I doubt it does any numbers.
Anyway, the recipe below is how I make pho at home, using ingredients that are both affordable and easily available, save for the dried marine worms known as sa sung, which I order online. I don’t claim that this is “authentic” in any way; in fact, it’s probably unorthodox in a number of different ways. But, it’s a mostly hands-off process and yields a light (it won’t gel when chilled), very clear beef stock with a lot of flavor and very little sweetness. My main complaint with a lot of pho out there is that it’s too sweet, either from the addition of rock sugar, granulated sugar, or because too many onions have been cooked for too long in the broth; this broth is only slightly sweet, from the onions and the worms.
There are several important parts of the cooking process that deserve a little explanation. To make a clear broth, the main thing you want to avoid is agitating the broth; agitation will make any fat and particulate matter (in this case, mostly coagulated protein) emulsify, which makes your broth cloudy. Since a bubbling pot is an agitated pot, you want to keep the temperature at or below a simmer, about 190 degrees F. However, that relatively low cooking temperature means the twin processes of extracting flavor from meat and converting collagen into gelatin will take a long time, far longer than if you just boiled the heck out of everything. As a result, the broth needs to cook for a long time. This broth takes a minimum of 11 hours to cook, and will likely be much more full-bodied if you cooked it for something like 18 hours. I find it pretty convenient to start cooking when I wake up, at about 7 or 8 am, then letting it cook just until I’m done cleaning up from dinner, which is 12 hours later.
Since clarity is so prized by people who love pho, I take it a step further and soak the beef parts in cold water in the refrigerator overnight, which helps to leech out a lot of myoglobin. Myoglobin is reddish at room temperature, but once it cooks it denatures into a gross gray, which, over time, will transform with heat into a scummy brown. This is an entirely optional step that, if anything, negatively affect flavor, but the effect on clarity is undeniable.
Finally, I also use a bunch of ground beef, which I add to the pot along with the soaked meaty bones and fresh water, breaking up the ground beef with my hands in the process. Ground meat has a lot of flavor, of course, but I include it mainly to help with clarification. As the meat proteins denature and coagulate, they sort of grab onto other proteins floating around in the broth, and together all the coagulated, free-floating proteins form a raft of sorts. As long as you don’t agitate the broth or the raft, the proteins stay locked in the raft, and you’ll get a very clear broth.
In terms of seasoning, I add a peeled, halved onion and a peeled 1-inch knob of ginger to the pot at the beginning along with a pod each of star anise and black cardamom, for flavor but also to ameliorate some of the beefy smells coming out of the pot. Toward the end, maybe an hour before I’m going to stop cooking the broth, I add 3-4 more pods of star anise, another pod of black cardamom, and a 2-inch stick of cassia, as well as 4-5 sa sung; everything gets toasted in a pan until aromatic before getting thrown in the pot. I also broil a halved onion and a 2-inch piece of ginger until blacked on the outside all over, then I rub off most, if not all, of the blackened bits, and toss the vegetables into the pot, too. Removing the peels of vegetables, particularly onions, particularly if they’ve been charred, will prevent the broth from darkening.
Once you’ve strained the broth, putting together a bowl of pho is straightforward: cook some banh pho (the rice noodles), put it in a bowl, add some (very) thinly sliced red or white onion, herbs like cilantro or culantro or basil (if you want), add fish sauce and salt for seasoning, then pour in the broth. For toppings, I typically go with raw beef—eye of round, sliced, then pounded between sheets of plastic wrap with a meat mallet, is very economical, if a little bland—but if you throw some brisket into the broth pot, you fish it out before straining, chill it, slice it up, and toss it into your serving bowls.
Noodles and Beef
I’ve separated this section from the previous one because it’s both optional and fairly important, in my view, to a good bowl of pho prepared at home.
For whatever reason, in my experience, every dried rice noodle manufacturer includes completely deranged instructions for cooking their noodles. If you follow the package instructions (if they exist), you will end up with either crunchy or mushy noodles. I can’t understand what the issue is. The only explanation is that in the name of convenience and making their products more appealing to casual cooks, they choose to include bad instructions. For example, all of the bun bo hue noodles I’ve ever tried outright lie about how long it takes to boil them in water: they say it takes 7-8 minutes, when in fact it takes at least 20 minutes.
For banh pho, I’ve found over the years that it’s best to soak them first in cold water, then gently heat them in hot water until they’ve softened. These noodles are already cooked starch, unlike pasta or fresh ramen, so you aren’t cooking the starch; you’re just hydrating it. If you toss banh pho into a pot of boiling water, the starches will hydrate unevenly, and by the time the interior of the noodles is hydrated and soft, the exterior will be super soft and mushy.
To cook banh pho, I drop the dry noodles (doesn’t matter how large the portion) in a very large metal mixing bowl and cover them completely with cold water for an hour. In that time, they’ll soften just a bit and become pliable; they’ll also take up far less volume than the dry sticks. Drain them, then put them back in the big mixing bowl. Bring a kettle or pot full of water (enough water to cover the noodles by a couple inches) to a boil, and pour it all over the drained noodles. Swish them around a couple of times, then let them sit for 6-8 minutes. (Nibble a bit off a noodle at around 6 minutes; I like them at around 6:30, but noodle preferences are very personal.)
The noodles should be fully hydrated—that is, “cooked”—but they won’t be sticky or mushy at all, which makes them super easy to portion. Slide them into hot soup and they’ll be the perfect texture. While this method for cooking banh pho takes an hour and six to eight minutes, you really only get one large metal mixing bowl dirty (and, I suppose a strainer or noodle basket), which isn’t all that different from cooking dried rice noodles in a pot. The benefit, of course, is the noodles won’t be terrible.
Now, the beef. I say above that I use eye of round, and I do, but I want to underline something for all of you: the worst cut of beef in the world is round. It’s tough, it has very little flavor, and there’s really no way to make it better. If you cook it to hell, it will be less tough, but dry; if you don’t cook it at all—use it in carpaccio, say, or tartare—it’s bland. Of course, this is less true of round from delicious beef, but it’s still more or less true, and instead of paying very little money for a tough and flavorless cut of commodity beef, you’ve shelled out a lot of money for a relatively tough and flavorless cut of good beef.
However, despite all that, if I’m making pho, I will pick up as small a hunk of eye of round as I can find, since it’s cheap. I’ll thinly slice a couple pieces of one end, cut them up into halves or thirds, then pound them as thinly as is possible using a meat mallet. Shingle all the pieces together into a little mound and you can pop the mound on top of your noodles; the broth should be hot enough to cook the thin bits of meat completely through, provided you warmed your serving bowl, used hot noodles, and got your broth boiling before adding it to the bowl. (If you’re very worried about raw meat, you can reserve a 1/4 cup of the broth in the pan you’re using to heat it up, bring it a boil, then pour it over the raw beef, which will ensure it’s completely cooked.)
Of course, if you do this, you’re going to end up with a big hunk of eye of round, the toughest and least tasty cut of beef in the world. To make it palatable, what I do is cure it overnight in salt (just sprinkle salt evenly over every surface and chuck the thing in a ziptop bag in the fridge); then the next day I’ll add a couple minced garlic cloves and a glug or two of soy sauce or tamari to the bag and smush the stuff all around the beef so it’s completely coated. I let the bag sit another night, then I’ll either let the roast air dry in the fridge on a rack set in a sheet pan for 8 hours, or I’ll slow-roast it in an oven set to about 250 degrees F on the rack set in a sheet pan until it’s very rare, with an internal temperature of about 115 degrees F (this takes a couple hours). Then I’ll jack up the heat of the oven to 500 degrees F to brown the exterior, just about 5 minutes, then I’ll remove the roast.
It’s still eye of round, sure, but the salt cure, plus the marinade in garlic and soy give it a little flavor, and cooking it rare keeps it relatively tender (ok, relatively less leathery). I slice it up as thinly as I’m able and make sandwiches with it.
I want to stress that this isn’t good. It’s just an acceptable way to use up an eye of round you purchased because it was cheap for use in a bowl of pho.
Bluefin Tuna
Over the holidays, I decided to treat myself to some nice fish. I’ve written before about e-fish: the quality is great, the selections are unique, yadda yadda. One of the things I was curious about was their Atlantic bluefin tuna. As far as I can tell, their claim that the Atlantic bluefin they offer comes from a “sustainable” fishery is true. Of course, whether bluefin tuna of any kind can be harvested sustainably is an open question, but if you are intent on eating bluefin, this is the kind of tuna you should be looking for.
(Generally speaking, I don’t like putting photos or anything about seafood that’s harvested unsustainably or is otherwise terrible for the environment. This is why I rarely post anything (or eat anything) with shrimp in it; this is also why I generally avoid eating or cooking with tuna of any kind.)
But I thought this experience would be interesting for you all because I got this tuna, and it was beautiful, and… I honestly had no idea what to do with it. I don’t think I’ve ever worked with tuna of this quality before, and I’ve only rarely eaten tuna like this, and that was exclusively at sushi places. It’s…a lot.
If you can make out the marbling, it’s crazy. That’s a ton of fish fat! And you can taste it. Everything that makes a nigiri of otoro delicious and amazing makes this bluefin tuna…kind of gross. Obviously, a lot is dependent on the preparation, but the fact of the matter is that a single, thin slice of fatty tuna is the ideal portion size. You don’t want any more than that. And yet, I was staring at 2 lbs of this stuff.
I cut it in half, and seared one half, then sliced it thinly and served it with some ponzu from Japanese Pantry. The first slice was amazing. The second slice? Not so much. It’s very similar to the experience of eating super marbled wagyu beef: You want just one bite, and anything more just makes you think about becoming a vegetarian. (I also did a tartare with some of it… same deal.)
The other half, I cured briefly in salt and sugar and cooked sous vide coated in olive oil to about 120 degrees F, then I served thick slices over beans (with some pickled red onion and gremolata for garnish). Beans and olive oil-poached tuna is a classic combo; beans and olive oil-poached bluefin tuna is… too much. Don’t get me wrong, it was quite tasty, but it was, again, super rich.
All of which is to say, if you want to buy some of the best-quality tuna I’ve ever seen, you can get it from e-fish. As to what to do with it? I have no idea.
They’ll Print Anything
(Thinking of making this a regular installment. Should I bring back my peevish haiku?)
“News”
Tammie Teclemariam’s profile of Scarr Pimentel, the man behind some of the best pizza in the city.
Apparently Tammie is the new “The Robs.” Seems to me like a real missed opportunity to give her Platt’s job. Who else is going to be the new NY Mag critic?
Dennis Lee, literal genius: Can you use spray cheese as moisturizer?
I haven’t seen it, but I agree with this review of that The Menu film (lol).
Imagine: You win the World Cup, and Anheuser-Busch floods your country with Bud. It’s like a nightmare.
That cup was won with yerba mate, by the way. (I read Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch a decade ago, and the only thing I remember, other than that the guy is like 100x too smart for my feeble brain, is that a lot of narrative time is spent on yerba mate.)
My Neighbor Baked Me A Cherry Pie And As Thanks I Fed Him To My Snails. Am I The Asshole?
“What is the point of all these parties?” (BookForum, RIP)
Is “Proust loved not just food, but writing food” a particularly incisive observation? (Also seems like in the examples trotted out, there’s a clear line between sensual and transcendent pleasure.)
A dispatch from a madeleine event.
Mines and mushrooms in Ukraine.
Of course AI chatbot writing will lean heavily on cliché!
On the rise and fall of an early American restaurateur.
Stabbed In The Fucking Back: The Oxalic Acid Present In Kale Is Inhibiting This Man’s Absorption Of The Calcium He Ate The Goddamn Kale For In The First Place
An ode to the reference books of yore highlights the work of my early career (as a fact-checker/writer for the Not For Tourists books!).
“There’s no such thing as Italian food.” All right, but have you ever seen a job posting in the middle of an essay?
Cormac McCarthy really likes eggs huh?
The New Yorker snobbishness of this “does PF Chang’s belong in NYC” is just kinda sad. We have a ton of shitty restaurants! We even have a ton of shitty Chinese restaurants! The f outta here!
Beef Pho Recipe
Ingredients:
~1 lb beef shank piece (1 piece)
~2 lbs beef neck bones (~8 pieces)
~1 lb lean ground beef
2 white onions
3-inch piece of ginger
5 star anise pods
2 black cardamom pods
1 two-inch piece of cassia (cinnamon)
3-4 sa sung (dried marine worms), or 2 dried scallops
For serving:
Raw, sliced, pounded eye of round
Thinly sliced red or white onion
Thinly sliced fresh Thai chilies
Limes
Herbs, if you like
Bean sprouts, if you like
Banh pho
Sliced garlic soaked in distilled vinegar, as a condiment
Place the beef shank and beef neck bones in a bowl or cambro and cover with cold water. Place in the refrigerator, covered, overnight. Drain.
Combine soaked beef shank, soaked beef neck bones, ground beef, and 3 quarts of cold water in a tall-sided pot. Using clean hands hands, break up the ground beef so there are no large chunks. Bring to a simmer over high heat.
As the water heats, halve and skin one of the onions and place it in the pot. Cut off a 1-inch piece of ginger, peel it, and add it to the pot. Add 1 star anise pod and 1 black cardamom pod to the pot.
When the water in the pot reaches about 190 degrees F (bubbles should appear on the surface every 30 seconds or so), reduce heat to low to maintain the temperature. Let cook for at least 11 hours. Don’t mess with it.
While the stock cooks, char the remaining onion and ginger. Preheat broiler to high, about 5 minutes. Halve the remaining onion and place both halves, cut side-own, on a 1/2 sheet pan; place the unpeeled ginger next to it. Broil until the skin and several layers of the onion are blackened and charred, about 8 minutes; remove the onion to a plate and continue cooking ginger. Broil ginger until top side is charred, about 5 more minutes, then flip and broil the other side until charred, about 6 minutes more. Remove to a plate. Turn off broiler. Once cool, using your hands, remove most of the charred exterior of the vegetables and discard.
When the stock has cooked for about 11 hours, add remaining spices and sa sung to a skillet and toast over medium heat until quite fragrant, about 4 minutes, tossing and stirring occasionally. (If using dry scallops, do not toast them.) Add spices and sa sung (or dry, untoasted scallops, if using) to pot with beef, along with charred and peeled ginger and onions. Let broth cook for 1 more hour.
Strain broth through a cheesecloth-lined fine-mesh sieve into a large metal mixing bowl; discard solids. Let broth cool to room temperature, about 1.5 hours, before transferring to storage containers.
Broth will keep for a week in sealed containers in the refrigerator, and up to six months in the freezer.
To make a bowl of pho, I season ~500 ml of broth with a pinch of salt and just under 2 tablespoons of fish sauce. You can adjust the seasoning to your taste, of course, but this is just about right for me.