🇻🇳 How to Make Pho

Craving Pho? On FoodNeverComes the food never actually comes — so here's how to make real Pho at home, in about 2 hr, with stuff you probably already have.

🛒 Ingredients

Tap ingredients to tick them off as you shop or cook ✔️

• 500g beef bones (marrow + knuckle)
• 300g beef brisket
• 300g flat rice noodles (banh pho)
• 1 large onion, halved
• 5cm ginger, halved lengthways
• Spices: 2 star anise, 1 cinnamon stick, 3 cloves, 1 tsp coriander seeds
• 1 tbsp fish sauce + 1 tsp sugar (rock sugar is ideal)
• To serve: thinly sliced raw sirloin, bean sprouts, Thai basil, lime, chilli, spring onion

👩‍🍳 Method

1. Parboil the bones for 10 min in boiling water, then tip the water away and rinse both the bones and the pot. Skipping this is exactly why homemade pho turns out grey and cloudy.
2. Char the onion and ginger directly over a gas flame or under a hot grill until blackened in patches. That smoky sweetness IS the flavour of pho — it is not an optional garnish step.
3. Toast the spices dry in a pan for 1 min until fragrant, then tie them in a cloth or tea strainer so you are not fishing star anise out of someone's bowl later.
4. Cover the bones and brisket with 2.5L cold water, add the charred onion, ginger and spice bundle, and bring to a bare simmer — never a rolling boil, which emulsifies the fat and clouds everything.
5. Simmer uncovered for 2 hrs, skimming the grey foam off the surface every 20 min for the first hour. Clear broth is a skimming job, nothing more mysterious than that.
6. Pull the brisket out at about 1½ hrs and slice it thin against the grain. Season the broth at the very END with fish sauce and sugar, because it concentrates as it reduces.
7. Soak the rice noodles in hot water until just floppy, then dunk them in boiling water for 20 seconds and drain hard.
8. Noodles into the bowl, raw sirloin fanned over the top, then pour the broth over boiling hot — it cooks the beef in the bowl in about 15 seconds.
9. Herbs, sprouts, lime and chilli go on at the table by the person eating. Pho is assembled twice: once by the cook, once by whoever gets the bowl.