Pho BAC (NORTHEN PHO): How It Came to Be

Let me preface this article by disclosing two things.

Firstly, this is neither a history of pho nor a discussion to unearth the origin of how the dish got its name. This is simply a story that many folks at my parents’ age got to listen to and understand how each main ingredient was picked and combined to make this very dish as we know. And like my parents, I am simply the messenger.

Secondly, I never liked pho growing up. The details will be discussed in a different post. However, having consumed this product (both fresh and in instant noodle packages) for 17 years in Vietnam (and 10 almost disappointing years in the States), it is within my belief that I have some legitimate ground to talk about pho and somewhat capable of differentiating a good pho from an offensive one. In addition, it arguably frees me from forming biased opinions toward the dish.

So let’s talk about how pho took its current form. Unlike many others will claim to believe, the word “pho” (or phở) was invented by…..

Ehh, fuck that. I don’t know. People, who think they know, are still debating this to this day, proven by the existence of a good dozen Youtube videos attempting this feat. But there is a great chance that experts will be able to dust off an ancient bowl of pho buried somewhere in an abandoned rice paddy in Northern Vietnam along with its original creator “Nguyen Thi Pho” or “Nguyen Van Pho”. NO. We just don’t know.

Some say we stole it from the Chinese then modified it to our liking (seems like a lot of things we did back in the day. Heck, we used their alphabet, modified it, and called it our own). Some say that we got the idea from the French when they first stopped by and introduced their superiority.

PHO: HOW EACH INGREDIENT CAME (AS TOLD BY MY FOLKS).

There is simply no better way to tell a story using anecdotes and doing it over and over, for generations.

Pho (or phở) is originated from the province Nam Dinh (Nam Định). As many farmers found their way to the capital for bigger business opportunities, their food followed. As a result, Hanoi was a proper place to popularize pho and not the birthplace, contradicting to many people’s beliefs. In modern days, there are many pho joints in Hanoi that pride themselves on this very slogan “Phở gia truyền Nam Định” (Nam Dinh pho with a family recipe passed on for generations). This does not automatically authenticate these very places. It is simply, a bold claim and designed to grab attention. It raises more eyebrows than anything else.

So let’s start with the most obvious ingredient: the meat. Vietnam's economic strength has always relied heavily on agriculture, especially back in previous centuries. Rice farming was a major path to survival and way of living for many Viet. Preventing starvation is every family’s priority. Fortunately, rice farming immediately solved this dire need (albeit many of the end products was given to the lords, royalties) and opened up other production routes such as farming pigs, chickens, and small gardening. It was a solid and sustainable, carbon-neutral organic GMO-free model we had going on. In fact, if you visit many provinces in Vietnam today, there are a lot of families that still function this way (more notably in the South where the bulk of national grain production is held). They are consequently their ancestors, plus tv cables, mopeds, and 4g mobiles. Nevertheless, this model most often omits the use of heavy machinery since they are comparably more expensive, easier to get stolen, and not as useful in the grand scheme a thing, compared to a, umm, water buffalo.

Buffaloes are cheap, easy to maintain. None of your neighbors would steal yours because everybody has at least one. (Modern farmers are still aiming to get machinery because keeping the animal well fed throughout the non-farming seasons is a considerable cost). With these restrictions and omission, a buffalo becomes many families’ necessary investment, a prized possession, a piece of property, and ultimately a means to an end. So eating buffalo meat was simply not a common theme until the animal reached the end of its life cycle. Compounded with the fact that buffaloes are hardly treated as pets rather than properties, burying or cremating any of them was out of the question and frankly a waste of good carcasses. As conjecture goes, old meat is not ideal for cooking (this is by no mean it is rotten). As described, it is much chewier in texture and packs more stink. However, the desire not to waste solid days of guaranteed protein outweighs the stench. Never received high-quality source of protein as raw meat rarely features in the cuisine, Viet food is built strongly upon proper seasoning and utilizing herbs.

The meat is thrown into a big pot for boiling, along with seasonings and herbs. Many trials and errors went by to serve its ultimate goal: get rid of the stench for bearable consumption. Boiling requires no excessive use of oil (widely unavailable) or lard; and little to no maintenance. The exercise continued for hours through shimmering (wood fire) for hours on end. Next step, the meat was taken out and dried on hooks at room temperature. Meat shrinks in size and stiffens gradually.

Folks are left with the second ingredient, the broth. It was an educated guess that regardless of what comes out, the broth would be okay. Sweetness and richness from marrow are guaranteed by-products. The stench is obliterated after hours of herbs and heat. The process of building the broth profile with different ingredients combinations as well as the uses of slightly better meat (a younger buffalo) took place in different households in Nam Dinh. This is where different families try their own formulas to perfect the aforementioned “family recipe”. Despite the potentiality for pho to acquire a variety of flavor profiles, decades have cemented in the public mind what a bowl of pho should taste like.

The third ingredient is phở, or in this case “bánh phở” (the rice noodles, a.k.a the name). This is when things get tricky. Technology and acute engineering (especially for the past decades) have allowed many restaurants to produce noodles in-house with little to no effort. Noodle vendors still exist for smaller restaurants or joints or sporadic pho vendors (I will discuss this some other time). This level of dedication is derived from a simple fact: pho noodles taste best when made fresh.

But before all of that, here is a quick artisan guide to making banh pho: you start with rice soaked in water for a long period of time. Then the rice is drained, dried, and ground to powder (OR, you can just buy rice powder nowadays). The powder is mixed with water, salt, and oil. This mixture is poured over a hot metal surface (preferably round with the size of a bat signal) and covered with a lid for brief seconds. A thin, white, translucent, crepe-like pho is made and carefully removed from the metal with a bamboo (or PVC tube nowadays). The pho is folded to a smaller size for thin slicing to get the strand-like shape. In the past, if the farmer is not in possession of a slicing tool (almost like a mezzaluna), he/she would simply hand tear the crepe strand by strand. And that is banh pho.

Nowadays, you can achieve all of this using machinery with the size of a treadmill. I fail to comprehend why many restaurants in NYC choose not to do this and use packaged or dried pho noodles instead. They are the inferior product, on par with instant pho (sometimes worse than VIFON pho).

These are the three main ingredients and they started out as humbly as the people who made them. It was driven by several practical needs. But the most prominent one was the end of their most prized possession, their means to survive and make a living.

Get these three basics right, and you get yourself a good bowl of pho.