Beef Pho

I’ve been craving pho for a while, and after returning home from a very quick but tiring weekend road trip, the only thing I wanted was a cozy, home-cooked meal.

Our journey started at Wal-Mart because I assumed that due to the hefty grocery list it would be our best bet on saving a little money. Unfortunately, they were out of bean sprouts, which I was intent on including in our soup. So we decided to grab what we could at Wal-Mart then head over to Sprouts for anything we couldn’t find.

At Sprouts, we ran into another roadblock- I had no idea what “star anise” was. I finally found fennel anise and decided to wing it (after Googling once we got home, I realized I had nowhere near the right item). Nevertheless I persisted. Like usual, I prepped most of my veggies before starting to cook because that tends to take me a while to do, then went on to work on the pho broth.

I decided to make the broth from scratch per the recipe even though we found pre-made broth at Sprouts. After allowing it to simmer for about 30 minutes, I came incredibly close to pouring the broth down the sink instead of draining it into a new pot. That was pretty eye-opening, so I had to take a moment to collect myself. 

Next was cooking the beef and aromatics. I definitely made too much as per usual but found that I did a pretty good job with the seasoning and flavors. Once they reached medium rare, I set them aside to prepare the noodles and start to assemble the soup.

Overall, I was very happy with the results. I really enjoyed the flavors- as it turns out, the anise did what it was supposed to do despite not being star-shaped. I’d give it an 8/10.