Making great chicken stock can be challenging. Boil it long enough to get lots of flavor in your stock and you end up with dry pasty chicken. Don’t cook it enough and you end up with a watery broth. It’s a trade-off that leads many to throw away the meat used to make the stock and then cook a separate batch of meat to serve with the soup separately. Given that one in seven people around the world are chronically hungry, this just seems gratuitously wasteful. It’s a concept that has a word associated with it in Japanese: mottainai (勿体無い), which roughly translates to “What a waste”. It’s something frequently uttered with disdain in Japanese households and I suspect other Asian cultures have a similar concept since it is rooted in Buddhism. One of the things I’ve always loved about Phở Gà is that it uses every part of the chicken, including the liver, heart, gizzards, etc. But it’s always bothered me how the meat tends to be dry since it’s boiled to make the soup. I’ve found a better way to make chicken stock that gets you a great broth, with tender moist chicken, that is perfectly cooked. The trick is to gently poach the whole chicken first. Then, after separating the meat from the bones, the bones go back into the pot until you have an intensely flavored broth. I use a similar method to make my chicken soup as well as my hainanese chicken rice. Since this is for Phở, I add aromatics like charred onion, garlic and ginger, but I go easy on the seasonings as chicken is easily overwhelmed by spices such as star anise and cloves. The charring not only develops new flavor compounds, but it also adds a wonderful smokiness to the soup that gives it depth. Normally I’m a big fan of adding condiments such as basil, bean sprouts hoisin and hot sauce to pho tai nam, but I prefer my phở gà northern style: with wider noodles and a minimum of garnishes. Perhaps it’s because the more delicate chicken broth is easily smothered, or maybe it’s because the first really great bowl of phở gà I had was Hà Nội style. Whatever the case, the only table-side condiment I serve my phở gà with is pickled green chilies. One last note. I like my noodles very al dente. Because rice noodles cook so quickly, by the time you boil, drain and add them to the soup, they’re soggy already. One way around this I’ve found is to skip the separate boiling entirely and to cook the noodles directly in the soup. This gets you perfectly cooked noodles every time.
📖 Recipe
