For eaters of Vietnamese cuisine or fans of Asian foods, they may not necessarily know the differences between pho and ramen. They are oftentimes compared for their similarities. What separates them is not oftentimes discussed. Here we hope to shed a little bit of light on what’s pho, what’s ramen, and how they differ.
Pho is a Vietnamese soup mixing together broth, rice noodles, herbs, and meat like beef or chicken. Ramen is a Japanese dish which uses wheat noodles served in a meat or fish-based broth usually flavored with soy sauce or miso. Ramen’s also known to use toppings like slice pork, scallions, nori, and menma to flavor it. A lot of the ingredients in pho and ramen both can be applied to the other, and are present in both Vietnamese and Japanese cuisine. Another similarity/difference is also in how they are cooked. Pho is generally made at a simmer in a clear base made from beef and which can be scented with ingredients like star anise, cinnamon, or ginger. Comparatively, ramen’s stock is generally darker, richer, and cloudier usually made from pork bones cooked at a rolling boil.
Instant Pot is a key tool in making healthy, delicious pho and is one of the simplest ways to do. Reduce the work you have to put in and make it easy on yourself.
How to make pho in an Instant Pot is a skill any Vietnamese family would love to have. Instant Pot or no Instant Pot, the basic elements of Vietnamese pho are still what needs to be focused on. The rich, aromatic broth requires hours of simmering. Normally, this takes a lot of effort to oversee. With an Instant Pot however, you’ve cut down on how much time you need to dedicate towards managing its simmer. You speed up the cook time and still receive that instantly recognizable Vietnamese flavors. Even better, if you’re a health junkie, making pho at home instead of procuring it from a restaurant means you can control the herbs that go into it and control the sodium levels.
Read more: Tap into the Magic of your Instant Pot to make the Perfect Pho for any Pho Lover
Vietnamese cuisine can lay claim to many amazing dishes and some of the most perfectly balanced meals in ethnic food.
The release of a new Vietnamese cookbook, Andrea Nguyen’s Vietnamese Food Any Day, is making things easy for families looking to make authentic Vietnamese cuisine using easy-to-find ingredients from their grocery store.
Nguyen is an award-winning cookbook author and an expert in Vietnamese food. She has several cookbooks to her name, including the James Beard award-winning The Pho Cookbook: Easy to Adventurous Recipes for Vietnam’s Favourite Soup and Noodles. Building around Vietnam’s greatest comfort food, pho, Nguyen’s built her reputation around crafting the perfect bowl for all the right people. Based in Santa Cruz, California, it’s Andrea Nguyen’s newest cookbook Vietnamese Food Any Day: Simple Recipes for True, Fresh Flavors which is really turning heads.
Read more: ‘Vietnamese Food Any Day’ is a Vietnamese Cookbook you’ll want to Check Out!
Before roughly a decade ago, if you wanted to cook Vietnamese food at home in Canada, seeking out an Asian market was really the only way to do so. Things have changed however. Demographics have grown more multicultural with more Vietnamese families living in Canada. Traditional Vietnamese ingredients such as lemongrass, coconut water, turmeric, and high quality fish sauce have also found their way into mainstream grocery stores – thanks to demand.
Add to all this the growing health movement and the fact that Vietnamese cuisine is one of the healthier cuisines out there, and you have a winning combination of factors resulting in ingredients, restaurants, and dishes being widely available. Thanks to today’s generation curiosities as well as the growing demand for Vietnamese cuisine, it’s easy. Ingredients are not hard to find.
Read more: How Today’s Generations have Made it Easy to Cook Vietnamese Cuisine at Home
Pho is Vietnam’s greatest comfort food. It’s also very simple to make with chicken and stock. To prepare some slurp-worthy chicken pho from home, you don’t need much. After you’ve bought the plumpest pre-cooked chicken you can find, here’s what to do.
Place 2 cloves with 2 tsp coriander seeds in a large soup pot over medium heat. Give it a minute or two to toast. Then, peel and cut a 4 cm fresh piece of ginger into thick slices, bruising them with the flat side of the knife to release some flavor. Chop some spring opinions, greens, and more to add in.
Read more: How to Make the most Basic Chicken Pho like an Expert
Where Vietnamese cuisine differs from North American cooking is in the yin-yang balance. Comparatively, North American cuisine chooses to focus on using different ingredients to harmoniously blend together and create a single taste shared across a dish. In Vietnamese cuisine, foods are built a little differently. The principles of yin and yang are used throughout Vietnamese dishes, meaning that there’s a balance to every meal. Different ingredients are combined to create singular tastes in a meal that perfectly balances everything.
As an example, pho is Vietnam’s national dish. It’s able to be eaten for breakfast, lunch, and/or dinner. It can be created from a wide variety of different ingredients, with so many customizations and substitutions which can be made. In North America, some might look at pho and simply see soup. While there are similarities, the philosophies that go into creating pho is different from some general soup. The basics include meat like beef, pork, or chicken, mixed with herbs, spices, and tender rice noodles all in a broth. Everything that goes into pho is focused on establishing and maintaining balance. If you add something salty, sweet, bitter, sour, or spicy, it needs to be counterbalanced. Dishes like pho and others are always prepared with distinctive layers of textures and flavors which can be contrasted but which always need to be held together in harmony.
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