What exactly is pho? I know it's a type of vietnamese cuisine.
What does a bowl of pho typically consist of?
What are the bare requirements to consider it pho?
Soup – vietnamese pho? What exactly does it consist of
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Related Solutions
The non-rice paper rolls are probably made with wheat flour instead of rice flour, so they should be just as sturdy and stand up to deep frying as well or better than rice paper, which has always been fairly delicate and hard to work with in my limited experience.
Here is an image of flour egg roll wrappers in their uncooked state:
In Serious Eats, the author provides some insight on how to do this:
The process was easy: onions browned and then removed, meat and water added and boiled, then the rest of the aromatics go in, skimmed occasionally and simmered for six hours. By the time the broth was finished it was incredibly phở-like—the cinnamon and anise came through beautifully and the stock was insanely meaty.
The next day I took off the layer of fat and set about assembling the rest of the phở ingredients. I got my hands on lovely basil, bean sprouts, and some shabu-shabu beef.
Source: Serious Eats
Additionally, Viet World Kitchen provides some great basic techniques for building your pho broth:
Pho Secrets?
Roasting the bones. I've tried this and have not found that it's done much to the broth aside from making the broth dark, something that I've not found to be attractive. If you start with good bones, there's no need to roast, as the French would do for a veal stock, or demi-glace... Source: Viet World Kitchen, 2007
Viet World Kitchen has so many great articles about pho as well:
If you're looking for more resources loving pho has a great article about pho:
There is no single perfect technique for creating good pho broth. The Vietnamese always say that the best pho you will ever taste is the one cooked by your own mother (plus maybe one or two favorite restaurants), and she will have her own ideas of how good pho broth is made. These ideas, in turn, are ones that have been handed down to her by her own mother. Thus, no two bowls of pho made in two separate kitchens will ever taste the same.
Source: LovingPho 2009
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Best Answer
Full disclosure — I'm not Vietnamese :-)
The word "pho" (actually "Phở") is a corruption of the French word "feu", as in "Pot au Feu", the dish that it can claim as its ancestor. (That's from a Smithsonian Magazine article about Vietnamese food from sometime in the past few years.)
It's a stock-based brothy soup, usually with at least onions and rice noodles and often (by customer choice) one or more meat additions. Sometimes the meat is added raw to the boiling hot soup immediately before serving. The dish is almost always served with a side platter of fresh herbs, bean sprouts, sliced-up chiles, and lime. The herbs are usually something like mint, Thai basil, and cilantro (or equivalent).
It's not a super-fancy dish, and to my knowledge there's no International Phở Licensing Board, so the rules as to what is and isn't "correct" are probably pretty loose. I've had an awesome veggie-broth Phở, for example.