I ate the best fried rice of my life in Vietnam. The thing that made it so good was these crunchy little bits. They were about the size of a regular grain or rice but they were very crunchy (more crunchy than puffed rice). I'm wondering if this could have been uncooked rice fried in oil. I've tried searching google and can't find anything accurate.
Vietnamese crunchy rice
vietnamese-cuisine
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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.
Does it look like this? I have some in my pantry now. (Don't tell anyone.)
By request, the box contents: inside a cellophane sleeve, 4 foil-wrapped cubes. Here's one:
Texture is very much like a boullion cube - hard, with a bit of sticky give when pushed. Salty, as expected, but also sweetish with a distinct flavor of caramelized onions and star anise.
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Best Answer
Crust formed on the bottom of the pot deliberately? You put the rice in a very hot stone pot after cooking and let it sit a bit so that the crust develops (Korean version). Or you add some butter up front and cook the rice longer than necessary so a crust develops in the cooking pot itself (Iranian version). Many ways to do this, but I agree it's divine :-)