Phở Ga 2.0

Some week or so ago, we made Vietnamese chicken noodle soup - Phở Ga - with the Daring Cooks. We were disappointed with the results, but saved the leftover broth in the freezer to try to improve it at some point in the future. Turns out the future was today, mainly due to a whole bunch of fresh cilantro that we forgot to use in yesterday's dinner.

We added more toasted spices - maybe 6 whole cloves, 3 whole star anise and 2 tablespoons ground coriander seeds. We also charred a large onion and a big chunk of ginger and added those, together with a large bunch of stems from the fresh cilantro. We brought the broth to a healthy boil, added chicken breast and thighs, boiled those for about 15-20 minutes, and then boiled the soup for another 20 minutes or so.

And guess what! It was delicious! More flavorful and complex; you could definitely taste the warm fragrant spices, the ginger and the onion. So, the key to making a nice Phở Ga was: more vigorous boiling for a longer time plus extra spices and more ginger and onion. A lot of Daring Cooks were very happy with the original recipe, but next time we're making Phở, we'll make sure to up the amounts of flavoring and increase the cooking time.

I'm so happy that the challenge turned out satisfying in the end. Thanks to our fellow Daring Cooks for their encouragement in comments on the original post, and to Jaden of the Steamy Kitchen for sharing her recipes!

Daring Cooks October: Phở Ga (and a little extra something)

Fall is here: the days are getting shorter, the temperature is creeping towards zero, and the trees are showing off their new colors of orange, red and yellow. It's the perfect season to escape to the kitchen and make stews and casseroles, apple pie and hot chocolate. Or as in this month's Daring Cooks challenge: a flavorful, warm soup.

The Daring Cooks had a special guest host this month, Jaden Hair of the blog Steamy Kitchen, who just published her first cookbook: The Steamy Kitchen Cookbook. As the challenge, she graciously shared her recipe for a Vietnamese chicken noodle soup, Phở Ga.

We had great expectations for this challenge. I love noodle soups, and Vietnamese food has never disappointed me. I remember the Phở Ga I had at a small Vietnamese place in a back road in Jordan, Hong Kong. It was packed with flavor of warm, fragrant spices, the noodles were perfectly cooked and the chicken oh so tender.

I was very excited about getting to recreate something so yummy in my own kitchen. We could either do a quick version of Phở, using store-bought chicken stock, or a longer version, where you make the chicken stock yourself. We of course opted for the longer version - making the broth from scratch would surely mean that the soup would be super delicious!


Meet the meat, up close and personal.

We followed the recipe perfectly, and even threw in an extra chicken carcass that we had laying in the freezer, to get some extra bone and marrow in there. We took great care to toast the spices and char the ginger and onion - these are steps that both Jaden and other Daring Cooks said were essential in creating a rich, flavorful broth. Judging from the smell coming from the oven and the stove, it would indeed be lovely.

We had started cooking kind of late, so the clook was approaching 9pm when I finally dipped a spoon into the broth in anticipation of what was to follow: the taste of a rich broth with layers of flavor from the spices.

Total anticlimax.

The broth was watery, and didn't taste much else than chicken fat. We were so disappointed. We really don't know what went wrong. We both went back and re-read the recipe, but no, we hadn't missed anything. The only reasons we could come up with as to why the broth was so flavorless were:
1. We couldn't find whole coriander seeds, only ground. We used the same amount, they were fresh and had a lot of aroma, so I can't imagine that this would have done that much for the end result.
2. It hadn't been simmering enough. The recipe said to simmer for 1½ hours on "low". We did exactly that - we even let it simmer for closer to two hours, but maybe we should have cranked up the heat a little bit to get some more bubbles going. We think this was problem.



We ate the soup with all the sides: rice noodles, the cooked chicken breast, bean sprouts, red onions, red chilies, freshly squeezed lime and fresh cilantro. We had also found sriracha sauce in the store (another bottle of strange condiments for the fridge), and we found ourselves pouring a lot of sriracha into the soup to make it taste something.

While we were eating, we had turned up the heat on the stove so that the broth was simmering more vigorously. The recipe yielded a lot of broth, and the idea was to freeze the remainder, so that we can make more Phở in the future. I want to say that the broth tasted more after it had boiled for another hour or so, but I couldn't really tell, so maybe that's just me wanting to like this recipe. Because I really want it to be great. It has potential, definitely. But in this version, I'm sorry to say, it was only... meh.

Anyway, the remainder of the broth is now in the freezer, and I hope that when I thaw it, heat it and add those lovely Phở ingredients, I will be pleasantly surprised. Maybe the extra boiling was the secret key to a flavorful, rich Phở. I will report back when we have tried it.

The recipe for the long version of Phở Ga can be found on the Steamy Kitchen blog. Jaden also has a recipe for a beef Phở (the challenge said that we could do chicken, beef, seafood or vegetarian/vegan). The recipe for the quick version of Phở Ga can be found on the Daring Kitchen website, where you also can see the other Daring Cooks' creations.

The fine print:
The October 2009 Daring Cooks’ challenge was brought to us by Jaden of the blog Steamy Kitchen. The recipes are from her new cookbook, The Steamy Kitchen Cookbook.

But wait, there's more!

As a bonus, Jaden gave us her recipe for deep fried chocolate wontons (you'll find the recipe in the Daring Kitchen). This optional challenge was to make a creative wonton dessert. Sadly there were no wonton wrappers in our grocery store, and it was way too cold to bike across town to the Chinese shop (we got our first snowfall yesterday; it didn't stay on the ground, but still kind of early in the year), so I had to use phyllo dough instead. I hope this will count as "in the spirit of the challenge"! Voilà, my dessert:



Ganache filled banana in a wrapper

Bananas (the thicker and straighter, the better)
Dark chocolate ganache (I used this recipe)
Phyllo dough
Melted butter
Vegetable oil for deep frying
Vanilla ice cream
Caramel sauce (I used this recipe, scroll down for caramel sauce)

Peel the bananas and cut them in smaller sections of about 5 cm. Use an apple corer to make a hole through the banana (this is why you want straight and thick bananas).


Bananas with holes, ready to be filled with ganache.

Make sure your ganache is soft but not runny. Use a pastry bag to fill the banana with ganache (this didn't work for me so I had to use my fingers, which was messy but got the job done). Place the chocolate filled bananas (standing up) in the freezer for about one hour.

Things to remember about phyllo dough: the sheets are very delicate and need to be stored under a wet cloth, otherwise they'll dry out and break apart!

Cut the phyllo dough into squares of about 15×17 cm. Take a sheet of phyllo, brush it with some melted butter, and put another sheet on top. Place a chocolate-filled banana piece on the short end of the square, roll it up and twist the ends (carefully!) to make it look like wrapped candy.

Place your little packages in the freezer for at least twenty minutes. Heat the oil for deep frying. Deep fry two rolls at the time for 2-3 minutes, turning them halfway through. Place on a paper towel to get rid of excess oil before plating. Dust with confectioner's sugar. Serve with vanilla ice cream and caramel sauce.


Needless to say, this was incredibly yummy!

Carrot soup

No creativity for smalltalk (smallblogging?) today, I'll just get straight to the recipe. This soup, with its vibrant color, creamyness and subtle heat, was the perfect lunch for a gray October Monday. If you want something more substantial with it, I recommend Indian nan bread, especially the cheese variety.

Carrot-Coconut soup

2 large portions

250 g carrots
½ large red onion
A chunk of fresh ginger (about 2 cm)
2 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp ancho chili powder
½ tsp turmeric
4 dl coconut milk
1 dl water
Salt
Pepper
Sesame oil

For serving: fresh cilantro, sour cream, coconut flakes

Peel and slice the carrots, onion and ginger. Heat the oil in a pot, add the vegetables, cumin and ancho chili, and fry, stirring often, for about 5 minutes. Add turmeric, coconut milk and water, and let the soup boil on medium heat for about 10 minutes or until the carrots are soft. Mix the soup until smooth (I use an immersion blender). Add salt and pepper to taste, and also a few drops of sesame oil (I find the flavor and smell of sesame oil to be overpowering, so it's usually just a drop or two for me). Garnish with a sprinkling of coconut flakes, some fresh cilantro and a small dollop of sour cream.

Honeydew soup

So, I'm back at work, i.e. ten feet from the kitchen, which means that I once again have to supply myself with lunch. This was today's little invention, which took like five minutes to make and about the same time to eat. Which means I should be working right now, if I wasn't writing here. Ah, the joys of procrastination...!

If you don't have prosciutto, I imagine shrimp tossed with some lemon and dill would be tasty too, or maybe some cucumber and feta cheese cut in cubes.

This made a fair sized lunch portion for me; if you serve it as a starter this would make two portions.



Cold honeydew soup

½ honeydew melon
2 tbsp plain thick yoghurt (I used Turkish cause that's what we had in the fridge)
Pinch of salt
Pinch of harissa (or sambal oelek)
1 slice prosciutto ham

Peel the melon, cut it in smaller pieces and toss them in the blender. Puree the melon, add the yoghurt, salt and harissa and blend again. Taste to see if you want more of anything. Pour into a bowl and top with prosciutto cut in small pieces. Done!

I added some flat-leaf parsley too, mostly because I wanted to make the photo look nicer. Ok, only because I wanted to make the photo look nicer, the parsley didn't really add anything flavor-wise.

Creamy seafood soup

I just love it when you have stuff sitting around in the freezer/fridge/pantry that needs to be used up, so you start experimenting, and the result is something as delicious as this evening's seafood soup. The base is the stock left over from making Moules à Marinière a while ago, so this recipe depends on that you have made that, strained the liquid and saved it in the freezer. If you have some other seafood-based stock (crayfish, lobster, shrimp) that would also work, I'm sure.

I feel kind of bad about the ridiculous amounts of cream that went into the soup, but the open carton had expired yesterday and needed to go into something, so it was either this or a desert (ok, desert is coming up in a later post). You can of course exchange the cream for a low fat equivalent. For the seafood part, we used shrimp and seithe, but feel free to play around. Just make sure to use a firm fish that won't fall apart when cooking, and please try to think of sustainability when choosing your fish! WWF (as in wildlife conservation, not wrestling!) has lists of which fish has healthy populations and can be eaten with a good conscience - for the US see here, in Swedish see here.


Hey, the soup kind of matches our kitchen cabinet doors!

Creamy seafood soup

1 small yellow onion
1 fennel
½ tbsp butter
3 dl blue mussel stock from this recipe
1 tbsp tomato puré
½ dl dry vermouth
2½ dl cream
Pinch of ancho chili powder
300 g saithe (coley)
750 g unpeeled shrimp (about 3 dl peeled)

Chop up the onion and fennel. Melt the butter in a big pot, throw in the vegetables and fry on rather low heat until they are getting soft but not any colour. Add the mussel stock, tomato puré and vermouth, bring to a boil and let it reduce for a little while. Whip the cream lightly and stir it in together with a pinch of ancho chili. Bring to a slow simmer. Add the saithe and let it simmer for a minute or two, then add the peeled shrimp. Cook for another 4-5 minutes (we cooked everything for about six minutes, then the saithe was perfect but the shrimp a slight bit overcooked so add those after the fish). We served with the green stuff from the fennel on top, it adds nice colour but no real taste. For colour and flavour, decorate with dill instead. We didn't think it needed any salt or pepper, but let your taste decide.

A favorite soup

When we found that we got parsnips in our organic vegetable and fruit box, we immediately knew what to make of them: cream of parsnip soup. The original recipe comes from Arla, a Swedish dairy producer (although I think they're actually Danish now) who gives out little recipe folders for free in grocery stores. This soup is a find from one of those.

The soup works really well as a starter as well as a light lunch or dinner, and it tastes much more refined than you would think when you hear that the main ingredient is parsnips. The pears add a nice sweet fruitiness and the walnuts a nice crunch. We've made some changes to the recipe, like using vermouth and vinegar instead of white wine, and having the walnuts and pears raw rather than roasted as the original says.



Cream of parsnip soup with walnuts and pear

400 grams parsnips
1 onion
½ tbsp butter
5 dl water
1½ tbsp concentrated vegetable stock
1 dl dry vermouth
1 tbsp white wine vinegar
2½ dl light cream (15 % fat)
White pepper
50 grams walnuts
1 pear
2 tbsp finely chopped chives

Peel and dice the parsnips and onion. There's no need for very nice dicing since it's all going to be mixed later. Do make the dice quite small though, it will make them soft quicker. Fry the diced parsnips and onion in the butter. Dissolve the vegetable stock in the water and add that together with the vermouth and vinegar. Let cook slowly until the parsnips are soft, it takes about 10-15 minutes. (You can prepare the soup this far.) Mix the soup completely smooth with a blender. Add the cream and reheat. Add freshly ground white pepper to taste. Chop the walnuts and dice the pear. Mix with the chives. Serve the soup with the walnut-pear "chop" sprinkled on top.