Pho Ga
When people think of Vietnamese cuisine, pho is the first thing that comes to mind, but given the abundance of pho restaurants, it’s rarely something we eat at home. We’ve now been sheltering in place (officially and not) for going on 6 months, and with no end in sight to at home meals, it seemed like the right time to learn how to make pho for myself. Also, my aunt convinced me that making the chicken version could easily be done in my instant pot. While she wasn’t wrong, it still took me some practice with the new ingredients and technique.
The first challenge came with the ingredients themselves. It was the first time I’d heard of fructus amomi (otherwise known as cardamom pods) and turns out ‘vegetable seasoning’ means something really specific. What I had at home and another version I found at my local Ranch 99 were both wrong for this dish. I ended up having to order a bag of the exact brand my aunt uses from eBay after failing to find a proper substitute.
Besides the vegetable seasoning, most of the soup flavoring is fairly common. Cardamom pods, which I had never heard of before, was fairly easy to track down at Ranch 99 along with the rock sugar. See picture below for rough size; one time my soup was overly sweet because I chose too large of cubes. Grilling the ingredients also took some trial and error over our gas stove. Doing this on an actual grill is probably quicker if you have easy access to one.
In terms of noodles, we prefer fresh (usually found in a package or on a tray near the tofu/produce area), but any dry pho noodles work perfectly fine as well.
From start to finish, this dish was anything but quick to me, but, the active cooking time isn’t too unreasonable. Start early in the afternoon and it’ll be fairly low effort to have it done in time for dinner. Enjoy!
Instant Pot Pho Ga
Equipment
- Instant Pot
Ingredients
- 4-5 lb free range chicken
- 30 oz chicken broth (1 large carton or 2 small cans)
- 2 pieces large ginger root
- 2 shallots
- 1 white onion
- 3 tbsp fish sauce
- 2 tbsp Vegehope seasoning
- 3 cubes rock sugar (roughly 3/4" diameter)
- 5 star anise
- 1 cinnamon stick
- 3 cardamom pods (aka fructus amomi)
- 4 bunches green onions (garnish)
- vietnamese coriander (garnish)
Instructions
- Clean chicken with water and salt while also trimming away large sections of fat near the neck and cavity.
- Grill ginger, onion, shallots then rinse off burnt areas (run under water for a few seconds).
- Place chicken, ginger, onion, shallots, fish sauce, rock sugar into instant pot along with chicken broth. Add water up to max fill line (about 8-10 cups).
- Set to 30 minutes on High Pressure. Then do quick release. For me, the warm up, cook, and release time was altogether nearly 1.5 hours.
- While broth is cooking, roast cinamom, cardamom pods, and star anise in a dry pan until fragrant (about 3-5 minutes).
- Chop and mix together green onions (green part only) and coriander. Clean basil and bean sprouts.
- Once broth is done cooking, skim away fat from the top of the broth.
- Remove chicken, shallots, onion (but not ginger) from instant pot. Add anise, cinnamon, and cardamom pods.
- Turn to saute mode for 10 minutes.
- Shred chicken while broth continues cooking.
- Remove spices and strain broth.
- Cook noodles according to package instructions (should be less than a minute in boiling water for fresh noodles). Serve with bean sprouts, basil, hoison sauce, siracha, scallion and coriander garnish.