- [Helen] So my style of pho is nontraditional traditional.
When you taste it, you'll be able to taste
all of the flavors that are very familiar.
I've been able to add different layers that are very true
to the way that I eat and the way that I cook.
You can totally tell that the stock, at its core,
or the broth, at its core, is something entirely different
than you'll see at a regular mom-and-pop restaurant.
(anticipatory violin music)
I feel like the people that really appreciate meat
and really appreciate a really hearty broth,
they will taste it and they will feel, "Oh wow,
you could really taste the intensity of the beef
and the love that's in there."
And then there's the flipside where people were like,
"Oh, this doesn't taste like anything
like my grandma makes," right?
And either way, it's okay.
It's something that I can call my own
and feel very happy and proud of.
So, it's about 10:00 PM. I'm here at Pat LaFrieda warehouse.
I'm going to be picking up some bones and some meat
to restart my mother stock.
I know it's a little late,
but that's when the magic happens,
and that's when they start working
and breaking down all the meats
for many restaurants throughout the city.
So this is where our burgers get processed.
We do a special blend of eight ounce patties
with dry-aged ribeye, short rib, and just regular ribeye.
It goes through these machines.
So, I got a couple of beef shanks here
that the guys picked out for me,
and this is gonna go into our beef stocks.
There's Pat LaFrieda!
He's taken me in and taught me a lot
about the different types of bones and meat.
- This type of a motion
with gripping our knife.
And I'm gonna remember that
when we come up towards the meat cap,
that's where we use the flexibility of the knife.
- [Helen] So when I first started making pho,
I would just go to the store
and just pick up a bag of bones,
throw it into a pot, fill it up with water,
and voila, I'm making a bone broth.
The more I started cooking, the more I realized
that my stocks have been varying in color and taste.
It made me very curious, and I was like,
"Why is this happening?"
So about six years ago was
when I started going out to LaFrieda warehouse.
When I was introduced to Pat, I told him,
"I really wanna learn more about why people use
certain cuts for stews, for stocks, for searing."
From that, blossomed a very great relationship
between myself and the team at LaFrieda.
- When chefs come in,
and they want to learn about cutting meat,
we always embrace that.
- I learn something new every time I come here,
even though I'm making the same recipe.
One time Pat told me,
"Maybe you should consider using shank
because once we break down the shank,
then we can use the shank bone,
split it in half, and there you got your bone marrow."
I truly use every part of it,
from the meat to the tendon to the bones.
Through that, it truly helped transform my perspective
in terms of the different types of food that I was cooking.
It translated into, "How can I utilize that information
to make it more cost effective
and efficient for the restaurant?"
And then these guys over here,
we usually give over to Ecwa,
and he goes through the bandsaw,
and he cuts them canoe cut for us.
How beautiful these are.
All that marrow.
I'm gonna take you into
one of my favorite rooms in the whole entire world,
the dry-age room. (laughs)
Okay, so I'm gonna need 60 days, Pat.
Nothing more, nothing less.
I've tried them at every age,
and I really like the flavor profile of 60's
because 30 is a little bit too mild
and 90 is just too funky.
So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna turn this baby down
and we're going to extract the bone
and then, honestly, take everything with me.
Traditionally, in Vietnamese cuisine,
we don't use dry-aged beef.
When I started working with it,
I would start off with
very conservative amounts of
dry aged beef fat, dry aged meat,
just to have a little better understanding of
what fits my flavor profile.
You know, you have to be very careful
with the amount that you use
just because sometimes a little bit too much
and it just really ruins the whole dish.
On the days that I need assistance, Manny's my guy. (laughs)
Smells like beef jerky.
Asking questions, seeing them work,
has brought upon a lot of curiosity
and that truly shaped my cooking.
- [Manny] She used to come after been working
for 10, 12 hours in a restaurant
and just showing to keep learning more and more
about the meat.
It is something that you don't see in every person.
- [Helen] Manny used to always tell me, "Don't be afraid,"
because before it's like, "Oh man,
I'm working with a lot of expensive products here.
I really can't mess up."
- [Manny] She mastered her skills really good,
and she's becoming who she is right now.
- [Helen] I'm gonna take this,
gonna put it in a separate box.
These are the briskets that we use.
I don't really do anything else to them
just because this is thrown into the beef stock as a whole.
I'm gonna show you this new machine. It's very cool.
If you're looking for a specific cut,
you enter it into the machine,
you place your cut of meat on it,
it weighs it, and it cuts it precisely. It's wild.
So I need two pieces of porterhouses
that are roughly two inches thick. 50 ounces.
Voila. (laughs)
Isn't that beautiful?
We just need our neck bones and our oxtail
and we're ready to go.
What a haul, huh?
Thank you!
Before we take off with the meat, we have to weigh it.
You gotta spend money to make money, right? (laughs)
Right now it's about midnight.
We're gonna head back to the restaurant and start my stock.
So it's now 12:30 AM. We're back at home base
and we are going to unload and start the mother stock.
So we are going to fill this baby up
and load 'em up with bones.
Okay, so I like to start off with bones.
Bones first before I put any of the proteins in.
So we are going to start with our beef shanks.
So these are going in first.
When you look at the menu, it's "Helen's beef pho,"
it's not just pho.
I like a lot of flavors in the food that I eat
and the food that I cook.
Gonna move on to the neck bones.
I love that there's a good amount of meat
on these neck bones.
We can extract all the meat and use them for stews.
So once a year I restart the mother stock.
The goal here is to create a very beefy stock
that we can use for a million things.
And you'll see everything that comes out of the pots,
there's a really beautiful purpose.
Once the bones are in, I add the meat.
So now we're gonna put the beef shanks in.
All right, brisket. Brisket going in.
So right here I have some oxtails
that I'm gonna throw into the beef stock.
These are non-negotiables.
Must always have brisket, must always have oxtails.
Oh my gosh, I love this so much.
If I could just make stocks and stare at this for hours,
I would.
I'm thinking that it's going to be roughly 45 minutes
until we come into a full boil.
And then I want it to go at a rolling boil
for at least 15 minutes.
I watch the meat because, you know,
there's a different cooking time for each cut of meat.
We're at minute 45. And look at the baby,
she's at a rolling boil.
I'm gonna skim.
This is one of the most gratifying experiences.
'cause you know that the more you skim,
the clearer the stock becomes.
It's just pure joy. Pure joy.
And then now I take this guy.
I don't need a whole lot of movement,
I just need to make sure that
there's a little bit of separation so that it can breathe.
So I'm gonna keep it at a rolling boil
for another 15 minutes just to make sure that,
you know, things are getting cooked properly.
And then I'm gonna bring it down to a simmer.
And can you see the color of the fat forming right now?
It's so gorgeous.
And you'll see this transform over the hours
into something like a deeper golden yellow.
All right, so it's about, I don't know, four?
We're on hour four of our stock.
As you can see, we have about
an an inch and a half to two inches of rendered fat.
This is essentially our liquid gold here.
It's time to pull out the brisket and the shank
and all the meats
so that we can cool them in time to prep for service.
Just look at that. That's beautiful.
And this is the color that we strive for every batch.
It all starts from here.
So now that we've taken all of the meat out,
remember this beautiful guy?
This dry-aged rack of rib and meat.
So at this point is when we're gonna
add him into the baby mother stock,
just to be able to enhance the beefy flavor.
And then we sit and we wait for another two to three hours.
So we are going to pull apart some of the oxtail meat
that we took out earlier.
This is gonna go into our fried rice.
So this is what I mean when so many dishes
come out of that one master stock.
The mother stock doesn't just lend itself to our pho,
it's an essential to our sauces
and a lot of elements that, you know,
we utilize in our daily menu.
It's coming off the bone very easily.
I personally don't like cooking it too much,
just because I still like the chewy texture
and have it have a bouncy bite
rather than have it completely fall apart.
Out of that one big mother stock,
we got our oxtails, we all have our beef shanks,
we have our brisket.
All this is gonna contribute to at least five other dishes.
That's why she's called the mother stock.
So this is the back fat from yesterday's rib rack.
I'm going to cut them into smaller pieces
and then we're gonna render them
and we're going utilize the fat for fried rice, for saute.
So then I'm just gonna turn it on low
because we want it to slowly render.
So for oxtail fried rice, the wok is on.
We are going to add dry-aged beef fat.
We have oxtail and we have some beef shank.
Throw some onions,
all of our meat in there.
Special oxtail sauce.
So we have a jasmine rice.
At this stage of cooking,
I still think about my visits at the warehouse. You know?
From the point you get to pick the meat,
you get to have nice, fun conversations with the guys.
They always ask me what am I gonna do.
So we're gonna finish it off
with a little bit more rendered beef fat.
So this is the base of it.
I'm gonna fry an egg and I'm gonna top it.
This is our family-size oxtail fried rice
with oxtail and beef shank
and a fried egg fried in beef fat.
Remember that dry-aged rack of rib bones with the meat?
I'm taking it out now
'cause if not, it's going to really mess up
the ratio of our mother stock.
At this point, what this mother stock tastes like
is just a very beefy water. (laughs)
So what I have here is two pans. In one pan
we are going to toast spices. In the other,
we're going to sweat some onions,
some ginger, and some shallots.
When you do a little cooking and toasting
before you put it in, I think that it really blooms.
In here, I have a bunch of my spices that are going to,
you know, go into my beef stock.
All the aromatics have been sitting
for about an hour and a half.
Very nice. The spices are where I want it to be,
so I'm going to take everything out.
I think the mother stock of 2023 is beautiful.
The neck bones are definitely enhancing
the beefiness of the stock, which I love.
So now that we have strained all of the aromatics,
I am going to add rock sugar.
And then we're gonna add our salt.
I load up on cilantro stems.
So we use a lot of cilantro in our cooking.
We save all the stems.
The cilantro stems are an essential to my stocks.
This is almost as important as the beef to me.
So this brisket was cooking in the mother stock pot
for about four-and-a-half hours.
So I'm removing the cilantro stems.
Now we have pho broth.
It's no longer a stock, it's a broth.
We have our setup.
We have our sliced ribeye,
we have our sliced brisket,
and then we have the garnishes,
which is scallion, cilantro, and sliced onion.
So when we fire a bowl of pho, we blanche the noodles.
And then from here, a couple slices of the brisket
and then the ribeye that we picked up yesterday,
thinly sliced.
So then we have our beautiful pho broth.
As we're ladling the broth,
we're cooking that raw meat inside.
So what I'm looking for is that nice golden brown color,
but also clarity of the broth, which you can see here.
We're gonna do some scallions
and then we're gonna do some cilantro.
And there you have Helen's Beef Pho,
a very beautiful, beefy bowl of pho
noodle soup.
(violin music)