Better than Chicken Soup

Julian’s had a nasty cold this week. Last night he decided he needed soup to decongest his respiratory tract. He stopped at a Vietnamese joint north of us and brought home two servings of bun bo Hue, one of my favorite soups.

Bun bo Hue is a Vietnamese noodle soup, but it’s more complex than pho. First, it contains both pork and beef. Some restaurants will also add Vietnamese pork roll (what Julian calls nose meat); others will add blood cake. However, most of the recipes I’ve seen in cookbooks use beef shank and fresh ham for the soup. Other differences between bun bo Hue and pho are the use of chiles and shrimp sauce in bun bo Hue for spice and funk. Bun bo Hue noodles are also thicker than standard pho rice vermicelli. Both soups are served with an herb platter, which can also contain lime wedges and bean sprouts.

I had my first taste of bun bo Hue at a Vietnamese restaurant in Rochester, NY many years ago. It was love at first slurp. The soup isn’t easy to find in restaurants. Your all-purpose House of Pho wants to serve variations on one or two broths to simplify the menu and keep costs low. Making the broth for bun bo Hue is more involved, and requires multiple steps to build up the layers of flavor. The noodles take much longer to cook than rice vermicelli, about 15 minutes. Finally, the owners of many pho joints believe that their non-Asian customers wouldn’t like bun bo Hue.

Making bun bo Hue at home isn’t difficult, providing you have a good Asian grocery store nearby. You want to get pork and beef cuts with bones to make the broth. The only challenging ingredients to find are the bun bo Hue noodles and an herb called rau ram (sometimes called Vietnamese coriander) for the herb platter. My go-to recipe is in Mai Pham’s Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table. I bought the book solely on the basis of the bun bo Hue recipe; luckily, the other recipes are keepers as well. I’ve also used the recipe from Andrea Nguyen’s Into the Vietnamese Kitchen. Either recipe will yield a soup that will clear your sinuses and convince you that your ancestors took the long way to Plymouth Rock or Ellis Island.