Vietnamese Prawn Soup - Pho Tom
Fragrant and Fabulous Shrimp Pho
Vietnamese Pho is tangy and fresh, with wonderful flavour and amazing health properties at the same time. For instant zing tuck into a bowl today!
It's not at all hard to make, in fact it's incredibly easy. So easy you'll wonder why you haven't been making it before.
All the ingredients for this tasty shrimp soup are either already in the Western kitchen or readily available in the supermarket.
Cook Time
Ingredients
- 850 ml Fish stock
- 2 Cucumbers, peeled
- 1 cup Rice vermicelli
- 12 Large, fresh prawns (shrimp), peeled and deveined
- bunch mint, Vietnamese mint, coriander or basi
Instructions
- Bring the stock to boil, then turn down to simmer while you're preparing the rest of the ingredients
- Slice the cucumber into thin rounds or cut into fine matchsticks. Place on a plate and put it on the table.
- Place the herbs on a plate on the table.
- In another pot, boil water and then add the rice vermicelli. Turn off the heat and let the vermicelli soak for 5 minutes, then drain and place into four soup bowls.
- Put the shrimp into the bowls
- The Pho is now ready to serve. You can, with a large spoon or cup, ladle the stock into the soup bowls yourself. If you have a soup tureen, pour the pho into that, then bring it to the table so that guests can ladle for themselves.
Unsure about these ingredients? See Ingredients for Vietnamese Cooking
Unsure about these measurements? See the free-to-use online.Weights and Measures, Metric Conversion
Nockie's Kitchen
Nockie Le is a Vietnamese-Australian who creates wonderful meals with vegetables and herbs straight from her own garden. Her bright, cheerful kitchen is the centre of her home.
Nockie coaches me in Vietnamese cooking while I show her my tried and true lamb roasts, and the iconic Australian lamingtons, a mutually beneficial arrangement.
Even better, Nockie is also my daughter-in-law
Prawn or Shrimp?
Prawn versus Shrimp
To most people the words 'prawn' and 'shrimp' mean something deliciously edible from the sea, probably with several legs and a hard shell.
Australians think of prawns as large animals seen in the fish shop or on the menu in a restaurant. To us, shrimps are smaller, the little pink things on the top of pizzas or maybe the small quick translucent creatures in rock pools.
There are differences between the two crustaceans but I'm not going to get into a discussion of Penaeidae and Caridea. Apart from being highly technical and liable to send you to sleep, it would be irrelevant.
Sufficient to say : A shrimp in the USA is a prawn in Australia!
Do you pho?
Join me in a bowl of pho?
© 2010 Susanna Duffy
