Medicinal Mushroom Phở

Hello! This is Valerie, happy to share this delicious dish with you that comes from the cooler northern mountain provinces of Vietnam. As this recipe was passed on to warmer southern Vietnam, it became sweeter (through the addition of palm sugar) and more herbal. The name, “phở” is thought to be a reference to the dish’s signature technique of fire-blackening the alliums and spices to bring out the flavor.

More background and story about the dish after the recipe. Enjoy preparing and eating!

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How to prepare the broth:

In a cast iron pan, toast the whole spices on medium-low heat until fragrant. Start with the star anise, cinnamon, cardamon, clove, then add the coriander, fennel, and black pepper last. Keep the spices moving to prevent them from scorching. When the spices start popping and crackling, they are close to being perfect. When they are visibly roasted (but not burnt), transfer them into a small bowl and set aside.

Next, pan-roast your dried, sliced wild mushrooms on medium-low heat until they look golden and smell wonderfully toasty. Set these aside in the bowl with the spices.

In the same pan, pour a thin layer of high-heat oil (avocado, sesame, coconut). Slice the whole ginger and onion in half, leaving the skins on. Put on hot pan and leave to sizzle until the ginger, onion, whole garlic, whole shallot have developed a caramelized, charred sear. You want them to be fire-blackened.

If you are adding animal bones, roast them in the oven at 450 for 25 minutes before adding them to a large stock pot. If you have room in the sheet pan, feel free to add more halved onions and shallots for richer flavor.

If you are choosing vegan, wash your leek, daikon, carrot and fennel, keeping the vegetables as whole as possible. Toss them in high heat oil and at 400 for 15 minutes, to bring out caramelized flavor. Oil is very important to the vegan preparation, as it will help capture the perfume of the aromatics. If you have room in the sheet pan, feel free to add even more halved onions and shallots for richer flavor.

Bring out a small handful of reishi (4 small fruitbodies). Add all ingredients, including medicinal mushrooms, in a large stock pot. Simmer, do not let boil, for 40 minutes. Boiling will volatilize the aromatics, break down the delicate polysaccharides and dull the flavor. 

While the stock is gently simmering, clean your fresh herbs. Thinly-slice white onion and soak in water to soften bitter bite. Thinly-slice jalapeno peppers (remove white membrane if you don’t want spicy). Quarter the limes. Leave herbs whole on stem, for soup-eaters to personally strip into their bowls.

After the broth has simmered for 40 minutes, add your preference of salt (1 tbsp) and palm sugar (1 tsp) – regular sugar, agave or maple syrup will do.

Strain the broth through a fine-meshed strainer. Make sure to let it drip over the pot and squeeze out all the goodness from the vegetables. Return to the pot. Add thinly-sliced fresh mushrooms of your choice: shiitake, maiitake, lyophyllum decastes, porcini, sparassis… Simmer for 10 minutes. Crimini (Agaricus bisporus), portobella and other soil mushrooms are not recommended in this dish, as they will give the broth a slightly metallic flavor.

Serve broth over rice noodles, with sri racha and hoisin on the side to dip the noodles and mushroom. So delicious on a cold day!

Though hoisin sauce (a classic Chinese sweet-and-salty fermented black soybean sauce) is traditionally gluten-free, nowadays the soy is often bulk-cultured with wheat. For a homemade gluten-free probiotic hoisin, try this recipe! First, brew your reishi tea. Drink a cup of reishi tea. Add raisins to reishi tea to soak for half an hour. Drain and blend soaked raisins with a cup of roasted yam, a tablespoon of toasted five-spice (clove, star anise, cinnamon, cumin, anise), a teaspoon of garlic powder. Add a tablespoon each of tamari, dark miso, toasted sesame oil, molasses. Though the sweet potato and raisins should give a nice flavor and body, you add more sweetener (brown sugar, agave) according to your taste and diet.

You can make a wonderful phở with only mushrooms. Though in the last two centuries, beef has been the most popular flavor base of phở, the use of cow for meat was fairly taboo in the pre-colonial days, as these large ruminants held too much reverence and cultural value in their contribution of power and compost in the agrarian ecosystem. Holy cow! The French colonialist’s appetite for beef triggered a change in Southeast Asian culinary practices – among many others. From a new excess of bones, a nourishing commoner’s broth was alchemized. Typically phở uses only a small amount of thinly-sliced meat among a mix of tendons and ‘funny’ cartilaginous parts that have a toothsome texture that mushrooms mimic so well.

Last fall, I went foraging with a new friend who grew up in Vietnam and also adores mushrooms. We were on the hunt for matsutake in the pines and found a beautiful abundance of brick-red-capped, blue-staining Leccinum manzanitae in-and-among the pines and Ericaceae scrub (huckleberry, manzanita, salal). Though they are not typically prized for the table, perhaps due to their black furry scabers on their stalk and erratic blue-greening where they are cut, we joyfully lost ourselves in the hunt for them. Earlier that October, in the high Cascades, we had found gigantic-sized Leccinum ponderosum bigger than our heads at the foot of pines. Both are absolutely perfect for broth and take on a nutty flavor when dried.

The type of reishi recommended in this recipe has a nostalgic flavor reminiscent of wintertime gingerbread, clove and balsam fir. Originally brought into culture by the wonderful Olga Tzogas of Smugtown Mushrooms, its habitat is in the Great Lakes Bioregion. For this recipe, I recommend a more mildly bitter reishi variety, such as Ganoderma tsuga, oregonense and sessile (pictured below). The special flavor of Gingerbread Reishi (a cultivar of Ganoderma sessile) harmonizes remarkably well with flavors of this healing broth. It also substitutes for a rare ingredient typical to phở: Chinese black cardamom and its smoky, woodsy, menthol-like qualities.