Poor pho can’t seem to get a break.

After being billed as the “next ramen” by one major food publication last year, the long-suffering noodle soup was then subjected to a how-to-eat-this-ethnic-food video by said publication that sourced a white chef as the expert and used everyone’s favorite “you’ve-been-doing-this-wrong” setup that infuriated fans of food and culture alike. But the insults didn’t stop there: the dish has since suffered a wealth of non-Vietnamese appropriations that have been dubious at best and identity-shattering at worst.

But alas, as 2017 continues to prove, the worst is always yet to come. Yesterday, canned soup conglomerate Campbell’s partnered with “celebrity chef” Mike Daniel to put out this ad promoting the new “Campbell’s Pho Broth.” While I, for one, am in full support of a ready-to-go pho stock—after all, we can’t always wait 13 hours to get our fix—the video makes one egregious error: it confuses pho, the noodle soup of Vietnam, with ramen, a very delicious soup from another country, Japan.

Now, for those of you thinking, “pho, ramen; tomato, to-mah-to,” stop thinking that. This is more like tomato, kiwi. Sure, noodles floating in a bowl of soup may be confusing, but by that same logic, so is meat between bread. And who among us has ever mistaken a cheeseburger for a Reuben, or confused a hot dog for a BLT? (Don’t get me started on the bastardization of Vietnam’s own sandwich, the banh mi.) And that’s not to mention the sales, partnerships, and video teams who had to give the sign-off on this video in addition to the chef, a capable, successful CHEF, by Jove, one who travels and cooks fancy things and should understand the difference between rice stick and egg noodle.

Getting creative with dishes is one thing: after all, much of Vietnamese food as we know it today is a product of cultural contact—er, colonialism—and one of my favorite bowls of pho, ever, has a pretty unorthodox add-in. But creativity is not the same as ignorance. Call me a snowflake if you will, but this isn’t about being “politically correct,” it’s about being informed. With that in mind, here are some fast facts about both pho and ramen. (Disclaimer: There are loads of regional varieties and quirks for both dishes—these are the basics).

Origin: Vietnam
Noodle: Flat rice noodles, called banh pho
Soup: Typically beef broth, but can also be made with chicken and vegetables
Meat: The meat corresponds to the base of the stock. Cuts of beef include thinly-sliced eye-round steak, brisket, tripe, and meatballs.
Spices, seasonings, herbs: Star anise, cardamom, cinnamon, shallots, fish sauce, rock sugar
(Optional) toppings: Chopped scallions, cilantro, Thai basil, mint, sawtooth herb, jalapeños, bean sprouts, fresh lime, Sriracha, hoisin sauce
How to eat: Trick question! There’s no one way. Some choose to squeeze their Sriracha and hoisin sauce into a side dish and dip their meat as they go. Some add nuoc beo or a fatty broth served on the side. Aside from the chopped scallion and cilantro, the fresh veggie garnishes are typically added in at the table, rather than served in the bowl.

Origin: Japan
Noodle: Egg noodles that range from thick to thin, straight to wavy
Soup: There are many versions, but the basics seasoning styles include shio (salt-based), shoyu (soy-based), and miso. For the base itself, consider making a dashi stock for a lighter option or bone broths (pork, chicken, and beef, are all used) for something heavier.
Meat: Chashu (a marinated braised pork belly) is the favored cut
Spices, seasonings, herbs: Salt, soy sauce, miso paste, garlic, seasoned oils
{Optional) toppings: Boiled eggs, soft-boiled seasoned eggs, pickled vegetables, various styles of seaweed, corn, mushrooms, menma (bamboo)
How to eat: Ramen masters may be more of purists than the Vietnamese home cooks who make pho, but there similarly aren’t too many rules here. Pro-tip: You’ll want to eat your ramen fast, slurping all the while, as the egg noodles tend to get mushy when they’ve been sitting in the hot broth for too long.

The post Here’s the Difference Between Ramen and Pho appeared first on Saveur.

Kim Kim Dao shakes a small skillet filled with star anise, cloves, and cinnamon sticks over a stovetop burner, and her small, bright kitchen quickly fills with their fragrance. “The secret is the spices,” she says. “Everything starts there.”

Dao is making pho ga, the chicken noodle soup that she grew up eating in Saigon but is still a rarity in her newly adopted home of Sofia, Bulgaria. Some will be enjoyed for lunch today, and the rest will be offered for sale to a long list of Sofia residents—a customer base Dao has cultivated over the past year or so. What began as cooking homeland favorites for friends has blossomed into a booming home business, and she couldn’t be more pleased about it.

“I like to share with people,” she says. Dao adds freshly minced ginger as the intoxicating aromas intensify. Virtually every available moment of her weekends is spent cooking, a necessity given the demand for her food. “I began by cooking for a friend,” she explains. “Then more friends, and then they suggested I start selling it.”

It was advice well-taken. With more than two dozen steady customers and a waiting list beyond that, she is clearly succeeding. “I have a fan club now!” she declares. The response has been so positive that she began working with another Vietnamese expat, Quynh Tran. “We click very well,” Dao says. “It would be very difficult without her. I count on her.”

Dao moved to Sofia from Saigon almost two years ago. Sorely missing the foods from home, she began trying to cook her favorite recipes, a task that proved incredibly difficult at first. In Sofia—land of filled pastries and stuffed vegetables, chilled soups, and grilled skewered meats—ingredients like rice noodles, tamarind, and marinated soy beans are hard to come by, even in the country’s capital. Dao opts to grow as much as possible herself, covering her small porch in clay pots, small trellises, and vessels for dozens of different herbs and vegetables. When I visit, the dark green leaves of rau ram (Vietnamese coriander) are soaking up the warm sun. Thai basil and cilantro plants line the bannister, and luffa gourds—of which Dao is particularly proud—climb one of the thick wooden dowels. Nearby, Sofia’s biggest and busiest market, Zhenski Pazar (“The Women’s Market”), offers the best chance of finding what else she needs.

Inside Sofia’s stark, monochromatic buildings, the practice of cooks selling a vibrant array of foods from their homes is fairly common. Dao is careful to stay within the amounts legally allowed to be sold, but this limitation means less profit than she would like. (Each month she sees only 50 euros or so once all the expenses are accounted for.) The dishes she cooks distinguish her business from those of other home cooks in the city. “Most Bulgarians only know Asian cuisine from eating Chinese food,” she says. “Those that do know Vietnamese cooking only know pho.” While Dao’s top seller is still the most well-known version of pho—the beef-and-scallion-loaded pho bo—she also offers many other dishes she has been eating since childhood, including bo bun (chilled rice noodles with stir-fried beef marinated with lemongrass), and goi cuon, a spring roll stuffed with vegetables and pork or prawns.

In the corner of the kitchen, a huge stockpot of thit kho tau (caramelized pork belly and eggs) is mellowing for an upcoming event. Traditionally served on the eve of Tết, the Vietnamese lunar new year, this pungent dish combines marinated pork belly and hard-boiled eggs in a dark, rich broth of fish-sauce-infused coconut water. Dao pierces the eggs to let the juices to soak in, and adds homemade caramel during cooking to sweeten the meat. She then serves the meal with rice.

After three hours of simmering, Dao’s pot of pho ga is ready, and a group of diners has trickled in. She sets up dinner on a small table that rises only a few inches from the floor. The guests remove their shoes and take their place on ornate pillows surrounding the table. Dao ladles out broth atop bowls of chicken and rice noodles and brings them to the table along with a plate loaded with white onion, fresh herbs, sliced chiles, and lime wedges. Hands reach across the table, and the toppings criss-cross their way around until everyone’s bowl has been customized to their liking.

My pho is bursting with flavors and textures: basil leaves float in the broth, releasing their herbaceous aroma upward. Raw onion and fresh jalapeño slices provide crunch, spiciness, and bite, and lime juice punches up the broth with acidity and sweetness. Dao encourages her guests to slurp the soup, which in Vietnamese culture, is a sign of enjoyment and considered a compliment. “When you eat my soup, you have to make a lot of noise,” she laughs.

As her comfort and success as a host and public-facing cook continue to grow, Dao has her sights set on a new goal for the future. With the help of some interested local investors, she is hoping to open a Vietnamese restaurant somewhere in Sofia within the next year. Her plan is to offer three or four dishes a day with no set menu, letting seasonal availability of ingredients and personal inspiration lead the way. But for now, her home-kitchen ritual is working. “We smile. We’re happy,” she says. “And you leave with a taste of my Vietnamese culture.”

The post Pho, Far From Home appeared first on Saveur.

“We have to do it before someone else does,” says Yenvy Pham of building out the new restaurant, Phở Bắc Súp Shop, she owns with two of her siblings. As gentrification and big developments rapidly eat up the land around Seattle’s Little Saigon neighborhood, the Pham siblings look to fend off the loss of their cultural enclave to newer, shinier restaurants by opening one themselves—and, they hope, showing others in the community how they can, too.

Pioneering new ideas in the mini-neighborhood of Little Saigon, sandwiched between the Seattle’s Central and International Districts, runs in the Pham family. In 1982, Yenvy’s parents changed their sandwich shop, then called Cat’s Submarine, into Phở Bắc, the city’s first phở shop. Now that her parents are retired, the business is run by three of their five adult children, Quynh, Khoa, and Yenvy, and finding phở in Seattle is about as easy as finding a slice of pizza in New York (and nearly as essential to the city’s identity).

“There was nothing there,” says Yenvy of when her parents opened the red, boat-shaped original shop at the corner of 14th and Jackson. “It was a really blue-collar area.” On weekends, the crowds would spill out of the Vietnamese Catholic church two blocks away and pack in for phở. The community—Washington has the third-largest Vietnamese population in the country—came to shop at the Asian grocery stores and stopped in for soup. Soon, a whole neighborhood sprang up, an unofficial “Little Saigon,” centered on “The Boat.”

Less than a mile north, Capitol Hill’s dense population of hipsters and wealthy new arrivals fills up luxury apartment buildings. To the east is the rapidly gentrifying Central District, once a hub of African-American culture, with its jazz clubs spilling down Jackson and extending into the beginnings of Little Saigon, now filling up with multi-use new developments as the city scrambles to house the tech-boom employees flooding the city.

Today, 40 years after the first Vietnamese businesses opened here, more than 100 small, family-run businesses crowd the micro-neighborhood. A half-dozen bánh mì, or Vietnamese sandwich, shops circle the busy intersection of 12th and Jackson; low-rise buildings hold layers of restaurants boasting their offerings in English, Vietnamese, and Chinese.

Among the three-table noodle spots and two-dollar sandwich counters, the Pham’s Súp Shop sprawls. The space, an expanded remodel of Phở Viet, formerly another of their family’s restaurants, includes a full bar, a coffee shop, an area for people to settle in and do work, and another for hosting events. “It’s the Central Perk of Little Saigon,” jokes Quynh Pham.

One corner holds a surprising mini-business: a natural wine shop called Vita Uva, run by Suzi An, whom Yenvy calls her “Korean-American sister.” The décor is at once modern and, it seems, a little bit of a throwback to the rickety tables and plastic chair style of their parents’ original shop.

Yenvy laughs at the question of how she decided to follow in her parents’ footsteps, “I was tapped,” she clarifies. Like so many children of restaurateurs, she grew up in the kitchen of her parents Vietnamese restaurant, working since her pre-teen years before joining full-time after she graduated from college. Each time one of the five Pham kids graduated, their parents would encourage them to travel and see the world. “But when we got back,” says Yenvy, “they’d buy us a restaurant and make us run it. Just throw us right into the fire.”

A post shared by P H Ở B Ắ C (@phobacseattle) on Jan 12, 2017 at 4:19pm PST

Today, she runs the three Phở Bắc locations and the Súp Shop with two of her siblings (the other two, she says, “have real jobs.”) But running a restaurant in today’s Little Saigon is a little different from three decades ago. The Vietnamese church moved to Tukwila, as did much of the community, priced out of Seattle’s hot housing market: Little Saigon sits just minutes from Downtown, with easy access to the latest improvements to the city’s public transportation system.

“The demographic kind of changed.” Now, says Yenvy, the area attracts a mix of customers: those who have been coming for 25 years and young people taking the brand-new street car over from trendy Capitol Hill. She and her sister Quynh both serve on the board of the Friends of Little Saigon, a community non-profit advocating and acting on behalf of local businesses fearing displacement in the face of the incoming developments. With at least three of those large developments slated for the next few years and a strong possibility of more, the younger generation of Phams wanted to open a place that would serve all parts of the community, and they knew just where to do it.

“We were tired of leasing other buildings,” says Yenvy of their thought process. “Why not just improve what we have?” Even as more people moved into the neighborhood, nothing around stayed open past nine, and nowhere sold cocktails. “We felt like the neighborhood needed something different: that was our motivator.”

Something different, yet quintessentially the same: Súp simply means soup in Vietnamese. The same phở their immigrant parents first brought to Seattle forms the backbone of the menu, with the addition of a few small bites and, of course, the full bar. Weekly soup specials, a short-rib phở, and what she describes as “satisfying comfort food” round out the offerings. What the Phams want to change most are minds, not menus. “We want to set an example for the rest of the community.”

The siblings hope, through their own business and through Friends of Little Saigon, to promote the area as a Vietnamese cultural center. “We hope it will be multicultural, that people of color can live, work, and stay in their neighborhood.” Many of the Vietnamese own their business’s properties, but that’s no guarantee they’ll be able to flourish in the impending onslaught of development. With Phở Bắc Súp Shop, the younger Pham generation hopes to set an example of how Vietnamese entrepreneurs in the heart of Seattle’s Little Saigon can leverage their businesses to help retain the culture and tradition of the neighborhood. It’s no different, says Yenvy, from what their parents did in 1982, when they plunked down the first Vietnamese restaurant in the city before anyone else did. “We’re just optimizing on the opportunities we have. We want to inspire others to do the same.”

The post How the Next Generation of Seattle’s Little Saigon is Keeping the Neighborhood’s Culture—and Food—Intact appeared first on Saveur.

2017 was a strong year for cookbooks, from essential tomes capturing underrepresented cuisines to debut projects from celebrated chefs and one unpublished manuscript from a legendary fashion magazine designer. Through the good times and the bad, we turned to these texts to inspire our greatest kitchen endeavors, educate us on the history of dishes we’d otherwise be ignorant of, and entertain us with new levels of creative art and imagery. So much did we love this year in cookbooks that we launched our own Cookbook Club—it’s not too late to join. It would be near impossible to share all the titles we loved this year, but here’s a solid list to start.

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I’ll say it right away: Stella Parks’s new BraveTart is the most groundbreaking book on baking in years. Full stop. While plenty of cookbook offer inspiring, pretty photos and reliable recipes, it’s rare to find one that also gets deep into the science and history of cooking and baking. BraveTart does just that. The photos are indeed beautiful and inspiring, and don’t worry: the recipes (and their dozens of variations) do work. But you can expect to walk away from BraveTart with a lot more than a plate of awesome cookies; you’ll get a serious dessert education. — Kat Craddock, test kitchen associate

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If your parents or grandparents hailed from anywhere other than the place you live now—which, of course they did—you might relate to authors Bonnie Frumkin Morales and Deena Prichep’s endearing beautiful new cookbook, Kachka. Sharing a name with Morales’ Russian-ish restaurant in Portland, Oregon, the book gives background on her Belarusian heritage and how she rediscovered and belatedly embraced it in the kitchen. Detective work in the form of long talks with her mom helped Morales deeply delve into her childhood dishes and uncover some family recipe she had never seen before. Though technically, they are dishes from all over the former Soviet Union, Morales uses the word Russian in the way it was used to encompass all of these former territories. The chef puts her own special touches on many of them, bedazzling otherwise rustic or monotone dishes with a signature cheekiness, prettiness, and pop of color Kachka has become known for. — Stacy Adimando, test kitchen director

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Cipe Pineles was an acclaimed designer and art director whose work appeared on the pages of Vogue, Glamour, and Seventeen in the early days of women’s magazines. Her other passion? Food, which manifested in an unpublished book of recipes with hand-painted illustrations. Pineles passed away in 1991, but editors Wendy MacNaughton and Sarah Rich discovered the long-lost manuscript at a book fair, and have since published it as Cipe originally intended. — Dan Q. Dao, deputy digital editor

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To start, I love Burmese food. So Burma Superstar immediately piqued my interest (even though I’d never been to the eponymous San Francisco restaurant). Over the past couple decades, the restaurant went from a local hole-in-the-wall specializing in an obscure Himalayan cuisine to an undeniable staple in the Bay Area restaurant scene. The book reflects both worlds in a way—that of the Wus, the Burmese-Chinese family that owned the struggling restaurant in the ’90s, who quietly added a few of their favorite Burmese dishes to their mass-appeal Chinese-American menu, and that of Desmond Tan, the loyal customer who bought the place in 2000 with a vision for introducing his country’s cuisine to a wider audience that didn’t yet know what they were missing. Wondering where to start? We’ve been loving the chickpea-based shan tofu. — Alex Testere, associate editor

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Named after his two authentic Mexican restaurants in San Francisco, and the Spanish word for the edible cactus leaves used in Mexican salads and side dishes, the book is a love letter to traditional Mexican food from a homesick cook who grew up there. Guzmán, who spent his childhood in a 400-person village in Veracruz, learned the recipes his mother and aunt would cook over fire after plucking and harvesting simple ingredients that grew nearby—cactus leaves from the yard, sweet potatoes from the garden, cacao from the trees, and corn from their nearby farm. His book—co-authored by our own Stacy Adimando—sheds light on fresh, soulful parts of Mexico’s cooking culture that many of us may not yet know. — Katie Whittaker, associate digital editor

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This new book from Stephanie Villani, the friendly face of Blue Moon Fresh Fish, is full of sustainable Long Island seafood recipes, “salty stories” about her life with fishing captain, Alex Villani, a smattering of Yankee fishing history, and tips for cooking and eating fish like you caught it yourself. — Kat Craddock, test kitchen associate

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Samin Nosrat and Wendy MacNaughton instantly became two of my favorite people the moment I met them. That same infectious wit and enthusiasm is instilled in every single illustrated page of this book. Add to that a comprehensive fail-proof mantra for becoming a better cook, and you’ve got a definite keeper. This is one you will read from cover to cover and still go back to find something you’d glossed over entirely. — Alex Testere, associate editor

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Andrea Nguyen is the doyenne of Vietnamese cooking here in the States. She grew up in Saigon eating this iconic noodle soup and shares its historical context with us. — Shane Mitchell, contributing editor

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I spent a good chunk of last winter testing through the recipes in the new POK POK book on Thai drinking food. Long story short, I didn’t poison herself while testing home-fermented sausage, all the recipes worked, and I closed out the project with a newfound obsession with and appreciation for Thai cuisine. The spicy, aromatic ribs cooked under water is a new family favorite and the garlicy sour pork sausage fermented in banana leaves is addictive and delicious with sticky rice–just don’t forget to chill a few cans of beer to wash it all down. — Kat Craddock, test kitchen associate

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As a descendant of Tennessee moonshiners (on my mother’s side), I appreciate a good yarn about booze. Meehan’s compendium is a love letter to bar culture, new and old-fashioned, tiki and craft. Filled with bar wisdom accrued after years behind the stick, the book is ideal for professional bartenders and advanced home enthusiasts alike. — Shane Mitchell, contributing editor

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Michael Twitty’s live-action historical roleplay meets memoir meets searing cultural criticism is many things, but it’s not a cookbook. But insofar as we increasingly read cookbooks like novels to understand other people and times and places, I’m betting on The Cooking Gene becoming an essential text on the black roots that have created, nourished, and suffered for so much of American life. — Max Falkowitz, executive digital editor

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I have never made as many drinks on planes as I have this year (I’ve bought a lot of airplane bottles for my trips), so on a personal level, this book from spirits guru and SAVEUR contributor Kara Newman really speaks to me. But it also speaks to how good cocktails made with fine spirits, using bona fide recipes, are more accessible than ever before. From tips and tricks to making mile-high cocktails to solutions to your hotel mini bar, this whimsical book is as fun to read as its recipes are to make. — Dan Q. Dao, deputy digital editor

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I didn’t realize how brilliant this cookbook really is until I started getting my winter CSA vegetables—there’s an excellent recipe for even the most random knobby root vegetable. — Chris Cohen, senior editor

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Kristen Kish Cooking: Recipes and Techniques a beautiful, easy-to-read text that can serve both as a bible for the Top Chef winner’s super-fans (guilty as charged) and an aspirational manual of recipes for more advanced home cooks. Confidence you’ll need if you want to tackle the not-for-the-faint-of-heart recipes in Kish’s canon. Thankfully, she and her co-writer Meredith Erickson lead the book with a glossary of essential techniques—everything from properly reducing sauces to making confit—that she says she teaches to new cooks in her kitchen. The book centers heavily on these techniques, which admittedly, may require some independent research (and in my case, a few missteps) to master. — Dan Q. Dao, deputy digital editor

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Journalist Robyn Eckhardt and her travel photographer husband David Hagerman (both SAVEUR contributors) aim to prove that there’s more to Turkish cuisine than baklava and kebabs. In this extensively researched text, the globe-trotting duo present a veritable tome of recipes—some of which have never been printed in English—for dishes like pumpkin-flavored meatballs, fava and bulgar-stuffed grape leaves, and köfte meatballs. Read our interview with the authors here. — Madison Roberts, digital editorial intern

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One of our favorite cookbooks from spring of 2017, this beautiful, oversized volume is dedicated purely to pasta and its breezy ease, Colu Henry’s Back Pocket Pasta has been highly anticipated in my household. Not just because I (an honorary Italian-American) and my partner (a real-live Italian-American) have had the pleasure of regularly eating Henry’s food at her picturesque Hudson Valley home, but because we often throw our health-conscious inhibitions to the wind in lieu of carbs and cheese and carbs. Some brilliant highlights: Smoky garganaelli alla vodka (the book is worth all $28 just for this star), ramp & hazelnut pesto (hello, spring), and porchetta pasta (harness this for winter’s end comfort). —Leslie Pariseau, contributor

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When Nathan Myhrvold released Modernist Cuisine six years ago, there had never been a book—or, more specifically, a volume of books—that so thoroughly unpacked contemporary food science. While Modernist Cuisine might have seemed like a once in a lifetime contribution to the world, Myhrvold actually wasn’t finished. He joined forces with baking and pastry visionary, chef Francisco Migoya, for a second series, Modernist Bread. Without revealing too much, the five-volume, 2,642-page collection may be Myhrvold and The Cooking Lab’s most ambitious project yet. Read our full interview with the authors. — Kat Craddock, test kitchen associate

The post The Best New Cookbooks of 2017 appeared first on Saveur.

Home tastes like phở.

My parents were among the thousands of Vietnamese refugees that first brought the beef noodle soup to America 40 years ago. Since then, phở has spilled far and wide across the general American public consciousness, but for me, that smell of 13-hour beef broth wafting from the kitchen means home more than anything else.

The older generation uses phở as a gateway drug for us Vietnamese-American kids, a tool to reel us back into our culture even when we shun the language and grow embarrassed of our smelly Asian lunches. We’re introduced to it first as a cold cure when we’re sick, during weekend brunches, or at special family gatherings. But it’s only the first of many piping-hot noodle soups that connect us with our culture.

If you want to understand Vietnam’s regional cultures, geography, and people, look to noodle soup. In the more polished, Chinese-influenced urban centers of the north, broths tend to be light and clear like consomme with few garnishes. In the central highlands, seat of the ancient capital city of Huế and home to many of Vietnam’s indigenous ethnic minorities, soup gets heavier and spicier, drawing influence from tropical ingredients and peasant food staples of the agricultural south and Mekong Delta regions.

These regional tastes run deep. My father, who’s from the north, would often prepare bún thang, a delicate, almost fastidious Hanoi dish topped with a julienned egg omelette, shredded chicken, and sliced chả lụa, or Vietnamese pork cold cuts (sometimes American deli meats made a cameo). By contrast, my Saigonese mother (she doesn’t cook much, bless her heart) was most excited to introduce me to a Houston Chinatown restaurant called Hủ Tiếu Nam Vang, where the eponymous dish—hủ tiếu refers to a flat rice noodle; Nam Vang is the Vietnamese word for Phnom Penh—is an oily Cambodian number loaded with pork loaf, minced pork, garlic, and offal. It wasn’t until I took my first solo journey to Vietnam that I fell in love with the act of slurping steamy streetside bún bò Huế, the fiery round-noodle, pigs’-blood-topped specialty of Vietnam’s laid-back imperial capital of Huế.

Discerning the origins and specifications of these noodle soups is tough: Thousands of years of colonization (followed promptly by one of the world’s most deadly wars) have not been kind to the country’s written tradition. And in America, non-native speakers may not know where to find some of these lesser-known dishes, even in Vietnamese enclaves like San Jose, Houston, and New Orleans. But this much is obvious: there’s a lot more to Vietnamese noodles than phở. Here’s a guide to help you dig deeper.

But First: Know Your Noodles

The fifth-largest exporter of rice in the world, Vietnam produces many forms of rice noodle. You can find most of them at Asian specialty groceries, mostly dry, though on occasion fresh—my family settles for nothing less.

Bánh phở: Flat rice stick noodles, used in phở as well as pad Thai.
Bún: Thin, springy rice vermicelli used in a variety of Southeast Asian soups, noodle salads, and stir-fries.
Hủ tiếu: Can refer to chewy and clear thick noodles made from tapioca (these are called hủ tiếu dai) or smaller rice stick noodles like bánh phở. Called kuy teav, in Cambodia it’s used in traditional Khmer breakfast dishes.
Mì: A little less defined, mì can refer to whole wheat noodles or egg noodles, depending on the dish. It’s unclear why, but an exception is made for Mì Quảng, which is made with rice noodles. Fun fact: Instant noodles are called mì gói, or “package noodle” in Vietnamese.
Miến: Clear “cellophane noodles” made from a starch, typically mung beans or cassava. They are used in Korean japchae and Thai glass noodles.

Influenced by Chinese philosophy and Buddhism, Vietnamese cuisine is rooted in five cardinal flavors, each tied to one of the five natural elements: spicy represents metal, sour represents wood, bitter corresponds to fire, salty is water, and sweet is earth. Every dish, or at least every meal, should strike a balance of those flavors and elements.

Vietnamese noodle soups are masterpieces of this balance, not just in flavor but also texture: pliable strands of noodles, crunchy greens, slow-cooked beef, and crispy fried onions or pork cracklings. Broths, simmered for hours with a cabinet’s worth of spices, get jolts of fire from an array of chile of sauces, lashes of sour lime, and whispers of the bitter, fragrant oils of fresh herbs.

Don’t miss: Our Best Asian Soup Recipes

Beginning in the North and traveling southwards, here are the 10 essential styles of Vietnamese noodle soup.

Phở

The hallmark of Vietnamese cooking and the country’s national dish, the origins of phở are much murkier than its soothing broth. Though some have speculated that the phở is a Vietnam-ization of the French word feu, like the beef stew pot-au-feu, others, including Vietnamese cookbook author Andrea Nguyen, say that rice noodles entered by way of Chinese merchants in the earliest 20th century, and that phở is actually a corruption of the Cantonese word fun, or flat rice noodle.

Even more varied than phở’s origin stories are the incarnations it now takes on. Phở bắc (northern-style phở) is minimally garnished and seasoned to emphasize the pure unadulterated beef broth that is made from simmering beef leg or oxtail with onion, ginger, star anise, and any number of other herbs and spices. If served with rare, thinly-sliced beef (tái) or meatballs (bò viên), the meat is dipped into a side dish filled with accompanying sauces, rather than dumped into the bowl.

In the south, expect a more anything-goes approach, with sauce joining meat and broth and tons of vegetables—bean sprouts, mint leaves, Thai basil, Thai chilies, sawtooth herb, and more. These two styles of beef soup course do not account for any range of variations like chicken phở, seafood phở, vegetarian phở, and phở saté.

Bún Thang

Thang means “ladder” in Vietnamese, but since that doesn’t translation make much sense with regards to broth and noodles, some historians are inclined to think that it’s a translation of the Chinese word for soup, spelled tang.

Best known in northern Vietnam, it’s a fortifying, soulful dish that truly exemplifies the principle of the five elements through sight, sound, and smell. The broth is prepared from a combination of chicken and pig bones, with shrimp added in early on or stirred in later as a paste called mắm tôm, while toppings include a multi-colored spread of julienned egg, Vietnamese ham, chicken, and green onions. In its most traditional Northern iteration (I admit, I’ve yet to try this), the dish is also topped with one or two drops of cà cuống, the pungent pheremones extracted from a giant Southeast Asian water bug.

Bún Măng Vịt

Măng means bamboo and vịt means duck. While duck isn’t as common in Vietnamese cooking as it is in some other Asian cuisines, the buttery richness of whole duck—boiled for close to an hour—stands up excellently against tangy bamboo shoots and savory fish sauce. It’s finished off with or served with a side of fresh lettuce, cabbage, and mint.

Bún Bò Huế

I may be biased to say so, but I stand by the claim that bún bò Huế (beef noodle of Huế city) is the most underrated dish in Vietnamese cooking. Huế, the longtime imperial capital of Vietnam and home of the former royal court, is a beautiful, relatively unhurried city whose people are much more mild-mannered than those in the larger cities of Hanoi and Saigon, partly due to the stronger emphasis on Buddhism. It’s surprising then that the city’s crown dish is so boldly flavored, using the extremes of spice and sour to offset salt and sweet.

The broth calls for beef bones and beef shank boiled with a generous dose of lemongrass, shrimp paste, and sugar—the red color comes from a spicy chile oil added during simmering. The noodles used may be called bún, but they’re rounder and thicker than usual, easier for twirling up with hunks of meat like marinated beef shank, oxtail, pig’s knuckles, and pig’s blood congealed into maroon, tofu-like cubes. Upon serving, the bowl is presented with vegetables that can include lime wedges, scallions, cilantro, banana blossom, mint, basil, Vietnamese coriander, sawtooth herb, and mung bean sprouts.

Cao Lầu

This unique, hard-to-explain dish from the historical trading port of Hoi An, Quang Nam Province, perfectly encapsulates the intersection of Vietnam’s colonial history, its wealth of natural resources, and the ethnic diversity of its native peoples. At its core, cao lầu is a simple dish of noodles, pork, and herbs such as basil and mint. But the noodles, unlike all other you’ll eat in Vietnam, have a springy, chewy quality reminiscent of ramen of pasta. That chewiness comes from soaking rice in a solution with lye—a liquid obtained from leaching wood and ash—and water drawn specifically from an ancient well built by the once glorious Hindu empire of Champa.

That Indianized civilization, which lasted until the early 1800s before being conquered by the Vietnamese, overlapped with a period where the city was flooded with merchants from France, China, and Japan. Traces of each group remain in Hoi An, which boasts a traditional Japanese-style bridge and French colonial architecture, as well as its principal dish. The dish’s super-thick round noodles closely resemble Japanese udon and the pork, called xá xíu, is an adaptation of Chinese barbecue.

Bánh Canh

The Vietnamese answer to Chinese nian gao, or rice cake, this dish uses fat, round noodles cut directly from uncooked sheets of rice tapioca flour. There are several variations and toppings for the dish that range from bánh canh cua (crab) to a well-known version from the southeastern district of Trảng Bàng, which loads the noodles with boiled pork knuckle, fried shallots, and local herbs.

Mì Quảng

Beyond Hoi An, the central Quang Nam province is known for another distinctive noodle dish called mì Quảng, which uses a wide rice noodle sometimes laced with turmeric to give it a yellowish hue. While the broth is seasoned simply with various bones, fish sauce, black pepper, shallot, and garlic, the proteins make it a true surf-and-turf: it typically comes with shrimp and pork, but can also be trussed up with beef, chicken, and fish.

For texture, the final additions include bánh tráng (sesame-flecked rice crackers), fried green onions, and an array of the usual greens, such as Vietnamese coriander, mint, and banana blossom. Though mì Quảng can be served noodle-heavy with a low volume of concentrated broth, southerners often make a full soup out of it.

Miến Gà

Though the exact origin of this simply-prepared dish is unclear, the use of miến, or cellophane glass noodles, lends well to the notion that it is a Chinese-influenced northern recipe. But it’s become a notorious dish at a number of restaurants in Saigon, namely Mai Xuân Cảnh in District 1, which is known for its southern takes on northern chicken dishes.

Light yet savory, the soup is served in homes during the Lunar New Year, as well as on the anniversary of a funeral or passing of a loved one. Seasoned only with the basic set of Vietnamese seasonings—black peppercorn, fish sauce, ginger—it’s a chicken noodle soup remedy in the purest form.

Bún Riêu

Die-hard southerners swear by this explosive vermicelli-and-pork soup made with tomato broth, shrimp and crab paste, tamarind, and eggs. To achieve its signature nuclear-red color, some Vietnamese cooks add annatto seed oil or tomato paste along with fresh Thai chiles for spice. For the riêu, or meat portion of the dish, freshwater crabs can be mixed with any combination of ground pork, fried tofu, and crab cakes; pig’s blood is also used on occasion. For garnish, mint, water spinach, and banana blossoms add freshness and crunch to the otherwise heavy broth.

Though the crab-and-pork combination is standard, other popular variations include bún riêu tôm thịt, which comes with shrimp and beef, and bún riêu ốc, which comes with snail.

Hủ Tiếu Nam Vang

Today’s Mekong River Delta was once the site of the Khmer Empire, prior to aggressive expansion by the Vietnamese in the 17th Century. This dish, popular in that deep south region, is borrowed from Cambodia (“Nam Vang” translates to Phnom Penh).

In the Vietnamese version of hủ tiếu, wider tapioca-based noodles are soaked in an umami-rich broth of pork bone and dried shrimp, then layered with several types of pork (ground pork, sliced liver, pork loin), as well as Chinese celery, basil, fried garlic and shallots. The sleeper hit of the dish is Chinese chive, which adds a slightly bitter, onion-y flavor that seeps into the hot soup. Optional toppings include quail eggs and shrimp.

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