Kenji/Serious Eats – 30-Min Pressure Cooker Pho Ga | Hacker News Reader

Kenji/Serious Eats – 30-Min Pressure Cooker Pho Ga

seriouseats.com

176 pointsstasomatic97 comments

Interesting to see this posted, as it's quite an old recipe (the oldest capture I could find on the Wayback Machine was from 2015 although I'm pretty confident it's older than that; as an aside, can I say how annoying it is when websites only have an "updated on" or "edited on" date and not a date for when it was originally written?). It's also one of my favorites of Kenji's though and a regular in our home.

I think that Kenji's series of pressure cooker recipes are probably my favorites of everything he did when he was doing The Food Lab section. Almost every recipe is fantastic and they are mostly pretty easy. If I had to pick my single favorite, it would probably be the pressure cooker chicken enchilads [0], although that one is on the higher end of the effort spectrum

[0] https://www.seriouseats.com/pressure-cooker-fast-and-easy-ch...

The article about ramen made me salivate, so I thought, hey, I know ramen is gonna put me in a comma, let me MacGyver pho - because the closest place to me that serves pho is named "Sushi Thai", so you know... :)

In this Florida weather, "Okroshka soup" [0] is more appropriate (Eastern European summer soup), but it's too much to chop and I already had nice bones for a pho.

[0] https://petersfoodadventures.com/okroshka-kvass/

The "updated/edited on" date is so that it'll say "2026", and search engine and searchers think "oh a freshly written article".. although that hardly matters for recipes.

Thanks, SEO.

Checking the source of the recipe page, there's a schema.org object in there that says

  "datePublished": "2015-01-08T03:45:00-05:00"

So I'd believe it's from 2015

Always wanted to try pressure cooker recipes, they look so good, but haven't been able to justify the purchase yet

I had my doubts about my pressure cooker when I received it, as I recalled the monstrosity my mother used when I was a kid. But that thing gets used several times a week now.

Combined with a recipe from Kenji, I'm going to have to try it. I have yet to make anything from Serious Eats, and particularly Kenji's recipes, that I didn't enjoy making and eating.

One thing that's worth noting. I don't know about this one but a number of those old SE pressure cooker recipes don't translate to Instant Pots. I'm thinking of Gritzer's french onion soup in particular. For those who have an instant pot as their pressure cooker, check the reviews of the recipes.

Plug-in pressure cookers like Instant Pots don't run at the same pressure/temperature as stovetop models. Electric models apparently run at ~12psi on high pressure mode, while stovetop models can run at 15psi. This means the timing is substantially different between the two.

Electric models can run unattended, so the slightly longer cook time isn't a deal-breaker. I'm a huge fan of Serious Eat's Colombian stew, which I can throw in the pot then go to the gym or out for errands and come home to a hot meal. https://www.seriouseats.com/colombian-chicken-stew-with-pota...

I hasten to add that an old school manual pressure cooker can be used on natural gas, propane, and electric stoves, any camp stove, or over a fire. With a bit of lye added, it can be used as a world class autoclave for sterilizing metal instruments and utensils with almost any available water that has not been chemically polluted. The caveat is that it must never be left cooking unattended.

I'll be trying this recipe.

I also want to add something. The new pressure cookers, stovetop or electric, are much less risky than the old school version with the rocker switch. Those could get clogged with food and they had no backup relief mechanism, as far as I know, anyway.

The ones used now have a primary valve that controls the cooking pressure, a secondary valve that will release if the primary fails, and the silicon gasket for the lid, which acts as a tertiary pressure release if the first two fail.

I know some people, like my mother-in-law, have stories of pressure cookers failing and spewing soup at high velocity all over the kitchen. I think that was more of a feature of the older version. And probably required some carelessness to achieve even then.

I have both a stovetop cooker (Zwilling) and an electric (Instant Pot). The stovetop gets hotter faster, so it cooks a lot faster too. The trade off is I can't leave home while it's cooking.

The electric lets me set and forget and come back to a hot meal hours later.

Exactly, that's the main difference, that the electric is convenient but depends upon... mains electricity.

I once bought a digital/electric pressure cooker for $50 CAD barely used off craigslist in Toronto. They're not that expensive.

Kenji’s stuff definitely goes back further. There was an article about Greek pizza that mentioned a place I loved in Newport, RI and I swear it was originally from 2002.

If you want less labor-intensive enchiladas, try stacking El Paso style instead of rolling. They have to be eaten on the spot rather than stored casserole-style, but I much prefer this style.

In a similar vein, Chris Young has a fantastic video on making world class chicken stock in 60 minutes using a pressure cooker: https://youtube.com/watch?v=3k20zFlbFfE.

I'm not convinced by his 350° searing temperature for steaks and his idea about searing from frozen doesn't turn out well because there's no time for the salt to penetrate.

His video showing that you can speed up a reverse sear starting at a higher temperature was really helpful though.

Haven't tried his pressure cooker video because I don't have one. I will get one eventually but probably not a multi cooker. I have heard great things about them.

You can’t actually do it in 60 minutes. It takes longer to reach pressure and then release pressure even with his tricks. At least with an instapot.

But I do generally follow this method. I put the chicken meat in a soup sock though, so I can pull it out and add it to a soup or whatever instead of throwing it away. It will be kind of dry chicken though.

Yeah, I do the same. Soup sock in a vacuum cooker. It's the chinese way to make soup. The chicken does turn out dry. Perhaps it's worth taking the chicken mear out (leaving the bones) after an hour and adding it back after the soup is done.

I would rather have the real chicken aroma in the stock liquid, and I consider bland meat a sign of a successful extraction. Why would I want to stop that happening?

I find that trying to keep the natural flavour of chicken meat in soups is a fool's errand anyway. I don't know if it makes a difference, but if I'm returning the meat into soup I will separate it, put the pieces in a small tupperware along with a ton of chicken stock powder, and just enough water to cover. It then sits in the fridge until the soup is 10 minutes from ready.

Salt won't penetrate much in even an hour unless it's very thin, overnight dry brining is better though.

My five-year-old Breville Fast Slow Pro has a menu setting for making stock under pressure, and follows the formula Chris Young describes precisely. 60 minute cook time with slow steam release.

Somewhat ironically, before I watched that video I had been manually increasing the cook time to 90 minutes. I thought I was being clever and would get better extraction. After I watched the video I realised that maybe the people who made the machine probably knew what they were doing.

Just learned about Kenji by finding his "The Best Chili Ever" recipe [0] through Reddit and immediately his another recipe appears on HN. Baader-Meinhof strikes again.

[0] https://www.seriouseats.com/the-best-chili-recipe

Is this the one where he adds espresso and chocolate? So good!

Love that this popped up on HN. Been making this recipe regularly for going on 14 (?) years now.

same here, one of my family's favorites

I’m not entirely sure what makes this hacker news?

It’s just a very long recipe for Phở (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pho)

Is the hack that it’s supposedly doable in under 30 minutes?

the person cooking it is Kenji Lopez-Alt, who is an MIT graduate turned professional chef, and his wife is the one who's colombian.

He's got several excellent cookbooks (like the Food Lab and Wok) and is a regular contributor to serious eats and has youtube etc...

Ex-wife I believe?

Ex-wife. I was not aware he went to MIT though (got a degree in architecture)

Still, doesn't really make sense to be here. Content not author is what matters usually.

OP here. Apologies if I overstepped, but it is kind of about hacking the prep. I was simply piggybacking on another thread about ramen, I wasn’t thinking of the hacking angle at that moment.

I appreciate the post if counts for anything. Cooking hacks to save time or elevate a dish to the next level or even allow me to make something without the proper equipment are always good to add to the toolbox. The coffee I am drinking right now is an example of that.[0][1]

[0] - https://youtu.be/Odo0f9P2SgQ

[1] - https://youtu.be/WeNoDCWezls

You didn't overstep, the preceding comment did. Anything that's interesting is on-topic here; even if the recipe isn't a "hack", if it's interesting it's a legit submission.

That’s such a nonsense rule that will eventually turn this site into cat and rage posting like the vast majority of social media. That’s no wonder the posts become more and more mediocre and inoffensive if the only validity metric is ‘what the majority decide is good enough’

I am interested in many things, most of them are not what I want to see on Hacker News.

It's always been the rule, so you might want to start a different site!

Hey, I am the "offender". I upvoted your comment. I don't know the answer, HN is kind of the last bastion of sanity for me as a Usenet refugee and it's as close to that that I have found.

I would also be upset if the feed was 99% about LLMs. Not too far in the past it was crypto and before then it was blockchain and before that it was Big Data. Use the downvote button profusely, or perhaps dang and the gang can implement stricter rules/filtering.

Cheers

He takes a scientific approach to cooking, and could accurately be described as coming up with techniques that are in the spirit of finding non-traditional ways of doing things.

He hacks food in other words.

Someone doing a technical write up about a new technique in their discipline is pretty hacker news to me.

Kenji worship can be a little weird, but assuming because of his heritage means he can't cook Pho is ridiculous. His contributions to Serious Eats and America's Test Kitchen have immensely pushed food science forward.

I don't think it's fair to say he has pushed food science forward.

He piggy-backed on the work of real food scientists and revealed things to the public that have been common in professional kitchens for decades, but then where he adds his own methods the evidence is often "trust me bro".

As someone who grew up in the household of two chefs one classically trained the other a development chef I see James Lopez as little more than a loud-mouthed amateur, have you tried his no-knead pizza dough, it's absolutely shocking, I think he later tried to distance himself from it claiming it came from another chef.

As someone who grew up around professional chefs you might not understand the true baseline level of cooking knowledge that many have going into adulthood; following a recipe is a challenge and they have no idea why they do any of the steps.

Kenji Lopez-Alt (weird that you intentionally chose to write his name in a way that he doesn’t) is by definition not an amateur (he worked professionally in kitchens), but more importantly, he is a really good communicator. His work is about explaining the why of cooking instead of the how to people who did not have the benefit of being raised by professional chefs. He may not have pushed food science forward, but he has pushed understanding of food science forward. His writing is for people that have no clue that adding pasta water to a sauce is a thing, let alone why. Of course professional chefs know to do this, and some of them even know why.

Has he had some dud recipes? Sure. That’s a good thing though, it means that he is willing to both try new things, as well as make mistakes.

The statement that electric pressure cookers measure pressure absolutely (i.e. not relative to local pressure) was news to me, and definitely a good hack to know if you're living at altitude.

Electric cookers don't "measure" pressure. They are thermostatically controlled via a sensor touching the bottom of the bowl and, because they are sealed, that temperature directly translates to the same pressure no matter what altitude you're at.

The temperature at the base of the bowl is close to the temperature of the mass of liquid / solids inside and at the base of the bowl, sure.

I'm less certain the same transfer function always returns the gas pressure at the top of the sealed bowl "no matter what altitude you're at" considering that at the starting point, when first sealed, ambient room atmospheric pressure varies with altitude: for the same initial food mass to be cooked the standardised gas volume included will vary with altitude.

(Alternatively, no matter the altitude, there's always a constant volume to fill with atmospheric gas .. and the mass of that gas will vary with altitude)

Seems like you didn't read the article very well. Kenji is a well known chef that does a lot of testing of methods so many recipes come with a story but you can also just scroll to the bottom

I popped in here just to say I would fight anyone who asked why Kenji would be on HackerNews and yet I was too late.

Also, authenticity about recipes is the “but does it scale” of app discussions. It’s ok to just let people enjoy stuff. Not everything is a purity test.

In addition to what others have said, the OP posted their rationale in a comment along with the post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49135427

Kenji Lopez Alt is a well known chef who writes a lot about the science behind making food (which might contribute to it being HN-worthy). Though I understand where you're coming from, his ethnicity (Caucasian and Japanese; the Lopez comes from his wife) is irrelevant in the light of the fact that he is a professional chef.

Pho bo (beef pho) typically takes at least 8 hours and is better simmered overnight, so cutting it down to 30 minutes and still having a good result is very useful.

Check out Kenji’s book, The Food Lab. (Also the name of his blog before it merged with Serious Eats.) You’ll get a sense of what makes him popular among nerds who like to cook.

He used to own a restaurant in downtown San Mateo called Wursthall. It has since closed. He lives up in Seattle now but I am not aware of him being involved in any new restaurants.

My Instant Pot has AI and when I turn it on I hear Kenji Lopez guiding me through the recipe steps.

Farming for points.

That’s rather uncharitable. I shared something that I like because another submission made me think of it. Nobody was incentivized to read my post. If others found that useful, yes, I’ll bank the points. Use the downvote link, that’s what it’s for.

I know I read HN for the world news and recipes...

There was a recent submission on HN about ramen. While I love ramen/udon/soba, I prefer pho. Perhaps I find pho more "crispy", I like the sprouts/lime/mint/jalapeno. Ramen puts me to sleep. Ramen definitely has more pedigree, this isn't about what's better.

As a lover of both pho and ramen I feel I can compel with you on the crispy factor - like pho is more for a jungle - and also on the food coma factor of ramen - a meal for the monsoons, perhaps - but nevertheless need to point out to you that there are also crispy ramens, with sprouts/lime/mint/japaleno, too.

In fact there is no ‘one ramen’, it has to be said; there are regional variants where the “scrap food” of the area is used as the decoration to the base, where a noodle and boiled-meat leftover soups/stock are combined …

I have very sleepy pho’s in my neighborhood, also .. just sayin’. Both are great, you’re right, they are a wonderful branch of food.

Best pho I had was in Tokyo, thinly sliced raw wagyu melted into the soup. Though theres as many ramen styles as there are cities in Japan, some style would likely suit you.

Yes, tori paitan is one nice light alternative to the popular and heavy tonkotsu.

Particularly tonkotsu, which basically has fat emulsified into it. My understanding is that ramen was originally a workman's meal -- inexpensive and calorie rich food for laborers.

Instant (4 minutes in microwave) tonkotsu @$2.79 is surprisingly good:

https://www.doordash.com/products/nongshim-tonkotsu-premium-...

These come in a 6 pack at Costco (not black garlic though; Costco's comes with hot oil). They're surprisingly tasty for instant.

I had a Japanese teacher a few years ago who explained that Japan's ramen is the US's "burger and fries". It's calorie-rich processed food that's available everywhere. They are prepared in advance, served very quickly (usually within a few minutes), and people finish their meals within 15 minutes. It's far closer to "fast food" than most Westerners realize. The average ramen outside Japan is far more elevated than within Japan.

The average ramen, yes, but in the same way that many people in the US obsess about the perfect burger, there is a serious ramen scene in Japan with obsessive ramen devotees and chefs pushing the envelope.

I would say the average ramen in the US is instant ramen, so I think that the "cheap easy food" angle still goes on here.

They are both some of my favorite foods. I've made pho probably 4 times at this point. It takes 8 to 10 hours but is totally worth it.

Something I started doing was occasionally taking the rare thin meat out for use with the sriracha and sweet sauce. I never added then to the soup because I found it corrupts it.

There's also Northern Vietnamese Pho which I haven't tried but I'd like to. It's supposed to be less sweet and less spiced. In the US it seems southern sweet style is the norm.

Do you mean after the meat sat a bit in the broth? I’m no stranger to tartar or raw meats, just not clear.

Yeah. Cook it to how you like it and then dip in Sriracha and or the sweet one. But you could also do it with the braised meat or anything as well

I love the meat straight from the broth so I mostly do that but the sauces are a traditional option it seems.

Thank you. If you have a Trader Joe’s near you (it’s a chain in the states for anyone wondering), they have a pretty good chilly paste named “Bomba Hot Pepper”. It has a punch, but it’s not EMP level, not too sweet, not too acidy. Half a teaspoon does it for me.

I do have some Asian markets near me within reasonable driving distance, but I can’t try all the sauces and the ones I have tried leaned toward the sweeter side, and that’s not for me. This Bomba hits me where it matters.

https://www.traderjoes.com/home/products/pdp/italian-bomba-h...

I'll check it out. Although I didn't like their sriracha or chilli oil.

Their peanut butter cups are my favorite sweet. The ones in the plastic bags are better than in thr large container. (Darker chocolate and more salt).

The ubiquitous Southern-style pho in America is due to historical reasons, when Southern Vietnamese diaspora fled Saigon en masse in the aftermath of the fall of Saigon.

Southern Viet Pho is not supposed to be sweet.

Northern Pho is in almost all ways inferior to Southern Pho. Even Northerners tend to prefer the Southern style. Something important to understand is that the Northern style is essentially the starvation version of the Southern style. The south is the main agricultural region of the country, so they had ready access to ingredients, like meat, that were difficult to come by in the North. The styles reflect this reality.

Thanks for the info.

Yeah I don't like it sweet but it has sugar. Worse Pho places in the us will be sweet.

Northerner here, and Southern Pho is sweeter. Probably not noticeable to non-natives, but we always detect a slight sweetness in Southern food. Pho originated from the North, and I don't know anyone who actually comes from the North and prefers Southern pho. They exist, I'm sure, but while living abroad, the most common complaint with Northern Vietnamese is the lack of Northern-style pho.

Not sure about being inferior, but we like our broth to be clear. If you want heavy broth, you'll need to tell the restaurant to give you "fat broth". Maybe it started with us being poor, but we're not anymore. We want the broth flavor to come mostly from high-quality bone broth, not overly spiced. Same for the meat; most Hanoi Pho restaurants don't serve meatballs. We prefer high-quality rare beef over a random mix of beef. Northern Pho always comes with fresh, flat, and wide noodles. Outside of Vietnam, restaurants usually use narrower noodles, and usually not fresh. Sometimes they charge more for fresh noodles. It’s very common to eat Pho with a fried dough stick in the North. We dip them into the broth.

I’ve recently discovered Galbitang and despite being far less popular, I much prefer it over pho. We make it in a pressure cooker as well and love how easy it is!

We've been making pho ga from this recipe for years. It's been on weekly rotation in the fall and winter because it is so ridiculously good. Pair it with bone broth made in your instant pot for best results.

Normally we start making bone broth around 9am, it finishes by about 5pm, and then dinner is ready by 7pm.

Pressure cookers do reduce the cook time of some dishes dramatically, but the flavors don't meld as much compared with slow cooking. If you do a 30-minute recipe like this, it's probably worth letting the soup sit another 20-30 minutes in warming mode before serving.

One of the reasons why I loved The Food Lab was that very often Kenji would write several versions of a recipe at different effort levels, along with detailed reasonings about why and how he shortened a step and what one was giving up by doing so. While he didn't do that for the Pho Ga recipe, he did do that for his Beef Pho recipe, with a full blown 6 hour "traditional" version [0] and a faster (although still not as fast as the pressure cooker pho ga one) 1 hour version of the recipe [1]. My guess is that the write ups of the 3 recipes together probably give one enough information to dial in relatively precisely how much effort you want to give and which steps one can skip or reduce.

[0] https://www.seriouseats.com/traditional-beef-pho-recipe

[1] https://www.seriouseats.com/quick-and-easy-1-hour-pho

Oh man the the amount of fish sauce he wants you put in this will ruin it. Add a teaspoon or a tablespoon or something, but not 1/4 cup. The first time I made it I nearly threw it out.

It's a tablespoon per serving which isn't that crazy at all. Also Vietnamese fish stock is milder than Thai fish sauce if that's what you're thinking of.

Go through the SE comments on this recipe. The amount of fish sauce makes the broth smell like asshole. I recall several Vietnamese scratching their heads over it. I love fish sauce, but Kenji went nose blind to it or something.

A tablespoon of fish sauce per serving is wild.

I haven't seen this written yet but I highly recommend Kenji's book: The Food Lab. It's the perfect book for HN Nerds that love to cook

The Food Lab is a great introduction to cooking. Could use some updates but it's still a staple for me.

I didn't like The Wok (his most recent real coobook) as much as the Food Lab. Although the garlic noodles with regular Italian pasta, oyster sauce, and Parmeggiano Reggiano are absolutely incredible and easy to whip up because it's all pantry ingredients.

Another cookbook I recommend is Meathead: The Science of Great Barbecue and Grilling. Also teaches the science and the guy who wrote it is one of the main people who debunked the resting meat.

Thanks for the recommendation!

On the topic of nerd cookbooks recommendations: Cooking for Geeks. I found it way more approachable/readable than The Food Lab (which is a beast of a book, volume wise)

Is there a domain of low temperature, high pressure cooking? Infusions and such come to mind.

Pressure cookers get up to pressure by heating water until the steam pressure is whatever pressure they are trying to reach -- which means their temperature will necessarily be above the boiling point of water.

Low-temperature high-pressure cooking seems hard to achieve. You'd need a pump or something similar to pressurize with.

Yes, it’s been used for mixology (and other things like oils). Put ingredients in a whipping siphon, pressurize and then rapidly vent.

https://culinary.isi.com/en-GB/culinary/applications/aromati...

Dave Arnold’s Liquid Intelligence has instructions and popularized it with that specific brand of whipper (who also sell an infusion attachment).

The meat angle is crazy! I wonder what happens at much higher pressures…

I assumed it would use chicken broth. Obviously not a chef, but I am going to give it a go.

Since I became began I really miss good Pho, anyone knows a recipe that comes close?

Anyone else catch that he wrote this on an 11-inch MacBook Air (2016 at latest)?

Why couldn’t he have used the same laptop many years after its release?

I believe gp is noting that the MacBook couldn’t have been made after 2016 since that’s when that model was discontinued.

Site locks up my browser.

same ... well maybe not same: I can't scroll, can't click anything on the cookie banner, neither on FF with noscirpt, nor on vanilla Chromium. Weird.

I can click anything else and open stuff, but again, no scrolling.

It runs some sort of anti-ad-blocker script, which is likely the cause.

Kenji and Alton Browns first video together is a must watch, Alton was extremely insecure.

Trigger warning - meat.

Anyone have a vegetarian version of this recipe?

I consider eating meat completely morally reprehensible but a ‘trigger warning’? What do you do when you enter a supermarket?

As for making the recipe vegetarian, the chicken you could replace with any protein of your choosing. There are vegetarian fish sauces but I’ve not found a good one. You might be able to use miso or marmite.

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