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.
I love the meat straight from the broth so I mostly do that but the sauces are a traditional option it seems.
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.
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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).
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.
Yeah I don't like it sweet but it has sugar. Worse Pho places in the us will be sweet.
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.
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.
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