- [Helen] So my style of pho
is nontraditional traditional. When you taste it, you'll be able to taste all of the flavors that are very familiar. I've been able to add different
layers that are very true to the way that I eat
and the way that I cook. You can totally tell that
the stock, at its core, or the broth, at its core, is
something entirely different than you'll see at a regular
mom-and-pop restaurant. (anticipatory violin music) I feel like the people
that really appreciate meat and really appreciate
a really hearty broth, they will taste it and
they will feel, "Oh wow, you could really taste
the intensity of the beef and the love that's in there." And then there's the flipside
where people were like, "Oh, this doesn't taste like anything like my grandma makes," right? And either way, it's okay. It's something that I can call my own and feel very happy and proud of. So, it's about 10:00 PM. I'm
here at Pat LaFrieda warehouse. I'm going to be picking up
some bones and some meat to restart my mother stock. I know it's a little late, but that's when the magic happens, and that's when they start working and breaking down all the meats for many restaurants throughout the city. So this is where our
burgers get processed. We do a special blend
of eight ounce patties with dry-aged ribeye, short
rib, and just regular ribeye. It goes through these machines. So, I got a couple of beef shanks here that the guys picked out for me, and this is gonna go into our beef stocks. There's Pat LaFrieda! He's taken me in and taught me a lot about the different
types of bones and meat. - This type of a motion with gripping our knife. And I'm gonna remember that when we come up towards the meat cap, that's where we use the
flexibility of the knife. - [Helen] So when I
first started making pho, I would just go to the store and just pick up a bag of bones, throw it into a pot,
fill it up with water, and voila, I'm making a bone broth. The more I started cooking,
the more I realized that my stocks have been
varying in color and taste. It made me very curious, and I was like, "Why is this happening?" So about six years ago was when I started going out
to LaFrieda warehouse. When I was introduced to Pat, I told him, "I really wanna learn
more about why people use certain cuts for stews,
for stocks, for searing." From that, blossomed a
very great relationship between myself and the team at LaFrieda. - When chefs come in, and they want to learn about cutting meat, we always embrace that. - I learn something new
every time I come here, even though I'm making the same recipe. One time Pat told me, "Maybe you should consider using shank because once we break down the shank, then we can use the shank bone, split it in half, and there
you got your bone marrow." I truly use every part of it, from the meat to the tendon to the bones. Through that, it truly helped
transform my perspective in terms of the different types
of food that I was cooking. It translated into, "How can
I utilize that information to make it more cost effective and efficient for the restaurant?" And then these guys over here, we usually give over to Ecwa, and he goes through the bandsaw, and he cuts them canoe cut for us. How beautiful these are. All that marrow. I'm gonna take you into one of my favorite rooms
in the whole entire world, the dry-age room. (laughs) Okay, so I'm gonna need 60 days, Pat. Nothing more, nothing less. I've tried them at every age, and I really like the
flavor profile of 60's because 30 is a little bit too mild and 90 is just too funky. So what I'm gonna do is I'm
gonna turn this baby down and we're going to extract the bone and then, honestly,
take everything with me. Traditionally, in Vietnamese cuisine, we don't use dry-aged beef. When I started working with it, I would start off with very conservative amounts of dry aged beef fat, dry aged meat, just to have a little
better understanding of what fits my flavor profile. You know, you have to be very careful with the amount that you use just because sometimes
a little bit too much and it just really ruins the whole dish. On the days that I need assistance,
Manny's my guy. (laughs) Smells like beef jerky. Asking questions, seeing them work, has brought upon a lot of curiosity and that truly shaped my cooking. - [Manny] She used to
come after been working for 10, 12 hours in a restaurant and just showing to keep
learning more and more about the meat. It is something that you
don't see in every person. - [Helen] Manny used to always
tell me, "Don't be afraid," because before it's like, "Oh man, I'm working with a lot of
expensive products here. I really can't mess up." - [Manny] She mastered
her skills really good, and she's becoming who she is right now. - [Helen] I'm gonna take this, gonna put it in a separate box. These are the briskets that we use. I don't really do anything else to them just because this is thrown
into the beef stock as a whole. I'm gonna show you this new
machine. It's very cool. If you're looking for a specific cut, you enter it into the machine, you place your cut of meat on it, it weighs it, and it cuts
it precisely. It's wild. So I need two pieces of porterhouses that are roughly two
inches thick. 50 ounces. Voila. (laughs) Isn't that beautiful? We just need our neck bones and our oxtail and we're ready to go. What a haul, huh? Thank you! Before we take off with the
meat, we have to weigh it. You gotta spend money to
make money, right? (laughs) Right now it's about midnight. We're gonna head back to the
restaurant and start my stock. So it's now 12:30 AM.
We're back at home base and we are going to unload
and start the mother stock. So we are going to fill this baby up and load 'em up with bones. Okay, so I like to start off with bones. Bones first before I put
any of the proteins in. So we are going to start
with our beef shanks. So these are going in first. When you look at the menu,
it's "Helen's beef pho," it's not just pho. I like a lot of flavors
in the food that I eat and the food that I cook. Gonna move on to the neck bones. I love that there's a good amount of meat on these neck bones. We can extract all the meat
and use them for stews. So once a year I restart the mother stock. The goal here is to
create a very beefy stock that we can use for a million things. And you'll see everything
that comes out of the pots, there's a really beautiful purpose. Once the bones are in, I add the meat. So now we're gonna put the beef shanks in. All right, brisket. Brisket going in. So right here I have some oxtails that I'm gonna throw into the beef stock. These are non-negotiables. Must always have brisket,
must always have oxtails. Oh my gosh, I love this so much. If I could just make stocks
and stare at this for hours, I would. I'm thinking that it's going
to be roughly 45 minutes until we come into a full boil. And then I want it to go at a rolling boil for at least 15 minutes. I watch the meat because, you know, there's a different cooking
time for each cut of meat. We're at minute 45. And look at the baby, she's at a rolling boil. I'm gonna skim. This is one of the most
gratifying experiences. 'cause you know that the more you skim, the clearer the stock becomes. It's just pure joy. Pure joy. And then now I take this guy. I don't need a whole lot of movement, I just need to make sure that there's a little bit of
separation so that it can breathe. So I'm gonna keep it at a rolling boil for another 15 minutes
just to make sure that, you know, things are
getting cooked properly. And then I'm gonna bring
it down to a simmer. And can you see the color of
the fat forming right now? It's so gorgeous. And you'll see this
transform over the hours into something like a
deeper golden yellow. All right, so it's about,
I don't know, four? We're on hour four of our stock. As you can see, we have about an an inch and a half to
two inches of rendered fat. This is essentially our liquid gold here. It's time to pull out
the brisket and the shank and all the meats so that we can cool them in
time to prep for service. Just look at that. That's beautiful. And this is the color that
we strive for every batch. It all starts from here. So now that we've taken
all of the meat out, remember this beautiful guy? This dry-aged rack of rib and meat. So at this point is when we're gonna add him into the baby mother stock, just to be able to
enhance the beefy flavor. And then we sit and we wait
for another two to three hours. So we are going to pull
apart some of the oxtail meat that we took out earlier. This is gonna go into our fried rice. So this is what I mean when so many dishes come out of that one master stock. The mother stock doesn't
just lend itself to our pho, it's an essential to our sauces and a lot of elements that, you know, we utilize in our daily menu. It's coming off the bone very easily. I personally don't like
cooking it too much, just because I still
like the chewy texture and have it have a bouncy bite rather than have it completely fall apart. Out of that one big mother stock, we got our oxtails, we
all have our beef shanks, we have our brisket. All this is gonna contribute
to at least five other dishes. That's why she's called the mother stock. So this is the back fat
from yesterday's rib rack. I'm going to cut them into smaller pieces and then we're gonna render them and we're going utilize the
fat for fried rice, for saute. So then I'm just gonna turn it on low because we want it to slowly render. So for oxtail fried rice, the wok is on. We are going to add dry-aged beef fat. We have oxtail and we
have some beef shank. Throw some onions, all of our meat in there. Special oxtail sauce. So we have a jasmine rice. At this stage of cooking, I still think about my visits
at the warehouse. You know? From the point you get to pick the meat, you get to have nice, fun
conversations with the guys. They always ask me what am I gonna do. So we're gonna finish it off with a little bit more rendered beef fat. So this is the base of it. I'm gonna fry an egg and I'm gonna top it. This is our family-size oxtail fried rice with oxtail and beef shank and a fried egg fried in beef fat. Remember that dry-aged rack
of rib bones with the meat? I'm taking it out now 'cause if not, it's
going to really mess up the ratio of our mother stock. At this point, what this
mother stock tastes like is just a very beefy water. (laughs) So what I have here is
two pans. In one pan we are going to toast
spices. In the other, we're going to sweat some onions, some ginger, and some shallots. When you do a little cooking and toasting before you put it in, I
think that it really blooms. In here, I have a bunch of
my spices that are going to, you know, go into my beef stock. All the aromatics have been sitting for about an hour and a half. Very nice. The spices are
where I want it to be, so I'm going to take everything out. I think the mother stock
of 2023 is beautiful. The neck bones are definitely enhancing the beefiness of the stock, which I love. So now that we have strained
all of the aromatics, I am going to add rock sugar. And then we're gonna add our salt. I load up on cilantro stems. So we use a lot of
cilantro in our cooking. We save all the stems. The cilantro stems are an
essential to my stocks. This is almost as important
as the beef to me. So this brisket was cooking
in the mother stock pot for about four-and-a-half hours. So I'm removing the cilantro stems. Now we have pho broth. It's no longer a stock, it's a broth. We have our setup. We have our sliced ribeye, we have our sliced brisket, and then we have the garnishes, which is scallion,
cilantro, and sliced onion. So when we fire a bowl of
pho, we blanche the noodles. And then from here, a
couple slices of the brisket and then the ribeye that
we picked up yesterday, thinly sliced. So then we have our beautiful pho broth. As we're ladling the broth, we're cooking that raw meat inside. So what I'm looking for is
that nice golden brown color, but also clarity of the
broth, which you can see here. We're gonna do some scallions and then we're gonna do some cilantro. And there you have Helen's Beef Pho, a very beautiful, beefy bowl of pho noodle soup. (violin music)
