At NYC’s Saigon Social, chef and owner Helen Nguyen makes her own pho broth using oxtail, brisket, beef shank, and dry-aged rib bones that she butchers at Pat LaFrieda Meat Purveyors' warehouse every 10 days. The meat is used in dishes like oxtail fried rice, shaken beef steak, and more.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00 So my salifa is non-traditional traditional.
00:03 When you taste it, you'll be able to taste
00:06 all of the flavors that are very familiar.
00:09 I've been able to add different layers
00:12 that are very true to the way that I eat
00:13 and the way that I cook.
00:14 You can totally tell that the stock at its core
00:18 or the broth at its core is something entirely different
00:20 than you'll see at a regular mom and pop restaurant.
00:23 (upbeat music)
00:25 I feel like the people that really appreciate meat
00:35 and really appreciate a really hearty broth,
00:37 they will taste it and they will feel,
00:39 oh wow, you could really taste the intensity of the beef
00:42 and the love that's in there.
00:43 And then there's the flip side where people were like,
00:46 oh, this doesn't taste like anything
00:48 like my grandma makes, right?
00:50 And either way, it's okay.
00:51 It's something that I can call my own
00:53 and feel very happy and proud of.
00:55 So it's about 10 p.m.
01:00 I'm here at Pat Lofrito Warehouse.
01:02 I'm going to be picking up some bones and some meat
01:05 to restart my mother's stock.
01:06 I know it's a little late,
01:07 but that's when the magic happens
01:09 and that's when they start working
01:10 and breaking down all of the meats
01:12 for many restaurants throughout the city.
01:14 So this is where our burgers get processed.
01:16 We do a special blend of eight ounce patties
01:19 with dry aged ribeye, short rib, and just regular ribeye.
01:24 It goes through these machines.
01:25 So I got a couple of beef shanks here
01:30 that the guys picked out for me
01:32 and this is gonna go into our beef stock.
01:34 There's Pat Lofrito.
01:36 He's taken me in and taught me a lot
01:38 about the different types of bones and meat.
01:41 - This type of a motion with gripping our knife.
01:45 And then we're gonna remember that
01:47 when we come up towards the kneecap.
01:49 That's where we use the flexibility of the knife.
01:51 - So when I first started making pho,
01:53 I would just go to the store
01:56 and just pick up a bag of bones,
01:57 throw it into a pot, fill it up with water,
02:00 and voila, I'm making a bone broth.
02:02 The more I started cooking,
02:04 the more I realized that my stocks
02:06 have been varying in color and taste.
02:09 It made me very curious and I was like,
02:11 why is this happening?
02:12 So about six years ago
02:14 was when I started going out to the Lofrito Warehouse.
02:17 When I was introduced to Pat,
02:19 I told him I really wanna learn more
02:21 about why people use certain cuts for stews,
02:24 for stocks, for searing.
02:26 From that blossomed a very great relationship
02:29 between myself and the team at Lofrito.
02:32 - When chefs come in
02:34 and they wanna learn about cutting meat,
02:37 we always embrace that.
02:38 - I learn something new every time I come here.
02:40 Even though I'm making the same recipe.
02:43 One time Pat told me,
02:44 maybe you should consider using shank
02:46 because once we break down the shank,
02:48 then we can use the shank bone,
02:51 split it in half and there you got your bone marrow.
02:53 I truly use every part of it
02:54 from the meat to the tendon to the bones.
02:57 - Through that, it truly helped transform my perspective
03:01 in terms of the different types of food that I was cooking.
03:05 It translated into like,
03:06 how can I utilize that information
03:09 to make it more cost-effective
03:10 and efficient for the restaurant?
03:12 - And then these guys over here,
03:15 we usually give over to Equa
03:16 and he goes through the bandsaw
03:18 and he cuts them canoe cut for us.
03:20 Look how beautiful these are.
03:23 All that marrow.
03:25 I'm gonna take you into one of my favorite rooms
03:30 in the whole entire world.
03:32 The dry age room.
03:34 Okay, so I'm gonna need 60 days, Pat.
03:36 Nothing more, nothing less.
03:39 I try them at every age
03:42 and I really like the flavor profile of 60s
03:46 because 30 is a little bit too mild
03:49 and 90 is just too funky.
03:51 So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna trim this baby down
03:56 and we're going to extract the bone
03:58 and then honestly take everything with me.
04:00 Traditionally, in Vietnamese cuisine,
04:03 we don't use dry-aged beef.
04:05 When I started working with it,
04:06 I would start off with a very conservative amounts
04:10 of dry-aged beef, fat, dry-aged meat
04:12 just to have a little better understanding
04:14 of what fits my flavor profile.
04:16 You know, you have to be very careful
04:18 with the amount that you use
04:19 just because sometimes a little bit too much
04:21 and it just really ruins the whole dish.
04:24 On the days that I need assistance,
04:27 Manny's my guy.
04:28 Smells like beef jerky.
04:30 Asking questions, seeing them work
04:32 has brought upon a lot of curiosity
04:34 and that truly shaped my cooking.
04:36 - She used to come after being working
04:38 for 10, 12 hours in a restaurant
04:41 and just showing to keep learning more and more
04:44 about the meat.
04:46 It's something that you don't see in every person.
04:49 - Manny used to always tell me, "Don't be afraid."
04:51 Because before it's like, "Oh man,
04:52 "I'm working with a lot of expensive products here.
04:55 "I really can't mess up."
04:57 - She mastered her skills really good
04:59 and she's becoming who she is right now.
05:02 - Gonna take this, gonna put it in a separate box.
05:04 These are the brisket that we use.
05:08 I don't really do anything else to them
05:10 just because this is thrown into the beef stock as a whole.
05:14 I gotta show you this new machine, it's very cool.
05:16 If you're looking for a specific cut,
05:18 you enter it into the machine,
05:19 you place your cut of meat on it,
05:21 it weighs it and it cuts it precisely.
05:23 It's wild.
05:25 So I need two pieces of porterhouses
05:27 that are roughly two inches thick, 50 ounces.
05:31 Voila!
05:32 (laughs)
05:33 Isn't that beautiful?
05:36 We just need our neck bones and our oxtail
05:39 and we're ready to go.
05:40 What a haul, huh?
05:43 Thank you!
05:44 Before we take off with the meat, we have to weigh it.
05:48 You gotta spend money to make money, right?
05:49 (laughs)
05:51 Right now it's about midnight.
05:54 We're gonna head back to the restaurant and start my stock.
05:57 So it's now 12.30 a.m., we're back at home base
06:02 and we are going to unload and start the mother stock.
06:05 So we are going to fill this baby up
06:08 and load 'em up with bones.
06:10 Okay, so I like to start off with bones.
06:16 Bones first before I put any of the proteins in.
06:21 So we are going to start with our beef shanks.
06:26 So these are going in first.
06:28 When you look at the menu, it's Helen's Beef Pho,
06:30 it's not just pho.
06:31 I like a lot of flavors in the food that I eat
06:34 and the food that I cook.
06:35 Gonna move on to the neck bones.
06:37 I love that there's a good amount of meat
06:40 on these neck bones.
06:41 We can extract all the meat and use them for stews.
06:45 So once a year I restart the mother stock.
06:47 The goal here is to create a very beefy stock
06:52 that we can use for a million things.
06:55 And you'll see everything that comes out of the pot
06:58 serves a really beautiful purpose.
07:00 Once the bones are in, I add the meat.
07:03 So now we're gonna put the beef shanks in.
07:05 All right, brisket.
07:10 Brisket going in.
07:11 So right here I have some oxtails
07:14 that I'm gonna throw into the beef stock.
07:15 These are non-negotiables.
07:17 Must always have brisket, must always have oxtails.
07:20 Oh my gosh, I love this so much.
07:23 If I could just make stocks and stare at this for hours,
07:28 I would.
07:31 I'm thinking that it's going to be roughly 45 minutes
07:35 until we come into a full boil.
07:37 And then I want it to go at a rolling boil
07:40 for at least 15 minutes.
07:42 I watch the meat because there's a different cooking time
07:46 for each cut of meat.
07:48 We're at minute 45 and look at the baby.
07:51 She's at a rolling boil.
07:53 I'm gonna skim.
07:54 This is one of the most gratifying experiences
07:59 'cause you know that the more you skim,
08:01 the clearer the stock becomes.
08:03 It's just pure joy, pure joy.
08:06 And then now I take this guy.
08:09 I don't need a whole lot of movement.
08:11 I just need to make sure
08:12 that there's a little bit of separation
08:14 so that it can breathe.
08:16 So I'm gonna keep it at a rolling boil
08:17 for another 15 minutes just to make sure
08:20 that things are getting cooked properly.
08:23 And then I'm gonna bring it down to a simmer.
08:27 And can you see the color of the fat forming right now?
08:29 It's so gorgeous.
08:32 And you'll see this transform over the hours
08:36 into something like a deeper golden yellow.
08:39 All right, so it's about, I don't know, four.
08:43 We're on hour four of our stock.
08:46 As you can see, we have about an inch and a half
08:48 to two inches of rendered fat.
08:51 This is essentially our liquid gold here.
08:53 It's time to pull out the brisket and the shank
08:55 and all the meats so that we can cool them in time
08:58 to prep for service.
09:00 Just look at that.
09:00 That's beautiful.
09:01 And this is the color that we strive for, every batch.
09:07 It all starts from here.
09:08 So now that we've taken all of the meat out,
09:13 remember this beautiful guy,
09:14 this dry-age rack of rib and meat?
09:17 So at this point is when we're gonna add him
09:19 into the baby mother stock,
09:21 just to be able to enhance the beefy flavor.
09:24 And then we sit and we wait for another two to three hours.
09:27 (upbeat music)
09:29 So we are going to pull apart some of the oxtail meat
09:32 that we took out earlier.
09:35 This is gonna go into our fried rice.
09:38 So this is what I mean when so many dishes
09:41 come out of that one master stock.
09:43 The mother stock doesn't just lend itself to our pho.
09:47 It's an essential to our sauces and a lot of elements
09:50 that we utilize in our daily menu.
09:54 It's coming off the bone very easily.
09:56 I personally don't like cooking it too much,
09:59 just because I still like the chewy texture
10:01 and have it have like a bouncy bite
10:02 rather than have it completely fall apart.
10:05 Out of that one big mother stock, we got our oxtails.
10:08 We all have our beef shanks, we have our brisket.
10:11 All of this is gonna contribute
10:12 to at least five other dishes.
10:15 That's why she's called the mother stock.
10:17 So this is the back fat from yesterday's rib rack.
10:23 I'm going to cut them into smaller pieces
10:25 and then we're gonna render them.
10:26 And we're gonna utilize the fat for fried rice, for saute.
10:31 So then I'm just gonna turn it on low
10:33 because we want it to slowly render.
10:35 So for oxtail fried rice, the wok is on.
10:38 We are going to add dry-aged beef fat.
10:42 We have oxtail and we have some beef shank.
10:44 Throw some onion, all of our meat in there.
10:50 Special oxtail sauce.
10:53 So we have a jasmine rice.
10:55 At this stage of cooking,
10:57 I still think about my visits at the warehouse, you know?
11:01 From the point you get to pick the meat,
11:03 get to have nice, fun conversations with the guys.
11:06 They always ask me, what am I gonna do?
11:10 So we're gonna finish it off
11:12 with a little bit more rendered beef fat.
11:15 So this is the base of it.
11:16 I'm gonna fry an egg and I'm gonna top it.
11:19 So our family-size oxtail fried rice
11:23 with oxtail and beef shank
11:26 and a fried egg fried in beef fat.
11:28 Remember that dry-aged rack of rib bones with the meat?
11:33 I'm taking it out now 'cause if not,
11:35 it's going to really mess up the ratio of our mother stock.
11:39 At this point, what this mother stock tastes like
11:43 is just a very beefy water.
11:45 So what I have here is two pans.
11:49 In one pan, we are going to toast spices.
11:53 In the other, we're going to sweat some onions,
11:56 some ginger, and some shallot.
11:58 When you do a little cooking and toasting
12:00 before you put it in, I think that it really blooms.
12:04 In here, I have a bunch of my spices
12:06 that are gonna go into my beef stock.
12:09 All the aromatics have been sitting
12:15 for about an hour and a half.
12:17 Very nice.
12:18 The spices are where I want them to be,
12:20 so I'm going to take everything out.
12:23 I think mother stock of 2023 is beautiful.
12:27 The neck bones are definitely enhancing
12:30 the beefiness of the stock, which I love.
12:32 So now that we have strained all of the aromatics,
12:36 I am going to add rock sugar.
12:39 Now we're gonna add our salt.
12:41 I load up on cilantro stems,
12:43 so we use a lot of cilantro in our cooking.
12:46 We save all the stems.
12:48 The cilantro stems are an essential to my stocks.
12:52 This is almost as important as the beef to me.
12:55 So this brisket was cooking in the mother stock pot
13:00 for about four and a half hours.
13:02 So I'm removing the cilantro stems.
13:04 Now we have pho broth.
13:07 It's no longer a stock, it's a broth.
13:09 We have our setup.
13:11 We have our sliced ribeye.
13:13 We have our sliced brisket.
13:14 And then we have the garnishes,
13:16 which is scallion, cilantro, and sliced onion.
13:18 So when we fire a bowl of pho, we blanch the noodles.
13:24 And then from here, a couple slices of the brisket,
13:29 and then the ribeye that we picked up yesterday,
13:32 thinly sliced.
13:34 So then we have our beautiful pho broth.
13:40 As we're ladling the broth,
13:41 we're cooking that raw meat inside.
13:43 So what I'm looking for is that nice golden brown color,
13:47 but also clarity of the broth, which you can see here.
13:52 We're gonna do some scallions,
13:55 and then we're gonna do some cilantro.
13:57 And there you have Helen's beef pho.
14:01 A very beautiful, beefy bowl of pho noodle soup.
14:06 (upbeat music)
14:08 (upbeat music)
14:11 [BLANK_AUDIO]