For such a popular dish, the origins of Vietnamese pho are rather mysterious, and there are a number of different ways to go about getting your meat, rice noodles, and broth into one bowl. Beef pho is a popular sight in restaurants, and there are specific cuts of steak you should use for rich beef pho depending on your preferences. However, if you prefer chicken (which can be easier to cook with), is it the same? If you use light meat instead of dark meat, will that ruin your pho or your soup? For answers, Chowhound spoke exclusively with Kevin Tien, executive chef and owner of Moon Rabbit in Washington D.C.
According to Tien, you can work with either light or dark meat, but you should know how they’ll contribute different elements to the dish. In particular, Tien says, “I prefer both! white meat for a lighter taste, and dark meat for more flavor.” This is because dark meat contains more fat from the bird’s more frequently used muscles. According to Tien: “Fat is flavor and I love the flavor of the chicken fat on top of my pho broth. The texture of the white meat is great when shredded and put in the pho. I normally drop a whole chicken in it and then pull it out of the broth and pick the meat by hand.” Don’t feel like you need to limit yourself to one type of chicken meat.
Boneless chicken versus bone-in chicken
White meat or dark meat isn’t the only pho question you’ve got to answer, though. Do you go with boneless chicken only, or do you want the chicken bones, too? For Kevin Tien, this is another question that’s not mutually exclusive, and he uses both boneless and bone-in cuts of the bird at his restaurant: “We use chicken bones to roast and make the pho broth for flavor and then get additional boneless chicken to make sure we have a healthy portion of protein for the bowl to eat.”
Whenever anybody talks about bones in their pho, it’s almost always for making the broth rather than something like serving the soup with whole chicken wings in the bowl. Bones are considered an important part of any pho dish, even when you’re working with beef instead of chicken. A good simmered and spiced bone broth is often what makes restaurant pho taste better than homemade pho, and so you should look for chicken that isn’t totally boneless at the store. Or at least, get the bones separately — many supermarkets sell the birds’ necks and backs. You might also consider saving a few pieces of chicken to eat as a complement the pho. Tien, for example, likes to serve some of the meat separately: “I always like a little extra on the side for dipping in hoisin or chili,” he says.
