Suong Food — Vietnamese home cooking anchored on phở | suongfood.com
Beef and chicken phở broths share one temperature — a bare simmer of 85–95 °C — but differ completely in hours: 6–12 for beef, 1.5–2 for chicken.
Both broths begin with the same preparation. The bones are parboiled for 10–15 minutes, the water is discarded, and the bones are rinsed. This strips scum and blood from the stock; skipping it is the standard cause of a cloudy broth, and no later skimming fully repairs the damage.
After the rinse, the clean bones go back into fresh water with the charred aromatics. Onion and ginger are blackened first — 20–30 minutes at 240 °C in the oven, or held over an open flame — and only then enter the pot.
On narrow screens, swipe or scroll the plate sideways.
From that point the two broths diverge on time only. Beef broth holds 85–95 °C for 6–12 hours. Chicken broth holds the identical temperature for 1.5–2 hours and is done; running chicken on the beef schedule gains nothing.
The spice bag scales with liquid volume, not with bone weight. Per 4 litres of broth it takes 4–6 star anise, one cassia stick 7–8 cm long, 4–5 cloves, about 10 g of coriander seed and 2–3 cardamom pods. Cloves are the ingredient to respect: exceeding 4–5 per 4 litres pushes the broth toward a medicinal taste.
Once the broth is finished, the bowl is assembled by the numbers on the companion page /pho-noodles-and-beef-cuts, and seasoning is handled by fish-sauce grade as explained at /fish-sauce-and-nuoc-cham.
Further reading