This recipe is one of my favorite ways to add diversity and nose-to-tail eating to my carnivore diet! It's made with extremely nutrient rich bone marrow, beef tendon and tripe (stomach). The authentic spices and preparation method give it the wonderful, distinctive taste of the beloved Vietnamese noodle soup dish.
Tendon and tripe (along with the steak used in this recipe) are traditional pho ingredients. Chewy, mild tendon is one of my favorite unique foods, and I love using tripe in this recipe sliced thin as noodles!
Although the word "pho" really comes from the rice noodles in the soup, the distinctive flavor comes from the spiced beef broth.
This is clearly not a "no-spice" recipe, but you will strain them out after making the broth so won't directly be eating them.
Ingredients
- 4 lbs beef bones
- 2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
- 2" piece of ginger, cut into several pieces
- 3 cinnamon sticks
- 1 tablespoon coriander seeds
- 1 tablespoon fennel seeds
- 4 star anise
- 8 whole cloves
- 4 cardamom pods
- 4 tablespoons fish sauce
- Salt
- About a pound of raw, thinly sliced steak or any type
- About 1/2 pound to a pound of washed (white colored) tripe, preferably pocket tripe, not honeycomb
- About 1/2 pound beef tendons
Instructions
- Roast the bones at 450 degrees for 30-60 minutes. (This step is optional but roasting the bones first will give the broth a deeper flavor.)
- Place the bones and all spices in a stock pot or slow cooker. You can contain the spices in a spice bag or plan to strain them out afterwards.
- Cover the bones with water. If using a stock pot on the stove, bring to a boil then reduce to a simmer. In a slow cooker, set the heat to low.
-Add the fish sauce. Add salt at this step if you wish, or salt to taste later.
- Let cook for 6-24 hours. Even longer is fine if you have the time. The longer the better! The more time your bones have to simmer, the more nutrient dense and flavorful your broth will be.
- Strain the broth through a mesh sieve to remove all the bones and spices.
- Normally the fat layer at the top of broth is removed. This is all healthy fat that can be eaten so this step is optional but I still chose to remove it to make a more traditional broth and save the fat for rendering into tallow later. Before removing the fat, my broth was very oily. How fatty your broth will be depends on how much marrow and connected fat your bones have. To get the fat to separate, cool in the fridge for a couple hours, or in the freezer for about an hour to speed up the process, until there is a hard, light colored layer at the top. Simply spoon it off.
- Return the broth to the pot and bring back to a simmer or the same low heat. If you are using tripe and/or tendon, cut the tripe into about rice noodle sized slices and chop the tendon into 1/2 inch to an inch pieces. Add the tripe and tendon to the broth and let cook for another 3-4 hours. If you want to speed up the process, you can cook the tripe and tendon with your bones and spices, but you will need to pick them out separately afterwards. Or, cook your spices in a spice bag so the spices and bones can be easily removed separate from the tripe and tendon.
- Right before serving, lay out servings of the raw steak into the bowls you will eat from.
- While the broth is still hot, pour over the steak in your serving bowls. This should immediately cook very thinly sliced steak to about medium rare. If you wish to cook the steak more, or your steak is not very thinly sliced, add the steak to the boiling broth while still on the heat for a couple minutes and then serve rather than pouring the broth over the steak.
You can make bone broth without vinegar, but I highly recommend it. The apple cider vinegar here draws out the nutrients and flavor of the bones and does not give any taste of vinegar to the broth.
Any type of beef bones will work for this recipe, but if you want to get the especially nutrient rich and fatty benefits of bone marrow, choose bones sold specifically for their marrow. The good news is that these are cheap! For cost to nutrient ratio, bone marrow is possibly about as good as it gets. In traditional cultures, bone marrow was often one of the first foods eaten from an animal and considered to have very health giving properties.
I believe marrow is one of the "whole animal" products that we should strive to get into a carnivore diet like organ meats. You can roast bones and eat the marrow out of them or even eat marrow raw. It's like a flavorful, gelatinous fat, but as a food that many Westerners aren't accustomed to eating, it can be hard to get used to. Making a bone marrow broth is a fantastic way to get all of the benefits of bone marrow in a way where it is hardly noticeable! If you choose to remove the fat layer you may be losing some of the benefits of the marrow but this is why I chose to save the fat for rendering.
Beef tendon is very gelatinous, like a mildly flavored, hard gummy. It's a great way to add a mega-dose of collagen to your diet. I've come to enjoy even just chewing on pieces of tendon as a snack because I love the consistency of it.
The tripe is such a perfect ingredient for this recipe because it's a traditional additional to pho soups, it adds another unique "nose-to-tail" ingredient, and possibly best of all it's a perfect replacement for rice noodles! I've made a separate recipe just for tripe noodles which could be creatively added to many different carnivore meals.
Some of the spices in this recipe can be hard to find. I went to several specialty grocery stores before I was able to find star anise but eventually found all of them for a very good price in bulk at Natural Grocer's. You can of course get dried, powdered forms of many of these spices, but I really recommend you look for these whole forms for this recipe. They are the key to giving the broth the wonderful, authentic flavor of pho. Only a couple minutes after beginning to simmer my broth, I could smell the very distinctive aroma of pho throughout my kitchen. I am personally not a fan of anise or fennel by themselves (which have a very similar flavor to black licorice), but all together these spices are a wonderful combination. Star anise is a very different spice than anise seeds.
Another great part about this recipe is that the fish sauce, which is essential to many Asian dishes like this, is just made of anchovies and salt- it's completely carnivore! Just make sure your fish sauce doesn't include sugar. Some have a small amount.
For the steak, any type will do. Thinly sliced ribeye would be the best and most traditional. I have found thinly sliced ribeye and bottom round steak at Wal Mart. The the latter is was what is photoed in this recipe. Another great option if you have access to it is this shaved beef steak from Trader Joes! If you don't buy already sliced steak, cut your steak into as thin of pieces as possible across the grain to make it more tender and easier to eat.
Enjoy!