Eye Round/Bones – Pho

Hello, weekend.

Glory be, hallelujah, mazel tov and hare krishna.

June was crazy. I bought a cow, climbed a mountain, and essentially didn’t stop moving from May 31 to now.

But June’s over. I’m ready to get some quality weekend on.

And I’m ready to do some beef right. No coasting on steaks and cake recipes today. I want something different. Something I probably wouldn’t have tried if I didn’t have a quarter ton of beef in my backyard. I want to stretch out.

Let’s play with some eye round.

Eye round comes off the round primal, which is essentially the back leg and hip of the animal. It’s a very pretty piece of meat. It’s round, five-ish inches across, and about as long as your forearm. It’s very lean, and uniformly red-pink. Frankly, it looks an awful lot like an intact tenderloin.

I’ve only used this piece once, as a pot roast. Since I’m not very familiar with it, I solicited some expert help. It turns out that despite appearances, this piece is distinctly NOT tenderloin-y.

Hidden inside this silky pink cylinder is a tremendous amount of connective tissue. If you treat it wrong you’ll be chewing it for days. It is as lean as it looks, though, so it dries out very quickly. It’s a riddle, wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in beef.

One solution: slice it very thinly, across the grain, and serve it in liquid.

Pho.

I haven’t cooked much eye round. I haven’t done much vietnamese. Hell yeah.

We start this by making a broth for the soup. It’s kinda like making a stock, except I’m skipping the Reduce To Almost A Syrup Then Reconstitute When Ready To Use step. I’m just going to reduce it to what I’m going to use.

This involves boiling bones (to turn their connective tissue into delicious gelatin) along with some veggies, then discarding all the spent bits. I could skip this, and start with store bought stock. But like I said, I’m ready to get my weekend on. Let’s do this up right.

stock to be

I do a little interwebs research, and find some quality recipes, but I think I’m gonna use this one as my skeleton.

Water. Once my Little Engine That Could stove brings eight-ish quarts to a boil, I add five and a half pounds of grassfed beef marrow bones. Boil vigorously for fifteen minutes, and discard water. You don’t have to do this, but it does reduce the amount of fat/blood/yucky stuff you have to skim off the broth as it’s coming together (and trust me, you will want to skim that off).

I’m gonna add a number of things to the broth when I build it – among them, onions and ginger.

From what I can tell, the French influenced the Vietnamese to char their veggies (especially onion) prior to inclusion into the broth. If fact, one theory of the etymology of “pho” is from the french “feu,” meaning fire (as in the stew “pot-au-feu”)… and the charred onion is considered one of the elements that separate pho from other similar meat soups.  So I rub the onions with canola, throw them under the broiler and char them for eight-ish minutes for some Maillard-y goodness.

You can see the flavor!

Let’s build a broth. The mise:

Mise en place. Simple, eh?

A quick rinse, then six quarts of water over the bones. Cover, return to boil. Add charred onions, charred ginger, a cinnamon stick, some whole coriander seeds, some fennel seeds, a cardamom pod, some cloves, and a half a dozen star anise. Follow that up with four-ish tsp of salt, two tbsp of white granulated sugar, and about a quarter cup of fish sauce. Boil, then reduce heat and simmer.

Once everything’s in, I set up a skim station. Otherwise, I pick up my copy of Being and Nothingness and settle in for a few hours.

skim station

Three and something hours later. The house smells wonderful, and I need to get ready to plate.

My rice noodles need hot water for ten minutes to soften. Done.

I pull the eye round out of the freezer and wait a few minutes until it’s still firm, but not really frozen. I slice thinly across the grain.

That bit is key – across the grain.

We aren’t really doing anything chemically to break down that connective tissue… in other words, we aren’t cooking this beef low and slow with liquid to convert collagen (yuck) into gelatin (yum). So we have to do something physically. To wit, we have to slice that connective tissue into very tiny pieces.

Thin beef at the ready, I prepare the condiment platter. One of the wonderful things about this dish is that it’s extraordinarily simple, and you can make it exactly how you like it at the table.

Big plate. Add chopped cilantro, mint leaves, basil leaves, sliced jalapeno, mung bean sprouts, lime wedges, more fish sauce, hoisin, and sriracha. This plate lives on the middle of the table. Next to it, the sriracha, fish sauce, and a jar of hoisin.

You don’t need to anticipate what somebody will like. They can build it themselves.

We’re ready. Strain and dump out anything chunky. We’re left with a lovely, golden broth. I bring it  to an enthusiastic, rolling boil. This broth has work to do.

Bowl. Very thin beef slices at the bottom. Add boiling broth. Soft noodles. Then on to the table for whatever other accouterments folks want.

I go for some mint, cilantro, a little basil, two slices of jalapeno, a handful of bean sprouts,  a dash more of fish sauce, and a squirt of sriracha.

My wife is entirely different. Mint, cilantro, basil, and that’s it.

Verdict? This soup is simply lovely.

When the boiling broth hits the raw beef at the bottom, it cooks in seconds. Poached, tender, lovely beef slices.

The broth itself is excellent, thanks to the quality time it had with wonderful, marrow-filled beef bones, at a simmer, for a long time.

And I’m basically a chimp with a spoon, people. Find someone with real skills? I shudder to think.

There is absolutely nothing intimidating about this soup. I daresay, it’s even easy. It requires good ingredients, a few spices we don’t use every day, and time. A few times, I wished the eye round was sliced a little thinner. I would have used my slicer, but for the fact I haven’t purchased it yet. Note to self.

The next day, we reheated the leftover broth, sliced some more eye round, whipped up some more noodles, and did the whole thing again.

The eye round was 3.42 pounds, and even after two uses, we still have half left.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with the second half of this piece of meat, but the first have gave me one incredible soup

Special thanks to my friend Eben for all his advice on this potentially problematic cut.