Pho Ga: Vietnamese Chicken Noodle Soup

In this Vietnamese Chicken Pho (Pho Ga) recipe, you’ll learn how to make a home-cooked, authentic Vietnamese chicken noodle soup.

Learn how to clean your chicken properly before making the Chicken Pho broth

Learn how to prevent dried, tough chicken meat

This soup is lighter, easier to cook than its more well-known cousin, Vietnamese Beef Pho.

You can make Chicken Pho in the slow cooker too!

How to clean chicken for Chicken Pho

The quality of the chicken directly affects how your broth tastes. Look for organic, free-range birds. It’s worth the extra few dollars.

To make the best tasting Chicken Pho, you must clean your chicken properly. The skin of raw chicken is full of extra guck, minuscule feathers, dirt, peeling skin and even powdery bone fragment. I know, it’s not appealing to write about or even read, but it’s the reality of raw poultry. All the stuff you don’t clean off your chicken, goes right into your precious Pho Ga broth.

Exfoliate the chicken!

To clean the chicken, I exfoliate the skin with kosher salt. Kosher salt is large and grainy enough to give the chicken a good rubdown. Just take a handful of salt:

And rub all over the chicken.

Rinse, and pat the chicken dry.

Much better, right?

This extra step that only takes 2 minutes, ensures a clean chicken for a clean broth.

Parboiling chicken also ensures a clean, clear Chicken Pho broth

Before actually making the pho ga broth, you’ll want to vigorously boil the chicken parts. Bring a potful of water to a boil. While the water is boiling, carve your chicken into parts: drumsticks, thighs, breasts, wings and the body.

When the water comes to a hard, rolling boil, add the chicken parts. Return the pot to a rolling boil and keep the heat on high. Let boil vigorously for 5 minutes. You’ll see grayish and white scum rise to the top of the pot. Keep watch on pot to make sure it doesn’t boil over! This vigorous, hard boil cleans the chicken even further. That scum is not good eating!

After 5 minutes, drain the pot into a large colander to catch the chicken. Rinse the chicken with cold water. Quickly wash the pot, scrub the sides to get rid of any scum. Add the chicken back into the pot, and refill pot with clean water.

Now, you can make your Chicken Pho broth! Those two extra steps for cleaning chicken is not absolutely necessary, but it will give you the cleanest, best tasting Chicken Pho soup you’ll ever have.

Secret to juicy, succulent chicken meat for eating

In this recipe, an entire chicken is used for making soup, and for slicing to serve with the Chicken Pho. The chicken is simmered for about 2 hours to make the broth. After 2 hours of cooking, the meat is dry, rubbery and tasteless.

Instead, we will remove the chicken breasts (or thighs if you prefer dark meat), about 20 minutes into cooking, so that they’ll stay succulent and juicy for your bowl.