I’m in San Francisco at the Fancy Food Show for a couple days. I hope to bring back some interesting photos to share with you all, y’know, because I can’t share the bitty little samples of food they got here.

A 50 pound bag of flour ought to hold me for a while. Scoring this humongous sack today gave me the same joy i felt as a college freshman when my dorm mate brought home a half keg of beer.

King Arthur Flour’s Sir Lancelot has a higher gluten percentage than just about any American-milled flour, and ought to produce the chewy bagels I’m after. If I can’t, it’s not the flour’s fault.

But scoring a beer keg as an eighteen year old is as difficult as securing this high gluten flour as a home baker. This particular brand is only distributed through wholesale channels to professional bakers. I spoke to a Phoenix distributor willing to sell me a pallet of 50 bags. That’s a ton and a quarter of flour.

A schmuck like me has to jump through serious hoops to get a “small” quantity, or have really good friends with a hookup. Thanks, RM, you are the best!

You’re looking at my fourth attempt at bagels since I started the year-long baking project last month.

The recipes I’ve used call for slow-rising dough techniques. Slow, cool fermentation in the refrigerator results in a more flavorful bread with more interesting textures. It takes two days or more to prepare a batch of dough for the oven.

For this batch, I tried the formula in Rose Levy Berenbaum’s The Bread Bible. You may know that bagel dough is parboiled prior to baking. The wetted, precooked surface starches bake into a thicker, chewier exterior in the heat of the oven.

Notice the pretzel-like brownish color on these bagels. Berenbaum’s recipe calls for baking soda in the boiling water, the ingredient which gives homemade pretzels their distinctive color during a similar parboiling treatment.

The recipe calls for an egg white wash prior to baking. This acts as a glue for the sesame seeds, and gives the finished product a nice gloss. Gloss is good, baby. But I want gloss and a crisper crust than what I’ve managed so far. Berenbaum brushes a cornstarch slurry on her rye bread loaves for gloss & crispiness, so I’m trying that on my next batch of bagels to see the effect.

I’ve tried recipes from Berenbaum and Peter Reinhart’s Crust & Crumb: Master Formulas For Serious Bakers. Both authors raise interesting points and are excellent teachers. I’ll continue working from their instructions until I can acheive consistent results for both formulas. In my attempts so far, I’ve made okay bagels, similar to the ones I can buy from my local stores. I’m after something far better, though, and I hope my efforts this year pay off.

Google “high end pho” with the quotation marks, and you’ll find links to high end pho-tography or high end pho-togrammetry. You’ll find bupkes on Quan Hop’s Vietnamese beef noodle soup with filet mignon. In its most basic form, pho turns humble ingredients into a magical, healing potion cooked with time, love and skill, so no wonder upscale pho doesn’t register on Google’s neural network….yet.

Despite the well lighted, thoughtfully decorated room, this is not some trendoid restaurant serving overpriced, watered-down fusion Cuisine with a capital C. Pho is not Cuisine. Pho remembers when you fell on your ass in a puddle in third grade and you went crying like a sissy to your Grandma, who changed your wet clothes, and made you all better - with what? You remember - a steaming bowl of pho.

Pho won’t give you shit for driving up in a pimped M3 convertible that you can afford only because you still live at home. Pho will be happy to see you and wants to know how Grandma’s doing.

Item #7 - Pho Hop

Grandma would approve of the deeply beefy broth with flavors that only thick slabs of meaty brisket can add. Beef bones and sinew give up rich collagen over hours of cooking that add body to the broth, and gentle simmering ensures that fats and proteins don’t conspire to cloud its beautifully clear complexion.

Carelessly cooked rice noodles show up in your bowl as a pasty ball of glop at lesser restaurants. Here, the cooks understand that a cold water rinse to rehydrate dried noodles followed by skillful cooking yields perfectly cooked, separate strands.

Only two pho variations exist on a brief menu that covers a few examples each of soup, rice, and noodle dishes. The $5.75 Pho Hop assembles different beef textures in a bowl: tender slices of filet mignon; toothy brisket stewed long enough to break down its tough muscle fibers; firm-yet-gelatinous pieces of beef tendon, dense rubbery meatballs, and chewy bits of tripe. While it’s more expensive than the average in this part of town, the Pho Tai Dac Biet only sets you back a whole six-fiddy, big spender. With this, you get only the filet mignon, and none of the “nasty” bits Grandma loves. You kids these days…

Water wall near entrance

Pho joints in non-Viet neighborhoods tend to skimp on the herbs served on the side. Here, the requisite bean sprouts, spicy royal basil, the cilantro-like, sawtoothed leaves of ngo gai (aka culantro), and fresh lime slices are joined by a separate dish of finely sliced shallots. Shredded scallions add another distinct layer of onion bite to the dish.

While there’s nothing wrong with the food at that run-down dump your old man’s loved since 1978, it’s about time that someone opened a good looking joint in Little Saigon and presented pho with premium ingredients to a savvy audience.

Quan Hop follows Professor Salt’s Restaurant and Bar Rule #1: make young women want to go, and the men will follow. Even Grandma would dig the place, and then your old man would have to rethink his divey joint, wouldn’t he?

Quan Hop
15640 Brookhurst St
Westminster, CA 92683
714-689-0555