Reddit mentions of Thai Kitchen Fish Sauce, 6.76 oz

> favorite

> easy

>really cheap

Sure. Both pho and ramen do require you to have some pantry essentials on hand, so there's an up-front cost involving a trip to the best Asian market you can access, but like any kitchen essential, once you have it it's there & you'll quickly learn what you burn through quickly and what sits on the shelf for months at a time. We're talking maybe $50 to be able to make a pretty endless supply of soups that generally cost ~$15 at a restaurant, so it's a good deal.

I prefer chicken pho (pho ga) because it tastes better to me than beef pho (pho bo), it's much easier and it's much cheaper. So it fits your bill.

For pho ga there are only two pantry items you really need:

• fish sauce — something like this or this, NOT something like this or this. Those last two links are awful US supermarket brands
  
  
• yellow rock sugar
  
  The recipe is pretty idiot-proof. Other than charring the onion and ginger until they're blackened—this is an essential step—and using enough rock sugar to give the broth some sweetness, the most important step is to blanch the chicken parts so your broth isn't cloudy. The steps for that are in the recipe.
  
  [Pho ga from Andrea Ngyuen.] (https://www.vietworldkitchen.com/blog/2007/06/chicken_pho_noo.html) Andrea's The Pho Cookbook is very good, but a whole book on pho is a little redundant IMO (Mai Pham is another Vietnamese chef who wrote the outstanding Pleasures of the Vietnamese Table if you're interested in a more comprehensive book on Viet cuisine; her pho ga recipe is virtually identical to Andrea's).
  
  For ramen I don't prefer chicken over the traditional pork, and TBH there's a much wider, denser spectrum of ramen out there than there is of pho—but chicken will still be the easier and cheaper option, and it's still fucking good. I've actually had a pot of chicken ramen broth going on my stove since last night, so I'll share that recipe here.
  
  The pantry staples for ramen are more complicated, so I'll just list them and you can see what's available in your area and what you might want to order online. They are:
  
  
• konbu (a variety of seaweed; thick, rectangular strips of kelp)
  
  
• mirin (rice wine used for cooking)
  
  
• sake (also rice wine, but generally served as a beverage)
  
  
• white soy sauce
  
  
• usukuchi soy sauce (a light soy sauce)
  
  
• niboshi
  
  
• katsuobushi
  
  That list might look intimidating. Don't let it be. Konbu, niboshi and katsuobushi are just dehydrated seafood & fish that will store in your pantry forever. Mirin and sake are just booze and the other two are just soy sauce. Easy.
  
  Now, ramen is a LOT more time-intensive than pho but don't let that scare you off. It takes 8–10 hours, but really only 1–2 of those are active depending on how fast you prep the ramen's seasoning ("tare"). Like I said, I put my chicken ramen (chicken paitan) on the stove last night before going to bed, and I'm just finishing off the last hour of it this morning while I type this. And after you soak the initial tare ingredients in the fridge—you can do that overnight while your broth simmers, too—then completing it only takes about 15 minutes. Comparatively, pho ga takes about two hours start to finish. But other than clock-watching, both of these recipes are so easy that any novice can tackle them.
  
  Both /r/pho and /r/ramen are a little circlejerk-y when it comes to just posting photos of bowls of soup (TBF I guess there's only so much you can actually say about either), but /r/ramen has a very good contributor/mod in /u/Ramen_Lord whose sidebar tour of ramen recipes will make homemade ramen feel very accessible to the American cook.
  
  Here is that entry for chicken paitan ramen, the thing that's going in my kitchen at this moment:. The recipe itself is in this comment.
  
  Enjoy, and feel free to ask any further questions! I do recommend buying an inexpensive kitchen scale as the one piece of equipment other than a pot, spoon and knife that you really want to have for soupmaking. Something less than $20 will do. Otherwise an immersion blender is a very, very handy tool to have around the house but it's in no way necessary. Have fun!