Phorrito Recipe - Viet World Kitchen (2024)

My husband and I were both skeptical, but for the sake of pho, we went to try the phorrito at Komodo in Los Angeles. It was December 2016, a couple days before Christmas. I posted a photo of myself eating the unusual noodle soup wrap on Instagram. There was curiosity, some disbelief, and a few jokes. But I liked the phorrito idea because it worked. From the outside, the burrito looked like a regular buritto but when you ate it, you also experienced the elemental aspects of pho.

When we ordered, I check out the other menu items available at Komodo and realized that the chef/owner Erwin Tjahyadiwas Indonesian in background. He was versed in Southeast Asian flavors and as I watched the staff assemble phorritos for a busy lunch service, the process reminded me of popiah hand rolls that I’d eaten in Singapore.

Of Chinese in origin, popiah are wrapped in a wheat-flour pancake that’s like a super thin flour tortilla. Inside, there’s an earthy savory-sweet bean sauce somewhat like hoisin, plus some chile sauce. The filling varies but may include stir-fried jicama and stir-fried pork, Chinese sweet sausage and pieces of egg omelet.

Tjahyadimerged impressions of popiah, pho and the burrito to come up with a phorrito – a burrito stuffed with pho-ish goodness. It was brilliant. And if you’re still incredulous, popiah is the precursor to Vietnamese bo bia, a handroll made with rice paper.

The phorrito was created in 2014 and seen as a novelty. Last year, I read a story about it in a Vietnam-based newspaper. There’s a Hanoi restaurant serving phorritos! The phorrito doesn’t seem to be on the Komodo menu these days (Tjahyadi opened a new restaurant in 2017), but it lives on elsewhere. In fact, late last year, I read about MexiPHO, which had opened in November 2016 with an unusual blending of Mexican and Vietnamese cuisines. When something has ventured from trendy Los Angeles to Connecticut, I listen up and head to my kitchen.

First I watched a video of how the phorrito is made at Komodo:

https://youtu.be/rgXTKIL3LY0

Meet the Phorrito! Why does it work? Because pho has always been about cultures rubbing shoulders. And, yes, a pho-stuffed burrito tastes good! On VWK is the phorrito backstory and my recipe for you to experiment with.It requires a restaurant style-set up. The phorrito I got (above) didn’t have as much meat as what the video showed. Oh well. When you look at the phorrito made at Komodo and MexiPHO, the meat was very thinly cut with a deli slicer.

If you have The Pho Cookbook, you could use some of the cooked brisket or chuck from a pot of pho. Or, you could make the beef pho banh mi on page 89 and use that amazing meat for the phorrito. The lamb phonitas on page 88 would be awesome, too. So would the chicken from a batch of pho (any of the recipes from Master Pho, or the Instant Pot Chicken Pho recipe), and the pan-seared tofu (page 97) and pho tempeh (page 99) in the book. Just helping you to make the most of the recipes in the book!

But what if you don’t have the book or don’t have a pot of pho broth sitting around? What if you just want to streamline things and experiment with making a phorrito? In the video, they say the phorrito started out as a joke.

You could simply stir-fry beef with pho spices. I chose a marbled tri-tip beef steak (what I nickname “the poor man’s New York”) and sliced it super thin, just like for the rare steak in a bowl of pho. (You could get deli-sliced roast beef or use leftover grilled steak.) Then I seasoned it with my pho spice blend along with the usual suspects before cooking the beef off in a skillet. Just like the onion garnish in a bowl of pho, sliced onion got added at the end. You want pho flair!

For pho flavor in the noodles, I made a cheat of a pho-ish broth and reduced it to intensify its flavor. To that broth, I added soaked pho rice noodles, which absorbed the broth and finished cooking to a nice springiness. You don’t want the noodles to be heavy. The noodles pick up some brown color from the spices and broth but that's just natural.

My husband bristled at doubling up on carbs (he’s not a fancy, stuffed burrito fan), but I grew up on French fries and rice at dinner. Interestingly, once you assemble the phorrito, you realize that there isn’t much noodle that can go in the wrap. The bean sprouts take up space, as does the beef.

The hoisin and chile sauce make the phorrito sing, as does a fair amount of fresh herbs to contrast and deliver the refreshing flavor of a bowl of pho. That’s why you see me spread the hoisin to cover most of the tortilla. I used my homemade hoisin sauce.

For the chile sauce, sriracha can be intense so you may want to opt for chile garlic sauce, which is the chile sauce Huy Fong developed for the Vietnamese market to begin with. You can thin out the chile sauce before adding it. The phorrito I got was not as spicy as the video makes it out to be.

Aside from flavor, the hoisin helps to hold the tortilla together because the condiment is sticky. It’s an unusually good combination of textures, flavors and visuals that conveys the Vietnamese-Mexican spirit.

At core, pho has always been about cultures rubbing shoulders. It likely evolved from a multicultural set of circ*mstances in which the French left beef carcasses and bits for Viet and Chinese butchers and noodle soup vendors to creatively use up. With the diaspora of Vietnamese people all over the globe, pho has taken on different dimensions to evolve.

That why the last recipe in The Pho Cookbook is for a Pho Michelada beer co*cktail. It’s my tribute to the connection between the two cultures. There are many Mexican staff and customers at pho joints and both cultures love light beer with ice. So why not a beer co*cktail? Why not a phorrito?

Here’s my recipe for you to play with. Enjoy!

VWK News:

My spring cooking classes are filling up. Here’s what’s in store:

• April 7, 11am-3:30pm, Pho Celebration, Santa Cruz (6 left)
• April 21, 9:30am-1:30pm, Pho + Dumplings, Napa Valley
• May 1, 6-8pm, DIY Tofu Tuesday, San Francisco (just opened)
• May 12, 11am-3pm, Dim Sum Party, Santa Cruz (new class! 6 left)

Hope to cook and eat with you soon!

And, The Pho Cookbook is a finalist for a major cookbook award from the International Association of Culinary Professionals, a leading organization in the food industry! Getting into the finals is an incredible nod for the food and cultures that we all embrace. Thanks for your support. It's been a great #Phobruary!

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