Keto Beef Pho

Low Carb Beef Pho Recipe

For the best, authentic Vietnamese pho, you have to use beef bones along with warm spices to make a fragrant, full flavored soup. The pressure cooker is the perfect way to extract flavor from the beef bones quickly. But don’t worry if you don’t own an Instant Pot; I give instructions for stove top and slow cooker pho in the recipe card above.

The key to making restaurant-worthy beef pho is to slowly cook the bone broth for hours. This gives you the most flavorful broth as it steeps with cinnamon, cloves, anise, ginger and fish sauce.

We keep this pho low carb with hearts of palm noodles added at the end. These noodles are very low in carbs and gluten-free. Finish this flavorful soup with your favorite vegetables, thinly sliced, and some shaved beef.

This beef pho is also a great dinner to make ahead. Simply make your broth ahead of time and have your vegetables prepped and ready to go for the night you want it.

Pho Broth

To make a pho broth that is rich and complex in flavor, you have to use real bones. True Vietnamese pho broth is made from beef bones that are slowly simmered for hours in order to extract all the flavor and nutrients from the bones. You can use any kind of beef bones. From marrow, oxtails, knuckles. Any bone will work.

Besides the beef bones, pho broth also uses cinnamon, cloves, anise and ginger to build that complex flavor. In a pinch, if you don’t have whole cinnamon sticks, cloves or star anise pods, you can use powdered. Even ginger powder works in place of fresh ginger. I recommend a teaspoon of ginger powder instead of sliced ginger.

Fish sauce is a major component of authentic pho broth too. It’s stinky, but fish sauce is made from fermented fish and adds that umami flavor.

Thinly Sliced Beef

It can seem strange to add raw beef and uncooked vegetables to the broth, especially if you’ve never had pho before. But the hot broth will cook the meat and vegetables as long as they are thinly sliced.

The best way to get very thin slices of strip steak is to freeze it for 25-35 minutes. This will harden it just enough so you can run a very sharp knife through it or slice it using a meat slicer. You can also request thinly sliced steak from your butcher.

Vegetables in Pho

For your pho, add your favorite low-carb vegetables. I like a mixture of red bell pepper, onions, zucchini, mushrooms and broccoli. Just make sure you cut or slice them thinly with a mandoline.

Is Pho Keto?

Yes, pho is keto! The broth is definitely approved. Just add low-carb vegetables and stick to noodles that are keto friendly like the hearts of palm noodles I use in this recipe. Traditional pho uses rice noodles, which are too high in carbs.