Andrea Nguyen Shared a Spin on Her Rotisserie Chicken Pho Recipe and It Deserves Your Attention

If you’re running late from work and need to get dinner ready, you can easily take to the internet to find a quick recipe to cook for a family of four. But back in the day, it wasn’t quite that simple, and most dinners happened thanks to the help of rotisserie chicken. Yes, the ones you see well-stocked in grocery stores and markets across the country. While rotisserie chickens have gotten a bit fancier over the years with flavors like lemon pepper and mojo, they are still known for their affordability, and can easily go down in history as one of the best dinner shortcuts. From making your own chicken stock to delicious Sheet Pan Chicken Nachos, the use of rotisserie chicken is truly endless for creating meals. 

So, it’s no wonder that beloved James Beard award-winning author and chef Andrea Nguyen used it as the key ingredient in a recipe found in her latest book, The Pho Cookbook. But it’s not used how you may assume, the recipe actually calls for you to only use the leftover chicken carcass, skin, and unwanted parts that normally get thrown away.

“My husband saved all the unwanted bits from a WF (Whole Foods) rotisserie chicken plus a breast so I could make this pho for him,” Andrea captioned the post. If you’re anything like me, I’ve always thought of pho as fun to eat and hard to make, but the idea of eliminating cooking a whole chicken — which is arguably the most time-consuming part of the recipe — makes the pho-making process sound much more approachable. 

Perhaps the best tip about Andrea’s pho recipe is the convenient bean sprout substitute that she included: cabbage. “The bean sprouts were sad at the store so I put thinly sliced green cabbage in the bottom of the bowl under the noodles,” she said. 

Recreating her original rotisserie chicken pho for the cold days ahead will require you to budget two hours of time for prep and cooking. And of course, you’ll need to pick up a considerable amount of ingredients including apples, celery, onion, cloves and ginger, and, of course, a rotisserie chicken. But if you’re interested in giving it a try, we know exactly what you can expect: an extra dose of comfort.

If this recipe sounds like something you’d enjoy over the holidays, consider planning ahead by adding the above ingredients to your shopping list or doubling what you would normally buy to have them on hand. And the best news is that you can take your Thanksgiving leftovers to another level by subbing out the chicken for turkey to make a day-after-Thanksgiving turkey pho.