Eating a good bowl of Vietnamese pho is a bit like choosing to do hot yoga instead of watching “Game of Thrones.’’ Rather than the dirty decadence the food world is so in love with — ramen, burgers, foie gras, poutine — pho has that clear broth cleanliness. It comes with a big virtuous pile of bean sprouts and fresh green herbs. Try to find the fatty sin in this bowl, and you can’t.

Yet there’s something almost druglike about this bowl of meat, noodles, and broth. Once you add in the fresh chiles, stir in some sriracha, and douse it all in lime, you’ve got a meal that’s going to leave you sweaty and buzzed.

But where to find the best version? I checked out the pho dac biet, the house special soup that comes with five forms of beef, across seven different pho joints, all located near Dorchester’s Fields Corner. In its classic form, the soup is based on a house-made beef broth, laden with small amounts of these different beef cuts (rare eye round, cooked flank, braised brisket, tendon, and tripe) and rice vermicelli, with scallions and cilantro floating in the broth. The broth is clear because the meat and bones are all blanched first, to remove any impurities, and then simmered for a long, long time, because unseared beef takes forever to give up its beefy essence to the stock. To keep things pure, the aromatics are kept simple: some star anise, a cinnamon stick, maybe a couple of cloves, and some onion and ginger that have been heavily charred and softened on the grill.

As with broth-based dishes everywhere, good stock is the foundation on which a bowl of pho rests: Fail there, and all the condiments in the world can’t save it. But even merely decent pho often beats other soupy dishes because of what you get to garnish your bowl: mounds of minty Thai basil, snow-white crunchy bean sprouts, fresh Thai bird chiles, and lime wedges. Now you can take your basic broth and turn it into something fresh and alive. In a gesture of hospitality, restaurants also provide hoisin, fish sauce, and sriracha to help tune the heat, sourness, saltiness, and sweetness to your own taste.

The main discovery of my pho crawl was this: Almost every place succeeded in putting out a bowl of something satiating. It was hot, it was salty, it had meat and noodles and top-notch garnishes. The ubiquitous dried rice noodles were basically a pass-fail situation. And atmosphere, when you’re searching out the best version of quintessential street food, is less of a consideration: You expect it might come with uncomfortable seats and a side of exhaust fumes.

The broth and meat are where you start to see a difference place to place. For dac biet, one restaurant stood out among its peers: Pho So 1 Boston. The broth was on a different level. While all were clear, hot, salty, and decent, only Pho So 1 succeeded in coaxing out the essence of beef from the bones and meat. While others seemed to rely heavily on rock sugar and fish sauce, Pho So 1 had a broth you’d want to pack in a Thermos and drag around all winter.

The beef, too, was treated with care. At too many places, the poor brisket was hammered to death over high heat, the fatty layer spiraling away from the meat layer, never to be rejoined. Here, the brisket slice actually looked like a slice from grandma’s brisket, and tasted like it was treated with the slow heat it deserved. I suspect that same slow heat was what made the flank so silky, as well as the tendon. Tendon, often a bit too wiggly and gelatinous for me (blame my cultural bias), was more my style here. It was shaved as thin as a slice of lardo and melted gently into the broth like a pat of butter. The tripe was nice; it had a bit of crunch, but you could still bite through it. The rare eye round was the only place Pho So 1 slipped a bit, only because it would’ve been nice had it arrived rarer. Balancing the steak on top of the noodles so that it sits mostly above the broth, and getting it to you quickly enough that your beef is still rare, is no easy trick — but it is one several of its competitors have mastered, notably Pho 2000 and Pho Hoa.

Two honorable mentions: Second-best broth went to King Do, not a place you’d necessarily look to for pho, as its specialty is banh mi. The other is an exceptional pho ga (chicken pho) at Hien Vuong, directly next to the Fields Corner T stop. In this cute little shop, the chicken broth is excellent, and the meat is nicely cooked, generously torn, and carefully culled of any sinewy bits. Then it goes and tops the whole thing with a handful of fried shallots.

Pho So 1, 223 Adams St., Dorchester, 617-436-8888; King Do, 1229 Dorchester Ave., Dorchester, 617-436-5464; Hien Vuong, 1487 Dorchester Ave., Dorchester, 617-282-9791.

Alison E. Hearn is a chef who has worked at B&G Oysters, Myers + Chang, Steel & Rye, Specialty Foods Boston, and more. She can be reached at alisonehearn@gmail.com.