Flavor Boulevard

Isn’t she a fine beauty?

Stuffed to the brim. Peppery chunky crunchy meatloaf. Cucumber strips, cilantro twigs, carrot and daikon strings. And beneath it all, a layer of (possibly homemade) velvety vietnamesischer Braunschweiger, als ob es jeglichen Sinn ergibt. Ja, der Sandwich ist so explosiv gut it induces a spontaneous breakout of German.

Bánh mì pâté thịt nướng*. Not the usual chargrilled pork banh mi I’ve had elsewhere, this one has some kind of briny rich meatloaf. I ordered only two miserable loaves. Shoulda got 20!

On top of that I found the secret to a good spicy yet non-spicy banh mi.

I forgot to ask them to hold the pepper, so they put in loads of jalapenos, which I could only picked out when I got home an hour later. You can get rid of the pepper (and you should, unless you have a parrot tongue**), but you can’t get rid of the pepper sting (which you shouldn’t). That mere fire tail left behind in the bread and the veggies and the meat gives just the right kick without overwhelming the other tastes. But if you wait too long (a few hours in the fridge) to pick out the jalapenos, then you might as well not pick them out at all, the sting has already soaked deep.

Address: Bánh Mì Ba Lẹ (East Oakland)
1909 International Blvd
Oakland, CA 94606
(510) 261-9800

(*) I didn’t see “bánh mì pate thịt nướng” or “thịt nướng pate” anywhere on the menu, I just copied the customers who ordered before me and the ones before them. Seems like a popular combination, for obvious reasons. So bánh mì is really like cơm tấm, only your imagination, not the printed menu, can limit your options! 😉

(**) I was told that the if you feed parrots chilipeppers, which they actually can eat, their pea-shaped tongue can get thinner (the heat peels it off) and allow them to talk. I haven’t found a source to verify this though…

Emerald green. Chilled. Clear. Leafy. Mildly sweet (sugar is added). Every time I pass by a patch of fuzzy spring grass, I dream of munching a tuft and inhaling the lush, youthful aroma of those dew- and rain-soaked blades. This two-dollar drink in this plastic cup is my dream come liquefied.

Lately I have been slacking on the blogging front, mainly because I took on an editing job to compensate for my unwillingness to cook. Ironically, now my eating out budget has increased but I have neither time to eat nor to write about the stuff that I eat. On top of that, the last few weeks of the semester are, naturally, the time to sprint at the end of the marathon and the professors make sure that slacking means death (no joke). But sometimes it backfires when you’re too stressed, you ditch your homework, set out on an hour bus ride to your Vietnamese sandwich shop, order a cup of pennywort drink, and drown your sleep deprivation in eavesdropping others’ conversations.

Little Mom used to make pennywort soup, the best remedy for hot weather and rising body temperature it was. Dad used to eat them raw. The plants almost grow wild, so the leaves cost next to nothing (I wonder why its English name isn’t “pennyworth”). On the streets pennyworth drinks usually get advertised on the same raggedy carts that sell sugarcane juice and fruit smoothies. Those “Nước Mía – Rau Má – Sinh Tố” surrounded with pictures of pineapple and avocado painted on the aluminum sides are a part of every Saigon school front.

But the cup at Bánh Mì Ba Lẹ was my first. There’s the familiar leafy taste in mom’s soup of years back, but the chilled sweetness is refreshingly new. A few tables away, a boy with Tintin‘s hair and two girls were also sipping their rau má. They speak in my mother tongue, yet somehow it sounds so foreign.

Address: Bánh Mì Ba Lẹ (East Oakland)
1909 International Blvd
Oakland, CA 94606
(510) 261-9800

Previously on Sandwich Shop Goodies: bánh quy (turtle mochi)

– QUYNHCHI, aka Little Mom – Translator: Mai

Most Vietnamese like chả, and I like chả even more than most people, because it tastes good, it’s good for you, and it’s good with everything. Chả appears subtly but unmistakably in noodle soups like bún bò, bún mộc, bún thang… Chả fares well with the lustrous steamed rolls of bánh cuốn, with bland white rice, topping sweet sticky rice, inside a crusty loaf of bánh mì… You can also eat chả by itself as a cold cut, then it tastes even better.

Why is chả good for you? Because of what comes into it and how people make it. Vegan chả aside, all chả are pure meat. Take chả lụa (silk sausage) for instance, the pork must be lean, the fresher it is from the slaughter house the higher quality the sausage has. Traditional chả makers don’t wash the pork with water but use instead a clean cloth to wipe off its excess moisture before the pasting process. These days the meat is most likely ground by machines(*), but a good log of chả used to be made from pounding and kneading the meat as one would do with sticky rice to make mochi. The pounding has its specific rhythm to success, which is a smooth, sticky, elastic mass of perfect consistency to be rolled up tight in banana leaves and boiled for hours. So if we come upon a warm log fresh out of the process, we’re guaranteed its cleanliness and pure content.

But chả lụa isn’t the only type of Vietnamese meat sausage around. Not all are made from pork, not all are served in its boiled final form, and not all contain just meat. Recently I got enticed by four types of chả from Đức Hương in Houston.

1. Chả heo chiên (fried pork chả):
Same content as chả lụa, with a textural twist. Fried chả is also in log shape, but the log is smaller than its boiled counterpart, and it has less pepper. The meat is slightly more chewy and the rim covered in the aroma of frying oil. Some of the chả lụa‘s loyal fans would detest chả chiên‘s inconsistency, but I think those bite-sized round slices that fit perfectly well in a crusty loaf of bánh mì or layer on top a scoop of hot sweet sticky rice would make quite a fair start for any busy day.

2. Chả bò chiên (fried beef chả):
Perhaps it’s because of the always-available, always-fresh-and-cheap Texas beef that a slice of beef sausage also shines a healthy golden brown hue. Although the texture errs on the hard side and the taste is a tad too spicy, the heartfelt aroma of beef entangling with a subtle fresh garlic zing makes chả bò chiên the best rice companion for the wintry months.

3. Chả cốm (rice flake chả):
Chả cốm is also made from pork, but like its name indicates, it contains a few handfuls of young rice flakes (cốm). The light green flakes scatter inside and on the surface of the pale beige meat log, their natural viscidity (from the heating of sticky rice) increases the meat’s chewiness and causes the appearance of gossamer strings woven into the meat when the log is sliced. Chả cốm is not as blatantly flavorful as chả bò, nonetheless a complete entity to be served by itself as a friendly witty representation of the rural Vietnam.

4. Chả gà chiên (fried chicken chả)
This turns out to be a pleasant surprise to me. The meat is neither too hard nor too soft but a bit crunchy, not fatty but savory, not strongly spiced but lingering at the tip of the tongue for quite some time. At first I actually wavered over buying the chicken sausage, but now I believe that this is the “phoenix sausage” in “peacock and phoenix sausages” (“nem công chả phượng”) that used to be offered to the monarchs and nobels of the old days. Wouldn’t you agree? 🙂

I can’t remember exactly how much each type costs, but the whole deal of four set me back by $20. That’s not expensive at all, considering the talent and the hard work poured into keeping alive a taste of that faraway home.

Address: Đức Hương Giò Chả in Bellaire, Houston
11369 Bellaire Blvd, Ste 950
Houston, TX 77072
(near the Vietnam War Memorial)
(281) 988-6155

(*): Note from Mai: double-ground meat is easier to obtain than kneaded meat, but would give the sausage a porous texture instead of a silky smooth one.

I like those restaurants that specialize. You go there and you know exactly what you’re gonna get: the one thing that the chefs make and that everyone else gets.

Cơm Tấm Thiên Hương uses two full pages to write all different combinations of their one dish: cơm tấm (broken rice) with meats, egg, and tofu. If they just list the “toppings” and their corresponding price, like for a pizza, the menu would condense down to the size of a calculator. Common toppings for broken rice are grilled pork (or chicken, or beef), chả trứng (egg loaf), tàu hủ ki (flaky fried tofu), bì (shredded pork skin), and fancier, chạo tôm (shrimp sausage on sugarcane). If you can choose up to 4 toppings on your plate, combinatorics tells us that’s 98 possible combinations. If you read Thiên Hương’s two-page menu and don’t see your perfect fit, just tell the waiter what you’d like. Broken rice can be custom-made, so to speak.

What makes broken rice superior to normal rice is its broken nature. Through milling, the germs, which are about 1/10 of a rice grain, break away from the endosperms (the part we eat and call “white rice”) and get mixed with other broken bits of the grains to form “tấm“. Millers used to collect tấm from the whole grains as an accidental byproduct and sell it at a cheaper price, but many people came to recognize that cooked tấm gives a better fragrance and tastes sweeter than normal rice, since it’s the most nourished part of a grain. By and by its popularity rises, factories these days even purposefully choose good rice to fracture and produce good broken rice with different desired ratios of germ to broken endosperm. The more germ the better, of course, but also the harder it is to cook. The germs don’t expand as much as the endosperm while boiled, the best cơm tấm comes by steaming tấm that has been soaked for a few hours in cold water. The grain bits then don’t cling to each other like normal rice, its texture as a whole is fine and dainty (similar to couscous). Pour in a few spoonfuls of the all-time sweet and savory nước mắm and cơm tấm is complete.

The meat and all are just bonus prize. I grew up loving chargrilled pork chop, egg loaf, and pork skin with my broken rice. But the grilled chicken at Thiên Hương is much juicier than the chop, and that sweetness afterchew from the sugarcane stick makes chạo tôm a wise company. Try to mix the egg and vermicelli bits of the egg loaf with the rice… mmmm I shouldn’t write this post at midnight, there’s not even pizza delivery this late.

To shake things up from the veggie end, Thiên Hương also adds a few pickled củ kiệu, all sweet and crunchy, with some lettuce, tomato, cucumber, and pickled carrots. Rabbit food? Yum.

I bet my keyboard that no sane body who enters here orders the lone token noodle soups at the bottom of the menu. Among the Vietnamese diners in the States, I haven’t seen anyone going full force focused like Cơm Tấm Thiên Hương, and they make the best cơm tấm, and I love it!

Address: Cơm Tấm Thiên Hương 2 (inside Grand Century Mall)
1111 Story Road #1086
San Jose, CA 95122

Money matter: $21.41 for two lunch plates and a soursop smoothie

Of my two hundred fifty some posts so far, this Sandwich Shop Goodies series brings me the most joy when writing and also takes me the longest time per post. It’s a collection of the bits and pieces that cost next to nothing. You may say why of course, how can a mere grad student afford The Slanted Door, The French Laundry, or our local Chez Panisse et al. Now although my salary certainly factors in my grocery list, the truth is I’ve lost interest in the uptown food scene. It dazzles like fireworks, and also like fireworks, it doesn’t stay. The mixing and matching of the freshest and strangest ingredients has blended so many nationalities into one that it loses culture like a smoothie losing texture. Those fancinesses don’t have a home. Meanwhile, I can spend days googling an obscure street snack and still regret that I haven’t spent more time, because I know that someone somewhere out there has an interesting story surrounding its identity that I haven’t heard. With such food there’s more than what goes into the pot that I can mention. For example, a simple sticky rice treat has made its way into an idiom, no less.

For twenty five years I’ve heard and used the expression “bánh ít trao đi, bánh quy trao lại” (“give bánh ít, get bánh quy” or “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”) in a million occasions, but not once did I know what bánh quy was. At home we call cookies bánh bích-quy (biscuit) and some shorten it to bánh quy, but the biscuit and the bánh ít are too different from each other to be consider equivalents, and it’s reasonable to guess that the idiom came about before the introduction of Western food into Vietnam. So confused I was. Then one day while foraging the pile of snacks at Alpha Bakery, I almost flipped backward as I found a package of three green mochi’s labeled “bánh quy“.

They’re round and flat at the bottom, each placed on a small cut of banana leaf, purposefully shaped like a turtle shell resting on wet grass. If you look closely you can even see some faint crevices near the rim. So there, mystery unveiled: “quy” means “turtle” in Han-Viet, and the banh gets its name from its look.

Content-wise, bánh quy is indeed just a smaller, rounder, flatter version of bánh ít: sticky rice, tapioca starch, salt, sugar, oil, and a sweet filling. Back in the day, the turtles had either a red or a yellow dot to distinguish between coconut and mung bean paste, but it seems these days only the coconut turtles are still around. Each banh is just big enough and tall enough to fit snuggly in a baby’s palm. Two or three adult bites and you suddenly wonder, hey, where did my sugary, chewy soft bun go?

Buy three at the store for $1.50. Also, look for this other type of bánh ít: bánh gai (bánh ít with thorn leaf extract)

Address: Alpha Bakery & Deli (inside Hong Kong City Mall)
11209 Bellaire Blvd # C-02
Houston, TX 77072-2548
(281) 988-5222

Previously on Sandwich Shop Goodies: bánh da lợn (pig skin pie)

This post is submitted to Delicious Vietnam #12, April edition, hosted by Anh of A Food’s Lover Journey. I’m so looking forward to the roundup this month!

— Guest post by Mom, translated by me —

Tofu is a familiar face in the Asian kitchens, especially the Far East ones: Chinese, Vietnamese, Japanese, and Korean. In Korean dramas, the Koreans have tofu for every meal and some would give a block of white dobu to people who just get out of detention, perhaps to wish them a good, new start without impurities and no returning to jail? A cute, meaningful tradition I think. Up north Vietnam, đậu phụ used to be the main source of protein, despite having “phụ” (secondary) in its name. After all, the old Mr. Lê in Nhất Linh‘s New Bridge Ville dreamed of only a tofu wedge dipped in shrimp paste to satiate a drink at dinner time. Is it white tofu or golden fried tofu, and is it good eaten like that, I wonder? Down South, soft tofu is marvelously used to make warm tofu pudding in syrup (tàu hủ nước đường), an addictive dessert that I haven’t seen in the States, and unfortunately, was slowly fading away from even the Saigon food scene as it’s harder to make than it looks. Ah, all this tofu talk’s driven me to the stove and so comes my savory tofu entree: stuffed tofu in tomato sauce (đậu phụ nhồi thịt sốt cà).

Ingredients:
– 1 package of yellow fried tofu, pre-cut into 3-cm squares
– 1/4 lb ground pork
– 3 purple onions, or 1/2 sweet onion
– 1/2 tsp chopped garlic
– 1 tsp sugar
– 1/4 tsp salt
– pepper and olive oil
For the tomato sauce:
– 1/2 can diced tomato (I use Hunt’s or Del Monte pre-seasoned with basil, garlic & oregano)
– 3 garlic cloves, half smashed.
– 3 tbs sugar
– 1 tsp salt

Marinade the pork with onion, garlic, pepper, salt & sugar. Gently slit open (from the side) half the tofu squares to stuff the meat in, as you would slice an English muffin.
On medium heat, add enough oil to barely submerge the stuffed tofu pieces. Fry tofu until golden brown on all six sides to make sure the meat is thoroughly cooked. Set aside.
In another skillet, add 1 tbs oil and quickly sauté the smashed garlic cloves until golden as the wonderful smell fills your nose. Add diced tomatoes, salt & sugar to taste. If you like it a bit bland, add 1/2 cup water. Cook on high heat and let the sauce boil for roughly 3 minutes, then pour on top of the fried stuffed tofu.

Scoop a bowl of steamy hot white rice. If it rains, you’ve got yourself a homey happiness.

The American Vietnamese must not like vegan very much. (And I stress “American” because plenty of places back home specialize in making vegan dishes far tastier than their meat counterparts.) Take Berkeley for example, there’s no Vietnamese vegan diners, but I can think of at least three Chinese ones (Vegi Food, Long Life Vegi House, and Renee’s Place) and a multitude of American’s (like Cafe Gratitude, Herbivore, and Saturn Cafe). Green Cafe in Milpitas is the first Vietnamese vegan restaurant you can find south of Berkeley.

Its good points: there’s an online menu, everything costs under ten bucks, and they give you a free warm-up. The tofu soup has little black squares of dry seaweed and a soothing broth slightly thickened with tapioca starch. The soup isn’t magnificent, but nothing gets the appetite rolling better than a gulp of soup.

Green Cafe’s fourth good point: no item on the menu has the word “Buddha” attached to its name. Here’s a pet peeve of mine: some people casually name their stuff Buddha this and that whenever their stuff doesn’t have animal. How come I haven’t seen “Jesus steak” or “Krishna delight”? I don’t even see “Washington mix” or any of sort. Just cuz the Buddhists don’t yell at you that it’s offensive to them it doesn’t mean you can commercialize any name as you please. Anyway, Green Cafe doesn’t have any of that on their list, so I eat here in peace. Granted they do have some sequin-sparkling names like “beauty tofu eggplant claypot” or “noble broccoli” (vegan beef and broccoli stir fry). I don’t know if the broccoli is noble, but the eggplant claypot looks as good as it tastes, for eggplant at least. The sauce could use some more salt and sugar and simmering, but the spongy eggplants and mushrooms soak up enough of it to nicely complement white rice.

The star of our lunch is the $7.95 wonton noodle soup with soft and flaky fried tofu, snow mushroom, and fried shallot in a sweet broth. If everything on their menu is as good as this soup, Green Cafe would rival Garden Fresh on my list. Or if they have vegan shrimps.

Lunch for two: $19.06

Address: Green Cafe Vegan Cuisine
190 Ranch Drive
Milpitas, CA 95035
(408) 375-8273
http://www.greencafevegan.com/

I lost my memory card. If you’re a food blogger too you’d know how devastated I felt: the first advice to a food blogger these days is “good pictures”. Well, the pictures I took at Hương Giang are amazing, they just no longer exist. But, pictures or not, as my professor Lawrence Hall would say in his British tongue, “you can’t stop me,” or in this case, I can’t stop myself from blogging about the restaurant.

Is their food that good? Hương Giang takes a shy, small square in the parking lot at the corner of Bellaire and Boone. If you drive westward on Bellaire Blvd, you’ll see its sign on the left before you reach Hong Kong Market. It’s really a tucked-away place for scoffers, the outlook unimpressive, the sign blue and white like a tired worker shirt. The inside is similar to any average pho joints you’ve seen, wiped clean and plastic cheap. I knew my mom wouldn’t come here if not for blogging’s sake, but in this city it’d be hard to get a menu more Huế than this one.

There are pictures in the menu and printouts taped to the wall to tell you what the specials are. For us it’s a matter of getting what we’ve heard of but not had: gỏi mít tôm thịt, bánh ít ram, cơm hến, and bún suông.

Gỏi mít tôm thịt is jackfruit salad with boiled shrimp and pork, and like other Vietnamese gỏi, it’s served cold with rice cracker (bánh tráng nướng) for shoveling and scooping. The airy blandness of a coal-toasted sesame rice paper elevates the lime juice, the pepper, the cilantro in a gỏi. The kitchen makes a slight mistake by bringing out a plate of gỏi mít hến instead, where the boiled pork and shrimp are replaced by handfuls of tiny basket clams (hến). These freshwater bivalves are connected to Huế like McDonald’s to Americanization. As small as a finger nail, each hến constitutes a second of chewing. As a stir-fried bunch mixed with young jackfruit flesh, the collection feels grainy and humble like a fisherman’s kitchen by the riverside. The color, too, is earthy: blackish-lined ivory hến,  pale brown jackfruit, and a bit of green cilantro.

Cơm hến offers more or less the same atmosphere as the salad, except the rice amplifies the grainy texture in place of the jackfruit’s fleshy blend, no rice cracker presents to break the unanimity, and the hến‘s natural sweetness here isn’t damped by any lime juice. When there isn’t just a few, but at least a hundred of these quiet lives in a bowl of cơm hến, you can’t help but feel the responsibility to treasure each spoonful. It’s the least you can do for the dignity of those tiny freshwater basket clams.

If cơm hến were hamburger, then bánh ít ram would be mac ‘n cheese. It’s not super well known, but anyone who knows Hue food knows this sticky (rice) business. I first learned of bánh ít ram from noodlepie, Ravenous Couple call them fried mochi dumpling (and you really can’t get a better looking picture of bánh ít ram than what the couple styled on their site). Each ping-pong-sized dumpling carries a marvelously inviting look: a plump, shiny round ball on a golden base, cut in half and there snuggle rosy bits of shrimp and char siu pork. Each bite is a step into a river: first soft, then sinking, then hitting the crusty bottom. With or without the mixed fish sauce, savory bánh ít ram, also called bánh ram ít by the natives, is a fair partnership between the steamed bánh ít and the deep fried bánh ram, with each component designed to excite the other. So why is it not as popular as bánh bèo? Because it’s hard to go down the second time. One bánh ít ram is good, two are too many. Ten on a plate, like what we get at Hương Giang, becomes a bloody battlefield.

Thankfully we are a team of three, and we rotates plates to share both the good and the challenging. And thankfully we get bún suông. This noodle soup draws a fine but successful line between being too meaty and being too thin, as it contains both. Ample cuts of chả cá (fish cake, similar to eomuk), chả lụa (silk sausage), and juicy shrimps weave among the angel hair rice vermicelli, all soaked in a slim sweet broth. Bún suông at Hương Giang tastes pure like bún mộc, quite a contrast from the definitions I’ve found online, whose broth is as thick as a deep South accent of the cooks said to invent the noodle soup.

If there are indeed two types of bún suông, the southern style and the Hương Giang style, then I’d choose the latter any day. If the southern style is really the only traditional style, then I’d go to Hương Giang just for their bún suông. You know you can trust a chef who has created something so delicate, so heart-warming, so balanced, and so very Huế.

Address: Hue Huong Giang (near Hong Kong Market)
11113 Bellaire Boulevard
Houston, TX 77072-2607
(832) 328-1308

Money matter:
gỏi mít hến (6.25) + bánh ít ram (6.50) + bún suông (6.50) + cơm hến (8.50)
= $27.25 a big lunch for three

— Guest post by Mom, translated by me —

My little family has three people, and two of them like beef. Ever since we settled in Texas, the land of cheap, good beef, my husband and daughter almost always order something cow related when we go out, even as they love these loving-eyed animals when they’re alive and grazing the fields too. Sometimes I join them in forking red meat, and of those few occasions the American steak does not quite sing to me, but rather they sink a little hard and a bit salty. I guess the blame lies with either the meat quality or the cooking method, and mostly the latter.

So I buy some steak fillet and try out the way we used to make back in Saigon. I slice ’em thin, marinade and fry, and not trying to toot my own horn here, but my steak is better than them restos’ steaks. 😛 Even Mai’s dad agrees. Its first highlight is the tenderness: it’s so tender I can bite it off with my teeth, who needs the knife and elbow grease to butcher that poor fillet. Its second highlight is the mouthwatering fragrance of garlic, onion, and pepper infused in every strand of muscle. Its last highlight, and also my principle of cooking, is that it doesn’t take long to make.

Vietnamese Steak (bò bíp-tết)

Ingredients:
– 1 lb beef filet
– 1 tbs chopped garlic
– 3 cloves of fresh garlic, smashed to flatten
– 4 purple onions, or half a sweet onion, chopped
– 2 tsp sugar
– 1/2 tsp salt
– 1/2 tsp pepper
– 2 tbs olive oil

Wash the filet, cut into slices of roughly 1 cm (1/3 inch) thick. Marinade the beef with chopped garlic, onion, sugar, salt, and pepper for an hour.
In a skillet, heat up oil on high heat. Throw in the three smashed cloves when the oil is really hot, wait until the garlic turns golden and smell good to add the beef.
Fry the beef slices for about 1 minute, flip over, and fry another 1 minute. Turn off heat and the meat is done.

We eat ’em hot with homemade fries and broccoli. This combination of Texas beef and Vietnamese cooking suits those who don’t have much time (or don’t really like meticulous labor in the kitchen), like me, best.

It’s not the black stuff they throw on your pizzas or the green thing they toothpick on your sandwich. How many of us city kids have tasted the tartness with a tiny sweet afterpunch of this Mekong delta fruit? It’s addictive like fresh squeezed orange juice on a summer day. Speaking street tongue, it’s nature’s crack in oblong shape.

Eat ’em fresh with chilipepper salt, or candy them with sugar and heat, it’s how kids down South do it with the cà na they shake off from bushes on the riverbanks. And argue if you may, kids know tasty food. The shape is really the only link cà na has with the Western olive (Olea europaea), though it’s at least two times bigger. Does the name “cà na” mean anything?

“Cà” is tomato, and “na” is the northern word for sweetsop, two totally unrelated species to this ovoid fruit. So “cà na” is not a compound noun. I’m no etymologist but here’s my best guess: “cà na” |kah nah| is a shortened vietnamization of the Thai word “kanachai”, from which cultigen taxonomists derive the the scientific name “canarium”, a genus with about 75 species native to the tropics. The cà na we eat and love from those riverbank bushes belongs to the species Canarium nigrum (black canarium) and Canarium album (white canarium), or “trám đen” and “trám trắng” in pure Vietnamese. Another delta variety is Canarium subulatum, pointy at both ends and sappy like green bananas.

Words on the net claim that cà na‘s acidity is good when you have a cold, drink too much, or wants to lower your weight, thus not so recommended for skinny sticks like me. I’ve never popped a fresh one myself, but this is the most (and only) mouth-watering description I could find on the net (translated from the Vietnamese original):

Every year, in roughly August or September, when the Mekong flushes the paddy fields, the cà na trees bear their first fruits. What could be better than rowing a canoe downstream, then tying it to a cà na trunk base by the riverbank to cast your fishing net, and while waiting, dip a bursting green ripen fruit into chilipepper salt to soak your soul with its wild and clean sweetness?

The first cà na‘s I’ve had are bright yellow with cracked skin, as big as a big green grape, resembling petrified dinosaur eggs, sold in glass jar among the ô mai and the salted plums.

The first nibble must be executed with caution. It’s firm and sound, with one big hard seed. No wonder the folks at home call the American football the cà na ball: they look and feel the same, only smaller. The flesh is dense like an old coconut’s meat, sour like lemon leaves, yet sweet like licorice blended with a dash of sea salt. How they’re made is a mystery to me.

Address: Vua Khô Bò & Ô Mai
2549 S King Rd #A-B
San Jose, CA 95121
(408) 531-8845

Also from here, also fruitilicious:
1. banana tootsie roll
2. ô mai (spiced fruit ball)

Other informative links on the Chinese olives:
– a list of different cultivars in China
– Autumn olive

This post is submitted to Delicious Vietnam #11, March edition, hosted by The Culinary Chronicles. I’ll head to her blog for more yummy posts on Vietnamese food this month, and many thanks to the Ravenous Couple and Anh for creating this event!