Flavor Boulevard

When Phở Hòa on Shattuck closed down, a part of me collapsed. No more bò kho? Granted that I can only have a bite or two in one sitting, or Mom would be worried about bò kho giving me a fever, it’s still comforting to know that a bowl of this supertender beef stew is only a few minutes walk away, or simply that it exists at a restaurant. Many a times I have seen Vietnamese restos, especially those in Houston, advertise bò kho on their menu but claim that they’re out of it when you order. So I felt in quite a shock fearing that bò kho has left me alone for good.

Then Mudpie, also a bò kho fan, found Phở Hà. We went and asked to make sure they have it. It’s no Berkeley, Phở Hà is in San Jose, but we’ll take what we can get.

Their plastic bowls and utensils aren’t all that splendid. Their miến gà (cellophane noodle soup with chicken) is decent but their phở áp chảo (pan-fried rice noodle) is too overfilled with thick brown sauce to sing.

Nonetheless, we’ve come here for bò kho after all. And both Dad and Mudpie use up their whole loaf of crusty bread to wipe clean every last bit of that red, spice-ladened beefy juice. I’d say the trip ends well. 🙂

Author's disclaimer: these two men, who are leisurely enjoying the noodle soup, are NOT Dad and Mudpie

Address: Phở Hà (next to the Grand Century Mall)
951 McLaughlin Avenue
San Jose, CA 95122-2612
(408) 280-0381

This is no stranger in the Vietnamese food biz: the layered pastry that gets its name from looking like pork belly, except green and yellow. Of course it doesn’t contain any pork skin, it’s sweet, sometimes may even be too sweet. Dad used to buy a whole pie home, as big as a platter and as warm as a father’s hand. From that same bakery somewhere in the market alley, he would buy bánh chuối nướng (bread pudding) too, which I always preferred to the bánh da lợn. But thinking back on those days when we lived near Bà Chiểu Market, it was certainly the best pig skin pie I ever ate.

Many years have passed, and many bánh da lợn have been eaten by me, both in its homeland and across the seas. The best way, I figured, to slaughter these chewy beasts is to peel off the layers one by one, when it’s warm. That wet, smooth skin of tapioca flour, when warm, is fragile. You don’t want to break it while peeling, and you want to drop it whole in your mouth to wrestle with its resilience, all the while inhaling the sweetness of pandan leaves and vanilla fused in its tone.

Simply put, a cold “pig skin” is a dead “pig skin”. A warm mung bean paste layer is also less sweet than a cold one, and thank goodness the bean layers are always one fewer than their tapioca neighbors. The pies Dad bought from that market bakery would have white chewy layers too, and the green ones didn’t look radioactive green like those we get from sandwich shops these days. Ah marketing strategies, just like somewhere in Vietnam someone thought of calling it “bánh chín tầng mây” (cloud nine pie) (because pork skin doesn’t ring any two-cent poetic sound), or when the tapioca layer turns dark purple, because of either magenta plant‘s leaf extract or food coloring, and the bean layer light purple because of taro.

Whatever the case, the original bánh da lợn is still the best. I looked through 51 pages of Google search for its origin, which seems likely lost through generations of home cooking and street food mingling. You see, it was never really a praiseworthy, historically recorded invention in the kitchen. There’s no village or province associated with the best bánh da lợn. It’s probably from the South, even if “lợn” is the Northern word for “pig”. It’s a product from a steamer, it’s cheap, it has texture, kids like it, Dad likes it. That’s all I know.

And by the way, Alpha Bakery & Deli sells some good, thinly sliced, warm numbers for a buck fifty.

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 xu xê (couple cookie)
Next on Sandwich Shop Goodies: bánh quy (turtle mochi)

*Guest post in Vietnamese by my Mom, translated by me*

My daughter and her friends always like my fresh squeezed orange juice, so every time she visits home in the summer and winter break, we drive up to the Farm Patch Produce Market in College Station to buy navel oranges. The grocery stores have navel oranges too, of course, but for some reason Farm Patch always have the best. Their rotund shape, their bright color, their rugged skin similar to that of the Vietnamese cam sành, all promise a slender sweetness contained, not to mention the little twin at the apex, darling like a hidden Christmas gift. These oranges are so well worth the two hour drive that I regret throwing them away after juicing, so I thought, why not make “mứt cam“, candied orange peel?

The simple ingredients:
– 2 oranges
– 10 tbs sugar or to taste
– 1 cup water

The simple method:
– Wash and squeeze out juice from the oranges, then slice the peel (with pulp attached) into strips.
– Mix 10 tbs sugar with water and simmer on low heat for roughly 15 minutes. Use a pair of chopstick to test: dip the chopsticks into the boiling sugar liquid, lift up and separate the chopsticks, if a sugar silk strand forms in between then the mixture is ready for the next step.
– Add orange peel strips, continue simmering on low heat for about 30 minutes, stir occasionally to make sure the sugar coat and soak the peel evenly.
– When all liquid evaporates and the peels feel jammy, turn off heat.
– Put candied peel in glass jar, wait until it’s cool to seal and store in refrigerator.

This candied orange can also be eaten with toast like marmalade, its sweetness stark, its texture crunchy, a natural minty sweep from the peel even gives it a healthy sense. They say eating it helps improving sore throats. I think making it helps improving patience. 🙂

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 theRavenous Couple and Anh for creating this event!

Let’s make it clear: ô mai |oh mai| is not xí muội |xi mui| (huamei), even if Wikipedia says so. The former is a cooked mixture of cut-up fruits, ginger, licorice and spices, the latter is a whole plum dried and salted.

Now that’s settled, I got a bunch of ô mai from Vua Khô Bò & Ô Mai a while ago, all homemade or so the lady told. Guava, rose buds, sấu (no English name, it seems), mango, kumquat, cóc (golden apple), tamarind, and 5-fruit combo, 2 balls each at $6.99 per half pound. Sweet, spicy, chunky, velvety, gingery, tart, salty, it’s all there.

The downside: they all have the same wrapper, so except for the guava one which is extra chunky, I can’t tell which is which if my life depended on it.

And here’s some xí muội. Look more like rocks then edibles, doesn’t it? Americans like ’em not, but I find them lip-smacking good, one tiny nibble at a time.

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

Also from here, also fruitilicious: banana tootsie roll

Among the countable Vietnamese restaurant owners that ever bother to make their menus available on the web, Kim Châu and her husband put together quite a decent site for their Red Pier: black background, colorful foods, dazzling images of the bar and the walls, names and prices of 166 dishes minus dessert. Red Pier is a go-to when you work in the ‘hood, have an hour for lunch, and just want some normal noodle soup or vermicelli at a reasonable price. Or when you crave something sweet and cold and nutty, like a chè ba màu (trichromatic bean and tapioca ice).

Don’t drive too fast down the one-way Milam, you’d miss the restaurant for sure. It took us a few loops around until we pulled into the right parking lot, just across the street from the proprietors’ other business, Kim Châu Jewelers, on the left side. Also, don’t order Cơm Tôm Rim (rice with caramelized shrimp), unless you’re having salt-deficiency. If you must, Chè Ba Màu proves to be a comforting three-buck companion.

Do order #1: Gỏi Sứa Tôm Thịt (jellyfish salad with shrimp and pork), the only setback is its chilipepper overload, which I’m sure you can ask the cook to take it down a few notches. The thinly sliced  jellyfish blends rather too well with carrots and cucumber strings you’d have to look to notice its cold, clean elastic crunch. Gỏi Sứa Tôm Thịt is one of the house specials that Red Pier emphasizes on their TV advertisement, and combined with large shrimp crackers it’s certainly a better execution of jellyfish than duck tongue and jelly fish at Chinese dim sum halls.

Do order #2: Mì Xá Xíu (char siu egg noodle soup). This is a cheap (only $6.25) and satisfying deal. It’s slightly more involved than Wiki Wiki’s saimin bowl, with crispy green onions and a meaty sweet broth.

Do order #3: the classic cold rice vermicelli (Bún) with the not so classic grilled beef (Bò Nướng), certainly bathed in nước mắm and garnished with chopped green onion seasoned in lard (mỡ hành), crushed peanuts, fried shallots, pickled carrots and daikon. For the greens lovers there’s that hidden pile of bean sprouts and shredded cucumber at the bottom, whose texture matches that of neither bún nor beef. (Now that I think of it, bibim nangmyeon also has bean sprout and cucumber, so it must be a cold noodle thing.)

Overall, Little Mom found the place less than pristine as the stir-fry smell sweeps over the metallic kitchen counter into the dining area. Red Pier’s chefs also take a tad too much liberty with the seasonings. But not all Vietnamese restaurants have jellyfish salad and friendly service, and usually the ones with 166 items on their menu don’t execute any of them too well, so I’d give Red Pier a B if the red-and-ebony dining box were a student in my class.

Address: Red Pier Vietnamese Restaurant
2704 Milam St
Ste C
Houston, TX 77006
theredpier.com
(713) 807-7726
(information from der Miller: Red Pier and Les Givral’s Sandwiches are sister businesses, both on Milam St.)

Lunch for 3:
Medium jellyfish salad (9.95) + grilled beef vermicelli (6.95) + rice & caramelized shrimp (7.75) + char siu noodle soup (6.25) + bean & tapioca ice (3.00) + tax
= $36.70

This month sees some of us travelling and visiting families for the Lunar New Year, so thank you all for spending time to write up your delicious pieces, which surprisingly comprise a very balanced and harmonious mix of courses, recipes, and reviews.

Appetizers

From Los Angeles, California: Hong and Kim, the Ravenous Couple, slices out a beautiful assortment of papaya, carrot, daikon, garden herbs, and (my personal addiction) dried anchovies, in the name of Green Papaya Salad (Gỏi Đu Đủ)

The salad, like all Vietnamese salads, is accompanied by Nước Mắm Pha, coincidentally also the dipping sauce that Penny at Jeroxie (Melbourne, Australia) uses for her BBQ lamb, fish, and beef! We wish her lemon tree the best. 🙂

Main courses

From Sydney, Australia: Amy at Cookbook Maniac boils up a loving pot of Cà Ri Gà (chicken curry) as she recollects sweet memories of her mom’s homecooking.

From Tennessee, USA: Pam at Sidewalk Shoes (Tennessee, US) combines Bò Lúc Lắc (shaken beef) with Xà Lách Xoong (watercress) to make an entrée full of “simple, clean, and fresh flavors”.

Desserts

From Melbourne, Australia: Anh, author of A Food Lover’s Journey, deconstructs Hanoian Vietnamese Coffee, brewing the old neighborhood’s filtering essence into your homemade cups. Her aromatic review of the vintage, “small, simply decorated [coffee] shops around town” makes me want to get on the next flight to Hanoi, and I don’t even drink coffee.

From yours truly in Berkeley, USA: how about a small bowl of warm, sweet, luscious banana tapioca pudding (Chè Chuối Chưng) after meal?

Good eats here and there

From San Diego, California: Nam Nguyen recommends the best joint for Bánh Cuốn (steamed rice crepe roll) in Santa Ana on her blog The Culinary Chronicles.

From Virginia, USA: Julia stumbles upon Dalat Vietnamese Cuisine and gets a “tasty, fresh, and filling” Bún Chạo Tôm Chả Giò, which results in a tasty review on her blog Beginner Mom on the Run.

And lastly, from Houston, Texas: my mom discovers two new specialties unique to Kim Son Restaurant: Bánh Canh Cua Nam Phồ (Nam Phổ style crab-and-chewy-round-noodle soup) and Chả Ốc bọc lá chuối nướng (grilled snail sausage in banana leaf) this past week of the Lunar New Year. 🙂

That concludes this month’s Delicious Vietnam edition. So many thanks to the Food Lover Anh and the Ravenous Couple Hong and Kim for organizing the event.
The next roundup, Delicious Vietnam #11, is hosted by Nam Nguyen at The Culinary Chronicles. Make sure to send your entries (post link and one 300-pixel-wide picture per entry) to her email theculinarychronicles [at] gmail [dot] com by Sunday March 13th. 🙂

When you reach(ed) mid 20s, don’t you just hear all sort of marriage announcements popping up among your social circle? By the time of college graduation, half the girls I know have gotten their wedding registry up on Facebook, and I thought okay it’s just an American thing (the wedding I mean, though the registry is American too). Then this past Christmas my best college friend missed our annual reunion for his big day in India, and another pal who I thought was still wandering the streets of Chengdu dropped the bomb that he’s engaged. Then I got news that two of my eleventh grade buddies in Vietnam are going to say the vows (not to each other) within this year. Then it really hits me.

I haven’t written about any wedding party food, even though I’ve been to many weddings :D. So why not celebrate this year’s Valentine’s day with a Vietnamese confection whose name derives from the main characters of any wedding: bánh xu xê, originally called bánh phu thê, or “husband (and) wife”?

My translation “couple cookie” is for the sake of consonant concordance. They are similar to neither American cookie, Scottish cookie nor British cookie. These little bouncy sweet green pillows get their names from being gift desserts at Vietnamese couples’ engagements back in the day, when they used banana leaves to make little boxes instead of a double layer of cellophane wrapper. At one point the adults called them bánh phu thê, then the kids mispronounced it to bánh xu xê (|soo-seh|) and the name stuck. Technique-wise, it takes a grandmother’s experience to make a mixture of sticky rice flour, arrowroot starch and water into a translucent jello casing that is resilient but not sticky. Some of us might find its crunch-chewy texture too rubbery, other would question its lack of flavor, but the skill of transforming ingredients alone is admirable, and I like chewing. 🙂 In fact I like the outer layer more than the filling.

Traditionally, taro cut into strips are mixed with the cooked batter to give onyx-like patterns, while the modern concoctions can have sesame seeds on top or dry coconut strips within to spice up the homogeneity. The fancy pâtissiers of old Northern Vietnam villages might also sprinkle a few drops of pomelo flower extract into the mung bean paste filling for enhancing fragrance. But I wouldn’t expect that from our local sandwich shops in the States, not when it’s less than $2 for a pack of four.

It’s the kind of sweet you either love or hate. My mom loves it. The Gastronomer suggests using it to pelt your loved ones. It’s the perfect representation of a marriage really, and I’m not talking about the symbolic meaning of glutinous rice (bonding) and all. Its shiny outlook is inviting – everybody likes to get married, then you take a bite and find it tough, lackluster, disappointing, at the least not quite as expected – the post-wedding depression, then you get to the core and discover some tender sweetness after all. 🙂

Got ’em from: 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: chuối nếp nướng (grilled banana in sticky rice)
Next on Sandwich Shop Goodies: bánh da lợn (pig skin pie)

*Guest post in Vietnamese by my Mom, translated by me*

Back in the day, I seldom ate from street stalls or vendors’ baskets, my conscience imprinted with my mother’s unmovable doubt on the street food’s cleanliness. Nonetheless, I scurry with no hesitation to make it to Kim Son for lunch today, just because the TV news last night showed that Kim Son has a 9-day New Year food festival where the goodies are sold in baskets, mimicking the vendor stalls in Vietnam.

Like usual, the display is a buffet style, but this week the dining hall is decorated with flowers, fruits, and Tet greetings, the food selection is also larger and more interesting than normal days. I notice thịt kho and dưa giá (slow braised pork and pickled bean sprout, two traditional Tet savory dishes), bánh xèo (sizzling crepe), bánh bèo (water fern banh), bánh bột lọc (translucent banh) bánh cống (mung bean fried muffin).

In the baskets lie a few types of xôi, bánh tét, and mứt. A tightening mix of homesickness and joy rushes through me as I see woven baskets, bamboo shoulder poles, and the waxy green banana leaves holding and covering morsels of Tet.

We load our first plate with seven-course beef, though the kitchen churns out only four: grilled beef (bò nướng vỉ), beef loaf (bò chả đùm), lolot beef (bò nướng lá lốt), and beef sausage in omental fat casing (bò mỡ chài). The little pinky-length fat beef sausages are extraordinarily tender, grilled on medium fire and so well seasoned they have the sweet smell of talents.

Meanwhile, my husband chooses the restaurant’s recommended special of the day: grilled snail sausage in banana leaves. I don’t like snails but have a taste anyway just out of curiosity. It is slightly spicy, but I get blown away. There is no hint of the wet and grassy snail scent that used to give me goosebumps when I was little. The banana leaf wrapping protects the velvety sausages from the burnt smell of open fire grilling, and gives it a sweet green aroma of summer breeze. As much as I like fish, I must admit these are better than the Indonesian fish sausages I’ve had a few months ago.

Another special is bánh canh cua Nam Phổ. I only learned about Nam Phổ, a village in central Vietnam, and its famous udon-like noodle soup from books, so I am overjoyed to see the real thing on the menu today. Bits of crab meat amidst chubby slick chunks of banh canh in a scarlet broth rich of crab sauce is the loveliest sight of all noodle soups. Banh canh Nam Pho, unlike banh canh of the South, doesn’t have loads of shrimp or pork, the broth isn’t starkly clear, yet its thickness delivers just a mellow natural sweetness. The first bite reveals little taste, but the second, the third, and a few sips of the broth in between start to sweep in waves of riverbank wind and meadow fragrance.

The country lunch sets us back $35.75 and 90 minutes. As we get ready to leave at 12:30, the parking lot gets ready for a massive lion dance and firecracker show. The sight of sixteen gaudy lions and hundred-meter long red squib strings and their boisterous sounds follow me all the way home, as I think of how we, the Asian expats, try to bring with us our lunar new year and our motherlands wherever we go.

Address: Kim Son Restaurant
10603 Bellaire Blvd
Houston, TX 77072
(281) 598-1777

This post is included in the February 2011 edition of Delicious Vietnam, a blogging event organized by Anh from A Food Lover’s Journey and Hong and Kim from Ravenous Couple.

Every once in a while when the planets align the right way with the constellations, I get into cooking mode. Then I ask my mom how to make certain things, usually easy stuff, spend at least an hour at the grocery, another half a day in front of either the sink or the stove, washing, churning, tasting, sprinkling, and tasting again. Saying that I like to cook would be like saying students hate holidays, but somehow the little accomplishment at the end of a cooking session always makes me glee, partly because I wouldn’t have to worry about dinner in the few days after. (Since the first day I had a kitchen(ette), I’ve only made savory dishes.) This time is special: I didn’t spend half a day in the kitchen, and the little accomplishment is a dessert.

Now this might actually means I have che instead of rice for dinner in the next few days :-P, but all is well as my banana che is not in the least coyingly sweet like che from sandwich shops.

Recipe adapted from Mom’s instruction:

Chè chuối chưng (banana tapioca pudding) (“chưng” means “display”, in this case to indicate the type of banana one would use for this dessert, not “tapioca”)

Ingredients:
– About 3 lbs of just-ripe banana (~6 big Cavendish bananas, or 12-15 chuoi su if you can find them).
– 1 can of coconut milk
– 100-150g tapioca pearl (bột báng), the small kind (packaged as dry white dots ~1.5mm in diameter). I got a 400g package from 99 Ranch Market in El Cerrito, so I’d imagine every Asian market has a few packs tucked on their shelves.
– water, sugar, salt
– roasted peanuts (the plain, unflavored kind)

Preparation:
– Gently wash and rinse the bot bang with cold water once, then leave it soak in water.
– Cut the bananas into 2-3 inch long sections, soak in salt water (2 tsp salt for roughly half a big pot of water, the same pot you’re going to cook che in) for 5-10 minutes. This step is to get rid of, or at least reduce, the clinging underripe aftertaste of Cavendish banana in Vietnamese desserts; you can skip this step if you use chuoi su.
– Shell peanuts if necessary, then crush ’em up. (Mudpie puts them in a ziploc bag and pounds on them with an ice cream scoop, it works well :D)
– Take out the bananas, drain water, wash pot, put bananas back in. Pour 1 can of coconut milk into pot, then use the same can to measure and add 2 cans of water.

Cooking
– Wait for banana, coconut milk and water to boil, add a pinch of salt and a lot of sugar to taste. (I added about 10 tbs sugar when Mudpie expresses some concern, tastes, and stops me.)
– When the mixture boils, add bot bang (after draining them, of course), gently stir once or twice to spread them out evenly in the pot.
– Bot bang will expand, at least quadruple in size. Do not stir too much or you’d burst the pearls and get tapioca porridge. Let the pot bubble until the bot bang all turn completely translucent (if you see a tiny needle-point size dot of white in the center, it’s not cooked yet).
– Turn off the heat. The pudding will be quite fluid when it’s still hot, and will thicken as it cools down.

Serving
It can be served either hot or chilled, with or without some crushed roasted peanuts on top. Mudpie prefers it warm fresh from the pot, my mom prefers it refrigerated.

A small variation of che chuoi chung is chè bà ba, where you add taro (or cassava), cubed and cooked in coconut milk and water before the bananas. My mom says che chuoi chung is the simplest kind of che to make. As long as the bananas are soft and sweet, the tapioca pearls chewy and fully puffed, the coconut milk gives just a shy squeeze of fruity richness, and the pudding smells like a ripe summer afternoon, you know someone will come back for a second bowl of your chè chuối chưng.

– Submission to Delicious Vietnam 10, a monthly blogging event created by Anh of A Food Lover’s Journey and Hong & Kim from Ravenous Couple – This February edition is hosted by me, so send your delicious writings (your name, your blog’s name, post title, and a brilliant image of the dish) to mai [at] flavorboulevard [dot] com by Sunday February 13. 🙂

Its popularity might have declined over the years in Vietnam, but to the Vietnamese expats, mứt Tết remains one of the few links home to resurrect our new spring festival atmosphere on foreign lands. As far as I know these candied fruits are unique to the Vietnamese New Year (Tết), just like the tteokguk and the yakwa to the Korean Seolnal. They are holiday gifts to friends and family, offerings at the altars to ancestors and deities, little snacks for children, tea confections for adults, and vegan treats for those who refrain from eating meat at the year’s beginning.

Mứt can be divided into two types: wet and dry. Visit any beef jerky (khô bò) and salted plums (xí muội) stores in Vietnamese shopping malls in the Tet season, you’d see a swarm of mứt in glass jars, the wet kinds wrapped in crunchy paper and the dry kind laying bare. The two most common wet mứt are tamarind (me) and soursop (mãng cầu). The former is kept in its scrawny form, with a few rope-like fibrous strings along the fruit’s length, which is to be discarded when eating, of course.

Tamarind mứt should be amber brown, chewy, and a little more sour than sweet. Tamarind is notorious for its medicinal effect, so be careful not to consume too many sticks at once. A similar chewy wet mứt is the soursop, but it’s always milkish white, doesn’t retain the fruit’s shape, and people tend to put too much sugar in the churning process.

On the dry side you can find some twenty common kinds, spanning both fruits and non-fruits (nuts and roots): coconut, persimmon, lotus seed, tomato, ginger slice, carrot, winter melon, apple, lemon, guava, water chesnut, etc. I’m particularly fond of the crunchy, aromatic coconut ribbons which as a kid I liked to hold in my mouth for hours to melt off all but the coconut itself; but this year I refrained from buying them to try the other kinds instead.

As advertised by the lady of the store, the scarlet kumquat mứt (mứt tắc) is “good enough to die for”. I’d say its texture is fresh, its color attractive, it’s not too killingly sweet (always a plus for these candied pieces), and it’s a thousand times better than the cherry they put in your hot fudge sundae. 😉 Word of mouth is it can help with digestion and lowering body temperature, and if you drink too much alcohol perhaps pack a few of these to detoxicate (or just don’t drink!).

The sweet potato mứt (mứt khoai lang) are warm yellow inch-long sticks without powder sugar coating, as dense as a medium boiled egg yolk and as sweet as the root itself. In a blind taste test, the first bite makes you think it resembles sweet potato, then the second casts some doubt because it’s denser and more consistent than sweet potato. It has the same medicinal effect as tamarind, but to a lesser degree.

Mudpie’s favorite of the five is labelled pomelo (bưởi), but it’s most likely the pomelo skin, sun-dried and pan-sweetened and powder-sugar-coated like American candies. It feels so light almost porous, the center has a subtle citrus pinch that would marry well a cup of hot chrysanthemum tea.

In the end, there’s no telling which kind of mứt everyone would like best, but there’s always some kind somewhere to each person’s liking. When you buy mứt, ask for a sample before settling on a 1-lb pound package, you can’t judge a mứt by its cover. Usually they cost $3-5 per half pound, and each little bite-size is packed with enough sugar that it’s best, though it may appear cheap, to buy $1-2 each kind, and buy many kinds. 🙂

Where I get my mứt this year: Eurasia Delight (inside Grand Century Mall)
1111 Story Rd Ste 1028
San Jose, CA 95122
(408) 293-1698