Flavor Boulevard

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!

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

Last night I dreamed of these brown sticks in cellophane wrappers. The sound of crunchy plastic unraveled. The smooth yet sticky, dried-syrup-like surface that easily gives way to the pinch of two nails. An ever so lightly sweet, fruity, malty breath whizzing up as your nose closes in…

I woke up feeling as though there were some of those pieces melting on my tongue. But the best part of eating a banana tootsie roll, if I may call it so despite it having no relationship to the Tootsie Roll, is, like with the real Tootsie rolls, the chew. You chew it and notice it get smaller, but not any less sweet or less gummy. And it’s only as sweet as a just ripe banana, yet with an alluring touch of coconut.

The chewy banana candy is a Mekong delta specialty, where siem bananas grow more easily than rice. The stout, dense, supple bananas either make their way into che, bread pudding, wrapped and grilled in sticky rice, flattened and sun-dried, or cooked in some recipes that are only passed down from mothers to daughters. I just know that whenever we traveled to or a friend of the family came back from the My Tho, Ben Tre region, I got a bag of keo chuoi – banana candy (pronounced somewhat like |keo jui|), or keo dua (|keo yua|) – coconut candy. Banana candies are less sweet and less strenuous to the jaw than the coconut ones; some are coated with roasted sesame seeds, some contain crushed peanuts or ginger bits, but I like the plain, pure, consistent banana kind the best.

– Keo Chuoi (banana chewy candy) –
Ingredients
– 3 bags of whole dried bananas
– 1 coconut
– 1 ginger root, roasted and crushed peanuts (if you like some texture variation)
– Sugar, 1 tsp lime juice
– cellophane candy wrapper

Slice thinly the dried bananas, coconut, and ginger. Stir banana and sugar in a skillet on low heat (add at least half as much sugar as banana), add coconut (and ginger if wanted), stir constantly to avoid them burnt. Add lime juice to keep the mixture gooey. Add peanuts when the mixture is homogeneous and start to harden. Take out, flatten and smoothen the surface (add a sesame coat now if you want), wait until cool then cut and wrapped in cellophane wrappers.
If you can’t find dried bananas, try using a blender to mix banana, coconut, and ginger together, and do every subsequent step the same way.
(Recipe not yet tried :-P, translated from Vietfun)

Ze kwik-n-easy vay:
Vua Khô Bò & Ô Mai (loosely translated: “King of Beef Jerkies and Dried Huamei“)
2549 S King Rd #A-B
San Jose, CA 95121
(408) 531-8845

Go bananas a few other ways:
– banana ice cream
– banana dog
– banana bread pudding
– banana in sticky rice log

Sometimes, very seldom, I feel the urge to learn Chinese. There are just too many little Chinese things going around without English labels. In fact, the harder it is to describe, the more likely its name is all in Chinese.

Take these sweets for instance. They come in handmade red paper boxes at a wedding.

This one shapes like a corn ear, smells and tastes like corn, and aptly has an English name: Corn Flavour Jelly. A nice chew but you gotta git it down fast or you git tireduvit.

This one doesn’t have a single English word, but it has a picture to tell you what to expect. Pink for strawberry, pillowy for marshmallow, and spewing for syrup. I don’t really care if they put toxins in it, this was a good syrupy center marshmallow bite.

Lastly, this one has neither English nor picture. My best description: a jello stick as long as my pinky, reeking of  unidentifiable artificial chemicals. I can’t tell if it’s supposed to be strawberry or raspberry or cherry, or any flavor for that matter. The taste is about as thrilling as Jesus and Mary Chain’s Some Candy Talking: