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Tag: mut

  • Mom’s Cooking #1: Candied orange peel with pulp

    *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.

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  • Candied fruits for a candy Year of the Cat


      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.

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