MARKETS : Of Moon Cakes and Tropical Dreams

Kuo’s Bakery, 1430 W. Valley Blvd., Alhambra, (818) 458-0688. Open 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily. Also after May: 145 N. Atlantic Blvd., Monterey Park, (818) 457-8855; 8150 E. Garvey Blvd., Rosemead, (818) 571-8800; 135 S. San Gabriel Blvd., (818) 285-8588. Mail Order: (800) 828-1689.

At Kuo’s Bakery, you don’t have to settle for what’s in the display case. You can shop by catalogue.

Printed in Chinese and English, the gorgeously photographed color catalogues are full of traditional Taiwanese pastries arranged in lavishly decorated boxes that you can order either by FAX or an 800 number.

But it’s more than this up-to-the-minute marketing technique that makes Kuo’s different. The Alhambra store, open only two years, is a branch of Kuo Yuan Ye Co., which has been in business in Taiwan for 125 years. The store’s cases hold an array of Chinese, Japanese and (Asian-style) Western items, from mochi and tea cakes filled with lotus seed to Napoleons and cream puffs. All these are freshly baked by a rotating corps of bakers who work here several months a year before returning to one of the home bakeries.

Kuo’s got started in 1867 in the Taipei suburb of Shee Lin, where the Kuo family loaded its green bean pastries into bamboo baskets to sell along the main street. Local food mavens knew the area for the high quality of its specialty vendors. In typical Taiwanese laissez-faire business style, anyone could trade here but stiff competition meant only the cream of the crop succeeded.

The next generation established a shop in Shee Lin that is still in operation today. But when it became clear that the capital city of Taipei could offer more potential, the third generation expanded by opening two shops there. Constantly on the lookout for items that would appeal to Taipei’s more sophisticated clientele, they began experimenting with new products and refining the old ones.

The current owner of the Alhambra Kuo’s, James Kuo, grew up working with his two brothers, experimenting with new products in the family business. Though he made his fortune investing in California real estate, the bakery is his first love. His children, Kristine and Jason Kuo, have inherited the task of expanding the North American arm of the local and mail-order business.

Sometime this May, Kuo’s will open shops in Rosemead, Monterey Park and San Gabriel. The business may now be light-years away from when its pastries were displayed in bamboo baskets. But it offers some of the most delicious examples I can imagine of the cultural blendings that are taking place in the Pacific Rim marketplace.

SHOPPING LIST

TRADITIONAL CHINESE PASTRIES

The Chinese eat pastries with afternoon tea rather than as a dessert.

* Four Seasons pastries: These are the most visually stunning items in the shop--pastel cookie-like pastries in geometric and floral shapes with intricate raised designs. A traditional specialty of Fukien, a coastal province of China from which many of Taiwan’s Chinese families came, the pastries were originally made from rice flour and sugar. Kuo’s has created other varieties and uses butter as the shortening.

The pastries come in several styles. The small, shaped ones are either filled or plain. Some of the larger rectangular bars come filled with glaceed fruit, lotus seed paste or white chocolate cream. Unfilled bars are flecked with Chinese salted plum, peanuts or sour plum speckled with chocolate.

They are all beautiful, but not every variety is sure to suit Western palates. I thoroughly recommend three flavors, at any rate: mandarin orange, cream and peanut.

* Original green bean pastries: These have been one of Kuo’s mainstays since the bakery’s beginning, and they’re the most refined Chinese-style filled pastries I’ve seen. The bite-sized buns are pale golden with either a savory or sweet bean filling. With their flaky, short pastry exterior, the tiny round buns could be likened to miniature pies. Kuo’s wraps them in pairs in dainty cellophane-covered boxes.

To Americans, green beans mean string beans, but these pastries are filled with mung beans--the Asian bean used for Chinese restaurant bean sprouts--which have been cooked, mashed and dried. The mild flavor of this puree, when sweetened or combined with other ingredients, makes a rich pastry filling. I recommend the ones with crushed walnuts in the filling. Another version contains pine nuts.

* Eastern-style green bean pastries: Near the cash register in a separate case is another style of green bean pastry that originated in Eastern China around Shanghai. These regional pastries have a fragile, snow-white “thousand-layer” exterior that falls away in large, velvety flakes. The large buns are filled with a mound of “forced pork” surrounded by sweetened mung bean filling. Forced pork, an ingredient that Kuo’s uses in many items, is also known as pork fluff. It is pork that has been slowly cooked in seasoned liquid until it falls apart. The meat is then finely shredded and cooked in its juice until it dries out like jerky and resembles the texture of cotton candy with a sweet-savory flavor.

A smaller version of this pastry is filled with sweetened bean paste and cooked egg yolk.

* Moon cakes and mini-moon cakes: Small versions called mini-moon cakes are available all year round. They are hand-molded into decorative embossed shapes and individually wrapped in cellophane packets. The moon cake pastry isn’t the same flaky dough used for Kuo’s green bean pastries--it’s more like a lightly sweetened biscuit with a shiny egg wash glaze.

Kuo’s makes its large moon cakes only for Mid-Moon Festival (Aug. 15 according to the Chinese calendar), when families gather and celebrate a reunion. On this day the moon is supposed to be the fullest of the year, so the moon cakes often contain a salted egg yolk at their center to represent the moon.

Not all moon cakes hold an egg yolk, however. There are large moon cakes with fillings such as pineapple and raisins, coconut and pine nuts, date paste and walnuts, sweet red bean paste or mixed nuts (none of the mini-moon cakes contain yolks). Salted duck egg yolks are traditional in moon cakes, but Kuo’s uses chicken eggs that it cures and cooks in-house. Though the eggs have been soaked in a salt brine, the yolks aren’t particularly salty. I think they taste much better than ordinary hard-cooked yolks.

* Egg shortcakes: Owner James Kuo says these cakes were invented when a monsoon hit Taiwan many years ago and flooded the bakery around the period of the Moon Festival. Kuo’s, being famous for its moon cakes, had only a few undamaged ingredients left with which to rustle up something for the festival period. Mini-egg shortcakes were the result.

Egg shortcakes aren’t made in fancy molds as moon cakes are but their fillings are similar; these may be date paste, lotus seed paste, salted walnuts or sweet black bean paste. Like the green bean pastries, the shortcakes are bite-sized little pies with an exterior of unsweetened short pastry. Like moon cakes, though, they are baked to a golden brown and brushed with an egg wash to give them a shiny glaze. And each little pastry holds a cooked, salted egg yolk at its center.

* Vegetarian pastries: Very similar to the small green-bean-and-shortcake pastries, these are made without any animal products. They’re filled with Chinese mushrooms, crushed pine nuts, green bean or almond fillings.

* Gift boxes: Gift givers might like to see the deluxe golden gift box. It’s a red lacquer, three-tier container stacked on a handled platform and decorated with black filigree. Each tier has half a dozen indentations that hold mini-moon cakes or a choice of shortcakes or green bean pastries. Or you might also want to take a look at the Hong Kong-style metal gift box filled with moon cakes.

BUNS AND BREADS

Kuo’s breads and buns, like many Western baked goods, are made with wheat flour and butter and leavened with yeast. Somewhere along the line, though, they have been refashioned to suit Asian tastes. The texture of these products is soft--like old-fashioned dinner rolls--but they are feathery-light. Some of the fillings have been borrowed from the West, but they are used in slightly un-Western ways. The cream-filled bun, for example, is a soft buttery yeast roll filled with vanilla-flavored custard; the parts are familiar, the whole is not.

* White bread: If you’ve ever shopped in a Japanese-style Western bakery, Kuo’s tall white bread will be familiar. The slices are thick and the texture is airy.

* Whole-wheat bread is a square loaf but, though it’s 100% whole wheat, it still manages to be soft.

* Coconut-butter loaf is white bread slit on top to accommodate a butter-drenched coconut topping and the cheese loaf is topped with Cheddar. Another loaf that looks like raisin bread is the honey-bean loaf, dotted with sweet red beans.

* Scallion buns: These buns show up in many Chinese bakeries but few are as toothsome as these. They are made with plenty of butter, and four are baked together, so that you have to pull them apart like monkey bread. Their scallion topping, interspersed with tiny cubes of ham, contrives to flavor the entire bun. Another delicious scallion-filled bread is baked in a long flat sheet rather like an Italian focaccia. It is sprinkled with forced pork (like the Eastern-style green bean pastries), folded in half and cut into large squares.

* Peanut buns: Kuo’s makes two varieties of peanut buns. One style is filled with a buttery sugar-and-raisin filling and glazed with a butter-sugar mixture sprinkled with peanuts, which turns crunchy as it bakes. Like the scallion buns, they are baked in groups of four.

The second peanut bun has a sweet, crushed-peanut filling and is shaped Danish pastry-style into a braid-like twist.

* Coconut buns: For these, a slightly sweet yeast dough is spread with a sweet coconut filling, then rolled and twisted cinnamon roll-style into a butterfly shape.

* Sweet red bean paste buns: The filling of these buns, made of mashed sweet adzuki beans, is familiar in many traditional Asian pastries. In this case, it’s surrounded by a slightly sweet yeast and butter dough--a sort of Asian take on French pain au chocolat.

* Cheese and forced pork bun: The most extravagant of all the buns are these lightly cheese-flavored yeast buns filled with a nugget of forced pork and surrounded with a thin layer of flaky pastry. It’s a devastatingly good contrast of textures.

* Sandwiches: Kuo’s club-style sandwich is like no other. Between four slices of freshly baked bread are omelette, ham and shredded roast chicken. The sandwich is cut open to show its rainbow-like layers and wrapped in shiny cellophane.

* Potato salad sandwich: A sandwich filled with heavy Western-style potato salad would be bizarre. The salad that goes into Kuo’s soft torpedo-shaped buns includes diced ham, cucumber and carrot mixed with tiny cubes of potato, all held together with the bakery’s delicate home-made mayonnaise--a wonderful light lunch.

CAKES AND PASTRIES

Like Kuo’s breads and buns, these perfectly Western-looking items are less intensely flavored and less sweet than true Western cakes, putting them squarely into Asian dessert territory.

* I love the Tiger-Skin Cake, a marvelous construction of about 10 thin velvety vanilla cake layers laminated together with an almost sheer spread of honey that gives a tiger-striped effect.

* Tropical Dream must have been adopted from Japanese manju, which the bakery also carries--it’s a fluffy pancake wrapped taco-style around half a banana, cut lengthwise and surrounded by whipped cream.

* Other cakes are only slightly less fanciful--the blueberry mousse cake has thin layers of white cake in a striped design around its perimeter, while the fruit mousse cake is rimmed with pink, brown and white cake layers in alternating vertical rows. It comes topped with a beautiful fruit design set with gelatin.

* Kuo’s house specialty, the chestnut mousse cake, is multiple layerings of white cake and mousse with a whole sweetened chestnut on each serving.

* Another original, Napoleon cheesecake, is layers of cake alternating with flaky pastry and cream filling. Its crumbly cheese topping is garnished with a gold-trimmed chocolate heart. Many of Kuo’s cakes are sold by the slice.

* Scottish shortbread: One of the bakery’s truly Western items, Kuo discovered these cookies on a trip to Europe and adopted them for his bakery. The shortbread, made with butter in almond, chocolate, walnut and chocolate-walnut flavors, is cut in long finger-lengths and packaged 10 slices to a decorative box.

* Japanese sweets: There’s a little section of Japanese items that are just slightly different than those found in Japanese shops. The chewy sweet-rice mochi come filled with peanut paste, red bean paste or Chinese-style yellow bean paste. Here the manju --two pancakes filled with sweet red bean paste--are so large they resemble little hamburgers.