Ju Fu Delicacies - 166 Jln Besar

Nice simple nostalgia food. Recommend to try the yam cake.

They make most of their dishes & condiments from scratch. With the exception of some items like the chee cheong fun (steam rice rolls) which is factory supplied, the pumpkin cake, yam cake, glutinous rice, fried bee hoon & soon kueh are made on site. They also make their own sweet sauce & chilli sauce. As my wife puts it, the sauce taste like what she had when she was a little girl. The sauce is slightly sweet, fragrant & savory. It complements the yam cake or pumpkin cake or chee cheong fun well. I suspect that bean paste is used in the sauce and together with the fragrant oil used in cooking the sauce heightens the underlying staple well, whether it is the pumpkin's sweet creamy taste or neutralising the yam's robust taut dryness or just giving the plain rice rolls a sweet lingering fragrance, it all works and it works well indeed! The fiery chilli is not for the faint hearted. It is made with dried chilli (I believe) and onions with dried shrimps added. It is a spicy hot, but a tad oily, complement for the dishes. The chilli in itself is tasty with complex flavours, sweet from the onions, spicy from the dried chilli, & salty from the dried shrimps. The pumpkin cake does not disappoint. It is made with rice flour and pumpkin. Other places will still add yam as a filler but here it is not, even if it is, it is kept to a minimum. You will also find rehydrated dried shiitake mushrooms mixed well into the cake. Every bite has the taste of pumpkin, mushroom, sweet sauce & occasionally mushroom. The texture is moist and firm but not too mushy. The yam cake's texture is also similar to the pumpkin cake, however, I find the yam chunks a bit too dry in the cake. On the whole, the taste of yam is there and you get what you paid for, yam cake. The usual additions like dried mushroom is also there and the sauce is also similar to the pumpkin cake. The winning factor as compared to other locales is that the dough of the yam cake is still moist and not too wet. Taste wise, if you like yam, this is the dish for you. I like the glutinous rice! I can't eat too much as it is not good for me, GI is high!! As you can see from the picture below, the rice grains are not over or under cooked, like many other places. The saltiness is just nice and the soya sauce used in the cooking adds another level of taste to the dish. It is also cooked with mushrooms and dried shrimps. Sprinkle some sesame seeds to this dish and it is to die for! The soon kueh is not big, as compared to other stalls. However, the Teo's soon kueh skin is very thin and very transparent. I have only seen soon kueh this thin or see thru only in restaurants! I believe the trick is in the flour they use and it is made with rice flour and other kinds of flour. This is a trade secret which the Teo's keep very close to their chest. The filling is the usual turnip, carrots & mushroom (memory fails me, need to go back get a 3rd opinion of the fillings :-)), stirred fried before it is wrapped up in the flour skin. After steaming, the skin turns transparent, soft and a little chewy. The skin complements well with the savoury filling to complete the bite. The many layers of taste and texture makes this dish simple to eat yet complex to decipher. By the time you try, the bite has already washed past your oesophagus into your stomach and the soon kueh is soon completely gone, only the taste memories remain on your tongue.