In a typical adventure outing to a local Asian supermarket, I picked up a package in the produce department labeled "dok care bong su dua." I thought that it was bean pods. Upon closer examination, they are greenish ivory flower buds.

Searching google for "dok care bong su dua" was less than illuminating. I got "Do you mean ‘Dog care bong su dua?’" Well, no, actually I don’t mean "dog care." Searches about edible Asian flowers or flower buds were equally useless.

The flavor of the raw bud is fairly innocuously flowery although the aftertaste is bitter.

I added some to a stir fry of gai choi. The gai choi was delicious, but the flower buds were unpalatable.

Suddenly it occurred to me that this might be one of those vegetables that need to be parboiled in six changes of water to purge it of deadly toxins before you eat it, so I thought I'd take advantage of the collective knowledge of the experts here before I try the next cooking experiment.

I’m just kidding about the poisoning part, of course, but my experience is that sometimes there’s more than one name or alternative spellings for words translated from languages that don’t use the Roman alphabet.

Can anyone help me out? Would pictures be helpful?

Thank you in advance,

Beatrice

So it should read as "bong so dua". "bong" = flower in Vietnamese. "so dua" = name of the plant. And the reason they call "so dua" because after flowering the bean pots look like the chopsticks. "dua" = chopsticks. "so" means not even. "so dua" mean not even chopsticks.

Hope this helps.
Alpharetta

I try most of asian veggies and fruits and stick to the ones that are agreeable to my taste. So don't expect every Asian veggies to be wonderfull.