Pontian Buy: Chai Huat Heng (再发兴饼家) Traditional Pastries @ Pontian Kechil
- Rick
- May 20
- 3 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
Kedai Biskut Chai Huat Heng (再发兴饼家), located near to Pontian Lau Pasar (笨珍老巴刹) in Pontian Kechil, is a family-run traditional bakery that makes a wide varieties of Chinese traditional pastries, wedding cakes, longevity buns, etc, and also mooncakes during Mid-Autumn Festival. The bakery has been around for more than 80 years and the skills of hand-making their pastries are passed down from generation to generation.
One of Chai Huat Heng's specialties is the big traditional Teochew la pia (潮州朥饼) that is popular as wedding cake or as mooncake during Mid Autumn Festival. The old-taste pastry has flaky crust and mild-sweet filling with aroma of roasted sesame seeds. This is the traditional taste that many local folks will go for.
Other than traditional la pia, Chai Huat Heng also has its own self-innovated versions with softer crust, smaller in size but thicker. They are considered Pontian-specialties. These new-version la pia comes with different fillings: black bean mooncake (黑豆沙), crystal (水晶), dou rong (豆蓉) and salty peacake (咸豆沙). Similarly, the cakes are stamped with the word "囍", meaning "happiness", since they are wedding cakes too.
The black (red) bean cake has a reddish layered crust with red bean paste. The crystal cake has dual layered fillings, consisting of dark red bean paste and candied winter melon. The dou rong cake has mung bean paste filling and is sweet-based. The salty peacake has drier savoury mung bean filling. Eating the savoury cake is like eating mung bean biscuit (tau sar peah) in a softer pastry crust. All the cakes have nice mellow flavours and are mildly sweet.
There are sun biscuits (太阳饼) too — although a popular Taiwan biscuit, Chai Huat Heng created the Pontian version with snow-white soft crust and stamped with a red sun pattern. The maltose-filled pastry has a pleasant light taste and mildly sweet too.
Chai Huat Heng has two types of fragrant biscuit (香饼) — one is the beh teh saw (马蹄酥) or heong peah, that most people are familiar with and the other one is called biskut wangi, which translates as "fragrant cookie" or hio bia.
Chai Huat Heng's original beh teh saw, in individual packs of 8 in each bag, is infused with candied tangerine fruit (桔饼) in the soft maltose filling encased in crispy crust with roasted white sesame seeds. The pastry has just-nice sweetness with tangy-sweet flavour of the candied tangerine. This is unique and very nice.
The biskut wangi / hio bia are packed in short tubes of 5 pieces each. The round biscuit has soft and crumbly crust, low sweetness and a mochi-like chewy filling — I like this texture very much. The biscuit has short shelf-life and should be consumed within 4 days without refrigeration — chilling the biscuit will affect its texture.
Chai Huat Heng makes so many types of traditional pastries and they are mostly not very sweet — which is the main reason why I always frequent the bakery on every trip to Pontian. It will take me many, many, many more visits to try them all.
Social Media:
Address:
903, Jalan Bakek, Kampung Atap, 82000 Pontian, Johor, Malaysia
Opening Hours:
9am to 7:30pm | Daily
Comments