Filipino Food Is Fantastic!

[prasantrin]

prasantrin: can't speak of the cuisine of the southern Philippines since my family hails from Luzon. also did forget about merienda, mostly because I haven't had it in many years. thanks for reminding me.

Soba

My mother's from Negros (Talisay, specifically) but because my father was Thai, he liked Bicol food the best . Actually, laing was one of the few Filipino foods he appreciated. I think my mother's family also had a very good cook when she was growing up, so she was able to experience a variety of Filipino and Western foods (and she also went to boarding school away from Negros so that may have influenced her eating habits).

I only spent a year in the Philippines, when I was 10, but merienda was the best part! Lola Ding (very distant relative of an in-law, but everyone in the Phil. is Lola/Lolo, Tita/Tito, or Manang/Manong ) made the best ensaimada. I've yet to have one that compares.

Can I also mention, my favourite filipino foods are tocino (that's what I usually have when we go out for Filipino breakfast) and empanada. I think Filipino empanadas are much tastier than empanadas from any of the South American countries! And for desserts/breads, ensaimada and mamon. And Filipino chiffon cakes are the best around! Oh, Sans Rival! I forgot about Sans Rival! I think I was about 7 the first time I had it and I still love it!

[slkinsey]

Here is an interesting Filipino food blog with recipes: The Radical Chef (a Filipino food, cooking & recipes journal)

[Jaymes]

Tommy/Jaymes:

Skin on definitely.

Yeah, that's what I said:

Don't have my recipes with me, but in memory I always brown the chicken pieces, skin on, and then add them to the water with the vinegar, etc.

[tommy]

i've seen a disparity in the amount of soy people are using. i'm doing equal parts vinegar and soy. i've seen recipes call for 1 cup of vinegar and a few tablespoons of soy. it seems to me that the results would be completely different.

[SobaAddict70]

My mom uses A LOT of vinegar and slightly less than a quarter amount of soy. I tend to use roughly the same proportions. I can't give you exact proportions, it's a little like cooking with feeling. hehe.

When you've managed chicken adobo, you've got to try PORK adobo. (OMG!!!! So good!)

Then maybe we can move on to dinuguan. Now that'll be a revelation. heheh.

Soba

[tommy]

what type of cut would you use for pok adobo?

Then maybe we can move on to dinuguan

not quite yet.

[Jaymes]

Then maybe we can move on to dinuguan. Now that'll be a revelation. heheh.

Ah yes. And I'm sure there will be some here who will enjoy calling their butchers and ordering a half-gallon or so of pig's blood.

But as for me, I'd rather we go into a lengthy dissertation on lumpia. Masarap.

[skchai]

Essential for pork adobo - lots of garlic and whole black peppercorns.

[tommy]

so i cooked it last night. and i'll eat it tonite.

i have a question about the frying step: the skin is definitely flabby from being boiled for an hour. is this going to crisp up at all? even dry chicken skin takes at least 10 minutes to crisp up nicely. or should i not expect a crispy skin.

[Toliver]

My sister-in-law's family is Filipino. Her mom would always make vats of pancit, which I now see was actually pancit bihon, and mountains of lumpia for family gatherings. I was in heaven eating that food! Man, it was good. But her mom is getting on in years and has told the family that she doesn't have the wherewithall to make those dishes anymore. That's such a shame and none of her kids want to learn how to make the dishes since they are so time consuming. Now you can actually buy bags of lumpia pre-made in the frozen section of your grocery store.

I've also been to a Filipino party (U.S. Navy retirement) where they roasted a pig and served this vinegar and garlic dipping sauce that was wonderful. Does this sauce have a name? Or was it really just vinegar & garlic?

Also, Soba, my sister-in-law's entire family loves hot & spicy dishes (which explains their love for spicy Mexican food). Is this typical of Filipinos? It looks like most of the Filipino dishes are mild. Does the chile pepper have a place in Filipino cuisine?

[prasantrin]

so i cooked it last night. and i'll eat it tonite.

i have a question about the frying step: the skin is definitely flabby from being boiled for an hour. is this going to crisp up at all? even dry chicken skin takes at least 10 minutes to crisp up nicely. or should i not expect a crispy skin.

This is probably too late, but don't expect crispy skin. It will be firmer, but it won't be crispy as in regular fried chicken crispy (though the soy sauce caramelizes and so the flavour of the skin becomes oh so good!)

[tommy]

i gotta say, prasantrin, the skin turned out way crispier than i ever though, and way faster than i expected. it was so rendered already that it was just a thin piece of fat/skin, and fried up very quickly.

this is a really tasty dish. however, i couldn't help but think it was more of the same as i continued eating it. i'd be interested in it's ever "cut" with a veggie side, or anything other than rice. it is quite acidic, which i generally like, but it got a little much after a while. or maybe i just ate too much.

thanks for all of the help. i'm looking forward to learning more about this stuff.

[Rhea_S]

I like chicken adobo to not be too vinegary. I don't measure, but I use about equal parts of vinegar and water that total to the same amount of soy sauce with lots and lots of garlic. I also never fry and like my sauce to be thick and gravy-like. However, I rarely cook adobo because I didn't grow up eating much adobo. My mom doesn't like it much.

Some of my fave savoury filipino dishes are daing na bangus (milkfish fillets marinated in lots of vinegar, garlic, black pepper and salt then pan-fried), laing, bopis (finely diced pork, or possibly beef, offal cooked in a spicy, vinegary sauce), fresh lumpia, kare kare, chicken tinola (chicken soup with ginger, green papaya or chayote and pepper leaves), arroz valenciana (glutinous/sweet rice cooked with coconut milk, saffron and chicken pieces) and green jackfruit cooked in coconut milk and chili peppers.

For desserts and merienda: ensaimada (brioche coils filled wth cheese and sugar), sans rival (layers of cashew dacquoise and buttercream), brazo mercedes, canonigo (soft, crustless meringue topped with a corn, custard sauce), espasol (like sweet Japanese mochi but cooked with coconut milk), turon (bananas wrapped in lumpia wrappers and deep-fried), cassava pudding (grated cassava mixed with coconut milk and baked into a sticky cake; there's a similar Vietnamese dessert), halo halo (shaved ice with various toppings), buko (young coconut) pie. Most of these aren't really all that sweet although much depends on who makes them.

Warning: If you are ever offered bicol express and told that it's delicious, be very careful even if you can handle spicy food. It's made up almost entirely of siling labuyo (tiny chile peppers similar to Thai bird chiles but possibly hotter) cooked in coconut milk.

[SobaAddict70]

Tommy: pork belly is typical for adobo lechon, although I've seen recipes that use pork butt. In addition, many versions add either pork or chicken liver. (I sometimes use both.) One version of this dish adds peeled whole hard-boiled eggs towards the end of cooking. (Not to my taste though.)

Jaymes: you don't need a lot of pig's blood for dinuguan. 2 cups is plenty. You know those small containers for wonton soup from takeout Chinese places? You can get one container's worth of pig's blood and that'll be more than enough for one pot of dinuguan. The blood provides a way to thicken the sauce without reducing it or adding a thickener like cornstarch. The sauce turns black whilst cooking. Don't knock it 'till you've tried it. Looks nasty but it tastes great!

Toliver: Filipino food is mostly mild, mostly sour and mostly garlicky. True, we have Chinese and Malay influences but for the most part the use of spicy (hot) ingredients such as chiles and Sichuan peppercorns are almost nil to non-existent. You might have an occasional flub like whole green chiles which are sometimes used in dinuguan, but on the whole, Filipino/Pinoy cuisine is not for the bold-tongued. Most of the "spiciness" comes from liberal amounts of garlic, vinegar, ginger, star anise and aromatic herbs.

We use A LOT of offal. A LOT. In fact, if you don't like sweetbreads, brains, tongue, pig's feet and tail and the like, you won't like Filipino food.

Some dishes offhand I can recall:

pork tongue asado (braised pork tongue in an aromatic soy and vinegar sauce)

pork lengua estofada (oxtail or pork tongue, braised in soy sauce, vinegar, brown sugar and beer)

callos (ox leg, ox tripe and blood sausage stew)

Bopis

Another aspect of Filipino food is that we will readily use a lot of ingredients that (eGulleteers and) other people look down upon -- such as vienna sausages and spam. It's part of what makes Filipino food, well...Filipino. We are the melting pot of SE Asia, and that American influence shines through quite clearly.

Soba

[Toliver]

Filipino/Pinoy cuisine is not for the bold-tongued.

Soba, thanks for the info and the idea for a new moniker:

Toliver, the bold-tongued!

[Rhea_S]

The spicyness/hotness is a factor of region. The southern provinces, such as Bicol, tend to cook spicier food although it's often tempered with coconut milk. There are also many Filipinos who eat most everything with spoonfuls of vinegar flavoured with squashed chili peppers. Also, spicier foods tend to be tapas-style dishes (pulutan) to serve with San Miguel beer. Otherwise, Soba is right that Filipino food isn't for the bold-tongued.

I just remembered a dish that I think is fairly unique to Filipinos: papaitan. It's beef offal flavoured with beef bile. It's quite bitter although not too bad if cooked well. I can't think of any dishes in other cultures that use bile.

A dish that I think is totally inedible is burong isda. It's fish fermented with rice. A friend makes it and others seem to like it, but it just tastes rotten to me. To make it, salt raw fish, mix with cooked rice and let sit in an airtight container at room temp for several days. It becomes a disgusting pink mass that doesn't look too different from very old yogurt.

[SobaAddict70]

But as for me, I'd rather we go into a lengthy dissertation on lumpia. Masarap.

Oh yes, lumpia. Be still, my tongue.

How do you like yours? Fresh (with a sweet sauce), or fried (with a sour sauce)?

What do you like to fill it with? Wrap it with?

Soba

[Pan]

Rhea, it's funny to see those Tagalog words. They look familiar but their meanings are totally unlike what they look like to a Malay-speaker. In Malay, pulut is glutinous rice, and burung is bird! Oh, and selamat is safe, not thank you...

I guess I'd better make a comment about Filipino food, though I'm afraid from a standpoint of little knowledge of it (OK, I've gone out with two Filipinas and with one on and off long enough to have had some home cooking, but still). I've been to a local steam-table place in the East Village called Angie's Turo-Turo, though not recently. Aside from the use of pork and the sausage (which I like), it's got a lot of similarities to some dishes I remember from the East Coast of the Malay Peninsula (the state of Terengganu) in the 70s. (Note: These are not similar to what you get in any Malaysian restaurant I've been to in New York, where only food found on the West Coast of Malaysia - the coast further from the Philippines - is served.) I seem to remember a dish of a bunch of vegetables with little dried shrimps, for example. This is a type of dish that probably used to be served more often in Terengganu in the 1970s than it is now, but it was one of the dishes that made me feel somewhat like I was "home" in my Malaysian second home again. Of course you can go home again, but you find that it's changed. [smiling because in many ways, it's changed for the better, including in terms of the quality of the food served in roadside shops in the villages. Still, sentimental attachment to the homestyle food of one's childhood does count for something.]

[runninwithscissors]

Oh, and selamat is safe, not thank you...

Terimah kasih...and it only took 10 minutes to remember SUCH a simple reply! *sheesh* Time to head back to SE Asia, methinks...

Selamat malam...

Edit to note that I much prefer fresh lumpia to fried...but that I would NEVER turn down either. YUM!!

Edited March 24, 2004 by runninwithscissors (log)

[Pan]

Selamat malam, runninwithscissors.

An old girlfriend of mine and I made some excellent lumpia out of a Taiwanese dim sum cookbook that was in Chinese (which neither of us could read - she was Swedish) and English, using ingredients purchased at a huge Asian grocery store in Edison, New Jersey.

[lueid813]

We're infamous for using stuff like spam

Now that you mention it, there was an item in the newspapers a week or two ago about a restaurant in Manila that served only Spam dishes. Things like Spam spaghetti, Spam meat loaf, etc. The restaurant is called "Spam Jam".

'Morning Edition' Returns: Spam Heaven

Specialty of the House: Spam

[skchai]

There's a SpamJam thread over in the Food Media forum:

Spamjam

It is really puzzling why Filipino food is not better-known in the U.S. There are certaintly more people of Filipino descent here than people of Thai or Vietnamese decent, yet Filipino restaurants don't have nearly the same level of visibility as Thai or Vietnamese restaurants.

Moreover, of all SEAsian cuisines, Filipino cuisine reflects the strongest level of Western influences. Also, the turo-turo concept would seem to fit in well with American fast-food sensibilities.

Examining the success of Thai or Vietnamese restaurants, however, it may be possible to single out the importance of the localization process to American tastes, as well as to American expectations about ethnic cuisinese. Both Thai and Vietnamese foods have strong images as "healthy" and "light", yet "accessible" cuisines - in part because the kinds of dishes that have shown up in U.S. restaurants have been chosen to emphasize that aspect of these cuisines. For instance, Vietnamese foods featuring caramel sauce or pork skin / fat are largely ignored on restaurant menus.

On the other hand, Filipino restaurants in the U.S. feature home-style dishes like adobo, dinuguan, karikari that don't fit the image of what the typical U.S. urban middle-class person is looking for in an ethnic restaurant. Too "heavy" or too "strange". Not that Americans won't eat heavy foods, but this is presumably not what most Americans are looking for in Asian ethnic cuisine.

Indeed, it may be the case that, at least in the Thai case, the necessity for restauranters to rely on non-Thai clientele to a much greater degree from the beginning may have actually been advantageous in that it quickened the localization process. . .

Anyway, stream of consciousness, so this may not make a lot of sense. . .

[lueid813]

It is really puzzling why Filipino food is not better-known in the U.S.  There are certaintly more people of Filipino descent here than people of Thai or Vietnamese decent, yet Filipino restaurants don't have nearly the same level of visibility as Thai or Vietnamese restaurants.  . . .

I think you are correct in your assessment of the differences between the cuisines you mention. I wonder if maybe Filipinos are less likely to go into business on their own, compared to people of other nationalities? That's just a guess. I would imagine that certain ethnic groups have more of a business tradition than others.

[prasantrin]

I wonder if maybe Filipinos are less likely to go into business on their own, compared to people of other nationalities? That's just a guess. I would imagine that certain ethnic groups have more of a business tradition than others.

I'm about to go far off-topic, and I may be severely censured for it, I found the above statement to...reek (unintentionally, I'm sure) of that sort of covert prejudice that pervades PC societies and as a Filipina (OK, half) I cannot let it go by without comment.

The city in which I was raised (Winnipeg) has a relatively large Filipino population. There are many Filipino-owned businesses--the first were probably grocery stores and travel agencies but now there are 8+ Filipino restaurants (not bad considering the population of Winnipeg is only around 700 000) and many other businesses.

Filipinos are no more or less likely to go into business for themselves than many other ethnicities. I think, however, what they need in order to do so is support from the community (Filipino community) and money.

Many (I would even go so far as to say most) Filipinos who immigrate to the US and Canada come from very low socio-economic backgrounds. When they first move here they cannot afford to open businesses nor do they have the education or experience to do so. This in no way means they do not have the desire to do so.

In terms of support, some Filipino communities are quite fragmented (I'm thinking of Portland, Oregon, for example) so should one person open a business, who would first support it? In Winnipeg if a Filipino were to open a business, they would know their family, friends, church, Filipino Association, etc. would patronize it so they do not have to worry so much about clientele. There are also clusters of Filipinos in certain areas of the city so if I were to open a business in one of those areas, I would know that I have a large client base to draw from. In Portland, for example, there is no one area where many/most of the residents are Filipino. Where would I open a business which has an established client base?

As with most businesses, if there is a need for the service the business will thrive. Perhaps in other communities, Filipinos do not open their own restaurants (for example) because there is no need or demand for them. I doubt it is because they lack "business tradition." And FWIW, many of my relatives in the Philippines own highly profitable sugar cane plantations and other businesses, and are also executives in such companies. Should Filipinos not have much of a "business tradition", who do you think is running the business world in the Philippines?

[Jaymes]

Probably shouldn't stick a toe in here, but I do want to say that when I lived in the Philippines, it appeared to me that the local cuisine was more one of home cooking, rather than restaurants. It was my experience anyway that most restaurants featured foreign food, more so than typical Filipino dishes. There were small snack-bar type restaurants with pancit, etc., but as far as large "fancy" restaurants went, they were for the most part foreign inspired.