What the hell is Filipino food? Here are the 7 dishes you need to know
By
Andy Kryza
As the US looks for its new East Asian food obsession, signs are pointing to a boom in Filipino food,
a melting pot cuisine that takes elements of Chinese and Malaysian, and mixes in a huge amount of Spanish influence left over from the colonial days.
It's one of the most unique flavor profiles out there, but where do you start? Probably not with the blood stew or chicken embryos (though those
are pretty good, according to
Andrew Zimmern). To help you enter this brave new world, we've assembled seven entry-level Filipino comfort foods that will have you completely hooked. Mainly because there's fried pork.
-----
LUMPIA
What it is: Veggies and sometimes meat, wrapped up in an crepe-like egg-based wrapper
What's the deal: Basically, the Pinoy cousin to the egg roll, spring roll, and salad roll, lumpia is served either crisply fried or "fresh", meaning unfried (also meaning less-delicious). It's filled up with carrots, sprouts, and other veggies, with the option to add shaved chicken, shrimp, pork, or tofu. Often served with peanut sauce,
it's one of the culture's favorite appetizers and the perfect gateway food for beginners.
ADOBO
What it is: Chicken, pork, or seafood simmered in a marinade of vinegar & soy sauce
What's the deal: The unofficial national food of the Philippines, Adobo starts with a protein -- bone-in chicken, pork loin, squid, or fish, usually -- that goes into a pot filled with soy, vinegar, garlic, onions, and other veggies (depending on the recipe). It's then simmered until tender, and kind of pickled in its own stock, before being served over rice. Not to be confused with the bald bad guy from
Double Dragon (that'd be Abobo),
it's a common foreigner move to order it with extra sauce on the rice... a move that's nonetheless worth it because it's delicious.
PANCIT
What it is: Noodles
What's the deal: The most popular foundation in street foods and upscale cuisine, pancit refers to a wide variety of noodles that essentially become
the Filipino version of Pad Thai. The most common are clear-ish noodles about the width of spaghetti and are often layered, kitchen sink-style, with pork, seafood, tofu, veggies, eggs, and sauce.
MENUDO
What it is: The global sensation that launched Ricky Martin's career A stew of roasted pork, peppers, and tomato sauce
What's the deal: You can't even get through 10mins ofan Antonio Banderas film without internalizing the Spanish influence, so when your country is the subject of 300yrs of Spanish colonialism, some stuff's gonna stick. Menudo is
the Filipino take on a classic Spanish soup, reinvented as a thick stew filled with pork, peppers, tomatoes, and other veggies served over rice and with a side of
Desperado.
INASAL
What it is: Skewered, grilled chicken marinated in lime, peppers, vinegar, and tropical seeds
What's the deal: Another
popular street food and cookout staple, Inasal originated in the west coast city of Bacolod, also known as the City of Smiles -- smiles that are filled with chunks of grilled chicken that're first marinated, and then coal-roasted while being basted with that vinegar-y juice. Lucky for that smile, the skewer can easily be used as a toothpick.
KARE-KARE
What it is: An oxtail stew with a strong peanut flavor
What's the deal: Like most stews (except Patrick Stuart, who is far too refined), Kare-kare is
the result of tossing the stuff that didn't cut the mustard in other dishes into a pot. Mainly oxtail, sometimes offal and hooves. Then it's loaded with crushed peanuts or peanut butter, filled with veggies, and served either on its own or over rice.
LECHON KAWALI
What it is: Fried pork belly
What's the deal: Another legacy from the Spanish colonial days, holidays are celebrated by roasting a whole suckling pig (lechon) over coals. That's pretty complicated for a restaurant. But most will carry lechon kawali, a condensed version that
makes bacon look healthy by comparison. It's basically pork belly, skin, and a little meat fried until crisp. Anthony Bourdain declared the stuff in Cebu "the best pig ever". No matter where you get it, each bite will make you wonder why Chinese is your takeout standby.
Andy Kryza is Thrillist's National Eat/Drink Senior Editor, and has proudly lived vegetable-free since 2001.
LINK - > Filipino food for beginners - Adobo, Lumpia, Pancit
====================================================================
Coconut, Vinegar, and a Whole Lotta Pork: An Introduction to Filipino Cuisine
Drew Lazor
In restaurant circles, the dreaded F-word—fusion—is usually reserved to describe some sort of disparate multi-culti combination, like sauce soubise on top of tamales. But in the case of Filipino food, there's no stronger term to capture the essence of Asia's most unique, idiosyncratic, and underrated culinary tradition.
To novice eyes, the food of the Philippines, the archipelago of 7,000-plus islands due east of the Malay Peninsula, is weird. Hell, it's weird to me, and I grew up eating it. There's oddity in unfamiliarity, and this is a cuisine that doesn't quite resemble, in elements, execution, or intention, anything else in Southeast Asia.
And that's what makes it so fascinating. No sound bite can accurately answer the one question Filipinos get plenty:
What is Filipino food? "The simplest way to put it is our food reflects our history," says Yana Gilbuena, founder of
The Salo Project.
It's a history shaped by colonialism. The Spanish, led by Ferdinand Magellan, made landfall on the islands in 1521, and controlled the Philippines until 1898, introducing Iberian ingredients and touches from other colonial holdings, like Mexico, to the natives. Though the two countries are ancient trade partners, the 16th century also saw the first major wave of immigrants from the Chinese coastal provinces of Fujian and Canton, who brought their own specialties across the South China Sea. Then there's America, which took control of the archipelago from Spain following the Treaty of Paris until it officially became an independent republic in 1946.
Unlike neighboring nations
like Malaysia, where many immigrants recreate their recipes relatively free of outside influence, the Philippines has seen these immensely different traditions commingle over the centuries, creating a remarkable Euro-Yankee-Latino-Malay amalgam—capital-f Fusion, fo' real—built on big, uncompromising flavors.
Bold Flavors...
Regionality plays a huge role in Filipino cooking, as it's a geographically divisive country populated by dozens of ethnic groups. "Each island has their own flavor," says Gilbuena, who's originally from Iloilo City in the Western Visayas. But there are commonalities that inform the Filipino palate regardless of longitude and latitude.
"Bottom line, it's the boldness," says Nicole Ponseca, owner of
Maharlika and
Jeepney in New York City's East Village. "It's the audaciousness of the ingredients."
The pillars of the pantry is a good place to begin, as they double as building blocks for the cuisine itself. For starters, you're going to find vinegar—most commonly
sukang iloco, derived from sugarcane—in every Filipino kitchen. Used for marinating, braising, and glazing, as well as a table dip for entrées and
pulutan (drinking snacks like
chicharrón), vinegar is also the backbone of
adobo, the Philippines' most lauded dish. (More on this in a sec.)
Vinegar is the most prevalent holdover from the pre-colonial era, a truly indigenous distinction. "The Filipino penchant for lip-puckering zest is not without reason," writes food blogger
Marvin Gapultos in
The Adobo Road Cookbook. "In the tropical climes of the Philippines, the preservative powers of vinegar were a culinary necessity for centuries, long before refrigeration was available."
Sour notes also crop up in the form of
calamansi, the versatile citrus fruit that finds its way into innumerable dishes; sweet and sour tamarind, stirred into soups like
sinigang; and green (unripe) mangos, an everyday snack. In fact, those mangos are often topped with another building block:
bagoong, or fermented shrimp paste, which, along with
patis (fish sauce), speaks to the aggressively salty/funky section of the Pinoy flavor wheel.
Given the environs, bananas, plantains, and coconuts pop up constantly, in myriad forms;
banana ketchup is perhaps the most curious to outsiders. White rice is also a must with every meal of the day, starting with
silog-style breakfasts—a breakfast meat, like longaniza, accompanied garlic fried rice, fried eggs and sliced tomatoes. In heavily Filipino
Daly City, California, the joke goes that it's permanently foggy because all the residents are running their old-school
R2D2-looking rice cookers ragged.
Unlike Thai cuisine, with which Filipino is often confused, heat is not a defining characteristic, though it does factor into individual dishes like
Bicol Express, a pork and coconut milk stew garnished with sliced long hots.
...Served Family-Style
It's tough to make many more blanket statements about Filipino food, given how much it varies from island to island, city to city and household to household. But this much can be said: Meals are rarely Western in structure. "Filipino, as a basic rule, is ordered family-style," says Ponseca, who encourages guests at Maharlika to approach
chef Miguel Trinidad's menu with the fierceness of a tactical strike. "Get in there and get as much as your tummy can handle. These dishes are made to be enjoyed this way."
Kamayan-style feasts at Maharlika involve a huge spread of shareable food laid out on banana leaves for diners to eat with their hands.
"We cook food in big batches to make sure everyone's fed," says
Prometheus Brown, the Seattle-based rapper and poet who last year launched the
"Food & Sh*t" Filipino dinner series with his wife, Chera. "It's not so much an individualized thing, with individual plates and individual portions. It's one big pot."
The Big Three: Gateway Dishes
If you come across one big pot simmering away in a Filipino kitchen and you dare to lift the lid, you've got a puncher's chance of that pot containing adobo. A prominent example of colonial mind-meld—conquistadors used their tongues to talk up local cooking, and it eventually became de facto Tagalog—adobo describes not only a dish, but a cooking technique. To qualify, a meat (chicken or pork, most commonly) must be braised in an elixir of vinegar, bay leaves, garlic, salt, and black pepper.
If that sounds boring to you, you've never had adobo. Something alchemical takes place when these ingredients get together, a universally celebrated innovation that inspires both creation and consternation. Everybody, their mom, her six sisters, and all their kids tout their own, adding in proprietary ingredients they'll swear creates a superior result. The "new-school" inclusion of soy sauce, in particular, is an endless topic of debate, the designated hitter rule of adobo preparation.
Adobo is the Philippines' proudest crossover dish, and we're always stoked when
non-Filipinos pick up on it. The two remaining dishes in the gateway trifecta, meanwhile, have their roots in China. Inspired by the spring roll,
lumpia are a must at the Filipino table, tightly wound wrappers filled with wildly personalized fillings (
including banana) and deep-fried. Lo mein-like
pancit, too, has countless variations, from the staple
bihon and cellophane
sotanghon to
palabok, blanketed in hard-boiled eggs.
"When it's done well, you can't go wrong. It's universal," says Brown of this triumvirate. "Once they've had that good-*** pancit or adobo, they're hooked. They want to see what else is out there."
Our Love Affair With Pork
Seafood obviously plays an enormous role in the Filipino islander diet. Ubiquitous preparations here include
kinilaw, the indigenous ceviche, pickled with vinegar, calamansi or both; and fried
bangus, or milkfish. As is the case with many peasant cuisines, oxtail is a big deal, too—it's the base of
kare-kare, a beef-and-peanut stew (thanks, Malayans) tinted orange with achiote oil (gracias, Mexico). And let's not forget the Philippines' lusty obsession with canned meat, especially corned beef and Spam (thanks, American Navy rations).
None of these proteins, however, come close to touching our special snout-to-tail relationship with
baboy.
"Next to fish, the pig is the most important and accessible source of food for Filipinos," writes Amy Besa in
Memories of Philippines Kitchens. Cebuanos
enjoy the distinction of being top
dog hog when it comes to the preparation of lechon, or whole roasted suckling pig (fight you for the cheeks), but they spin on spits everywhere. Numerous dishes can be gleaned from the whole animal, including
lechon kawali, deep-fried pork belly, served with
Mang Tomas "all-purpose sauce" and/or vinegar for dipping; and my personal Pinoy porcine obsession, crispy pata, or deep-fried pork knuckles.
Pork shoulder is the go-to for "Filipino barbecue," a skewered and grilled street snack marinated and glazed in a garlicky, tangy and sweet sauce made with a base of Coke or 7-Up. The other white meat is also where to look for offal-based preparations. The Kapampangan specialty
sisig is a headcheese hash of sorts, featuring finely chopped cheek, snout, ears (awesomely referred to as "face" on some menus) and organs doused in citrus and spices, tossed with white onion and served in screaming-hot cast-iron pan like Chili's sizzling fajitas.
Dinuguan is a thick brown stew of pork blood, which multiple generations of Filipino parents have sneakily mischaracterized as "chocolate meat" to get their progeny to eat it.
You may have noticed that we haven't touched much on vegetables. (Servers at Maharlika sardonically refer to their meat-free sides as the "Filipino allergy section.") It's true that the cuisine is unabashedly meat-centric, but there are plenty of veggies that play an important role in day-to-day cooking. The indigenous dish
pinakbet brings some of the most popular—eggplant, string beans,
ampalaya (bitter melon)—together in a bagoong-flavored stew that sometimes includes coconut milk (
gata).
Why Isn't It Bigger?
Filipinos are one of the largest immigrant groups in the U.S., up there with Mexicans and Chinese in terms of stateside population. So why is it that Filipino food still seems to lag behind other Asian cuisines in terms of mainstream acceptance,
"next big thing" nods notwithstanding?
Reasons abound. One of the most common is the fact that it's always been a staunchly family-oriented cooking tradition. "To this day, the best Filipino food is usually found in homes with a tradition of excellent home cooking, rather than in restaurants," writes Besa.
"For some reason, we've always been very apologetic about our cuisine," says Gilbuena. "I even get it from my mom. 'What, you're serving them dinuguan? They're not going to eat it!'" She's out to change that mentality singlehandedly,
currently traveling the country with the goal of staging kamayan pop-ups in each of the 50 states.
Ponseca, who was motivated to open her restaurants by what she perceived as a dearth of accessible options, is optimistic about integration into the mainstream. "It's only a matter of time before everyone in America has tried Filipino food," she says.
LINK -> Coconut, Vinegar, and a Whole Lotta Pork: An Introduction to Filipino Cuisine | Serious Eats
