Filipino Recipes
35 recipes found
Filipino Embutido
This recipe for embutido, a festive Filipino meatloaf featuring ingredients that appeared in the Philippines during the American occupation, is adapted from Emma Phojanakong. She often prepares it as a stuffing for chicken; inspired by that, this recipe features a simple citrus-and-soy-spiked chicken sauce to go alongside. Serve it with watercress and steamed white rice, but it also makes great next-day sandwiches.
Pancit Palabok (Rice Noodles With Chicken Ragout and Shrimp)
We eat pancit, or noodles, always — but especially at birthday celebrations, where the length of the noodles is seen as a promise for an equally long life. Among our many pancit dishes, palabok is the richest. The sauce almost takes on the texture of an Italian ragù, with the meat slowly disintegrating into a thick gravy that’s stained reddish-gold by achuete (annatto). The toppings aren’t decorative, but a crucial part of the dish: a whole regiment of hard-boiled eggs and poached shrimp, plus a tumble of fried garlic and crumbled chicharron (puffed-up crispy pork skins).
Bistek
Bistek is steak, but one transformed by its encounter with soy sauce and citrus. My addition is browned butter, an ingredient not so common in Southeast Asian cooking. This was one of my lola’s signature dishes: She’d cut the onions half-an-inch thick, sear them briefly, then add a little water to make the pan flare up, so they’d get extra crisp. She would always plate it in a casserole dish, with enough pan sauce to sop up with rice. The beef fat should coat your lips, and then the citrus cuts through it. It’s worth investing in good olive oil; every ingredient matters, because there are so few, and you can taste them all.
Embutido
There’s a perception that Filipino food is rustic and uncomplicated, but when my lola taught me to make chicken relleno — chicken stuffed with embutido, a kind of meatloaf — I realized that she was using the same techniques I’d learned in professional kitchens cooking French food. She was very particular about ingredients. Even when her memory started fading, her first question when she saw me was always “Are you using chorizo de Bilbao?” (Yes, Lola.) Here, embutido is a centerpiece dish in its own right. I tried chopping the meat for texture, but whipping the ingredients in a food processor, the way my lola did it, integrates everything better.
Sinigang (Tamarind Broth With Pork and Vegetables)
This is the soup that made me like vegetables when I was growing up. You always measure sinigang by sourness, which is so much a part of our cuisine — layers of acid coming from vinegar, fresh citrus, tamarind and unripe fruits. Here, sour is a power move, hitting you all the way at the back of your tongue. Whole serrano chiles bring a low-frequency spicy hum, adding not so much heat as depth. The daikon should be left in big, juicy chunks, so when you bite into them, you get an unexpected touch of coolness in the hot broth.
Pinakbet (Vegetables Stewed in Fermented Shrimp Paste)
Filipino cooking embraces salt — perhaps the legacy of life in a tropical climate, where, before refrigeration, food had to be preserved. The primary salt in pinkabet, a vegetable stew, is bagoong, a satisfyingly funky paste of fermented shrimp or fish. As with miso, there are many types of bagoong: dry or oily, toasted or raw, bright pink and briny or dark brown and faintly sweet. I like to use the pink variety because of the large formations of salt crystals. Paired with the toasted and caramelized tomato paste, the bagoong achieves a deep, concentrated umami flavor, enough to season all the vegetables.
Beef Empanadas
Filipinos take snacking seriously, so much so that we devote an entire meal to it: merienda, which may take place midmorning or midafternoon, if not both. Empanadas are a great treat for this in-between time, but also keep well at room temperature — the grace of food built for a warm climate — so you can graze all day. (My family used to buy these by the tray for parties, but it’s nice to make your own and store them in the freezer for later.) In these, a ground-beef filling is tucked inside sturdy but flaky dough, with raisins added early in the cooking to plump with the beef juices. There are variations on empanadas all over Latin America; ours rely on the potency of onion and garlic, and exploit it to the hilt.
Lumpia Shanghai
Lumpia are cousins to spring rolls, a tradition that most likely goes back to the Chinese traders who first visited the Philippines in the ninth century. As kids, we’d crowd around the kitchen counter to make them, spooning out the filling and rolling up the skins before sliding them into hot oil. They come in different incarnations and may be served unfried and even unwrapped, but the classic is lumpia Shanghai, skinny cigarillos with supercrunchy skins, packed with meat, juices seething. I like dipping them in banana ketchup, which you can buy or improvise by cooking overripe bananas and tomato paste into a sweet-and-sour jam.
Date-and-Walnut Bars
This recipe for golden, chewy, date-and-walnut-packed bars comes from the Los Angeles pastry chef Margarita Manzke, who grew up in the Philippines and now runs the sweet side of the kitchen at République. When she was in high school, Manzke came across the classic recipe for “food for the gods” in a thin pamphlet of Filipino desserts, and she made the bars again and again, learning how to produce a consistently tender, chewy batch: Don’t overcream the butter, and don’t use a light hand with the dates. Manzke sells fresh bars at République, but know that at home the cooled, cut bars store well in the freezer, ready to pop out and defrost at a moment's notice.
Arroz Caldo With Collards and Soy-Cured Egg Yolks
The Filipino rice porridge called lugaw started out as a simple equation of rice, water and salt, until the conquistadors arrived in the 16th century and demanded more sumptuous dishes. Add tripe and innards to lugaw, and it becomes goto; with chicken and saffron, it is arroz caldo. It’s looser and soupier than Chinese congee, cooked until you can’t see individual grains. I put in collard greens to make it a balanced meal and use wings because of the high bone-to-meat ratio and the jiggly skin. (Keeping the bones in will give the broth more flavor.) The soy sauce-cured yolks are probably best at the two-hour mark — they get firmer and saltier the longer they cure, so follow your taste.
Lugaw
As any Filipino mother will tell you, the magic of lugaw comes in its restorative properties. This recipe, adapted from the version served at Uncle Mike's Place, a diner in Chicago, is not supposed to be a wallop of flavors. Approach it as a savory oatmeal, with notes of ginger and chicken peeking through the warm, soothing creaminess. The key is constant stirring during the first 10 minutes of cooking, which aids in breaking down the starches in the rice and makes for a thicker, more luscious dish.