Tropical Island Cooking. Jennifer Aranas
teas such as calamansi tea or salabat ginger tea are common beverages as are American-style iced teas. The Philippines was emphatically receptive to the Spanish’s coffee culture. Coffee and hot chocolate are the beverages of choice paired with breakfast, merienda, or after-dinner dessert.
Filipinos are also fond of their alcoholic libations. Grape wines are nearly nonexistent but replaced instead with native wines creatively made from local resources. Tuba is the pervasive wine fermented from the sap of palm tree buds. Coconut palm sap is the superior choice although buri, nipa, and sugar palms are all viable sources of sap. Tapuy and pangasi are the most common wines made from rice or corn. The sugarcane wine basi traces its roots to the province of Ilocos Norte located on the northern tip of Luzon. It is amber-colored and flavored with the bark of fragrant trees such as samak or kabarawan. Fruit wines include plum wine called duhat or lomboy and mango wine. Distilled spirits include layaw, a potent corn distillation and lambanog, a distilled version of tuba. Anisado is similar to lambanog but lightly flavored with anise seeds. And, of course, there’s beer. San Miguel is the official Filipino brand.
As with any cuisine, the best way to enjoy a meal is with a beverage that complements the food. With its emphasis on seafood and poultry and tart flavors, Filipino cuisine lends itself to the enjoyment of light-bodied alcoholic beverages—such as lagers, pilsners, and pale ales, and fruity white wines such as Riesling or Gewurztraminer. There are exceptions, of course, for the heavier beef, lamb, or poultry dishes. For example, duck braised in adobo with pineapple and tomatoes pairs well with a fruity, weighty merlot and cashew-crusted lamb is best washed down with a nutty, medium-bodied dunkel. So although the rule to food and beverage pairings is that there are no rules, matching comparable flavors will steer you in the right direction to find the perfect potation for your meal.
The Recipes
What you’ll find in Tropical Island Cooking is a refreshing mix of Filipino old world and new. Traditional recipes come straight from the islands, adjusted marginally to account for native ingredients that are normally used fresh in the Philippines but that may only be offered in a preserved state here. I’ve also compiled traditionally based recipes bursting with the flavors of the Philippines but modified to include the bounty of fresh meat, fish, and vegetables offered in the United States. These are dishes that reveal my American fingerprint, which would not normally appear at a traditional Filipino meal, yet maintain the integrity of Filipino flavor, style, and technique.
Although many of the recipes in Tropical Island Cooking found their way onto my restaurant’s menu, this is not a restaurant cookbook. The recipes don’t require culinary school graduates to prepare, cook, and meticulously plate each dish. This is everyday food. In my house, quick meals, regardless of ethnicity, take as much priority as healthy, delicious ones. Many recipes are quick and easy to prepare so that a simple dinner can be on the table in less than 45 minutes from start to finish. Others are what we call fiesta dishes, more elaborate and time consuming, often served for special occasions and gatherings. Fiesta fare may require a couple of hours preparation or, at the very least, a helping hand in the kitchen. But as is often the case with ethnic cooking, preparation and organization are the keys to success. I find that planning ahead and breaking down long recipes into several small ones make the job much less formidable.
I will admit, though, that by embarking on the Filipino culinary track you are definitely taking the road less traveled. And although many of the ingredients essential to these recipes are now available in larger grocery stores, preparing for these recipes may require a trip to an Asian market. If you’ve never ventured into one, the unfamiliar sights and smells may be unnerving, perhaps even intimidating. But don’t be overwhelmed by the twelve different varieties of soy sauce or the multiple aisles dedicated solely to noodles. My best advice to those of you new to Filipino cuisine is to accept and enjoy your status as a novice. Discovery is an exciting component of cooking that we often forgo en route to quick, convenient meals.
At the end of this book you’ll find a guide to buying Filipino ingredients, a resource that details uncommon ingredients needed for the recipes so that you can navigate through the aisles with knowledge and confidence. It includes a Mail-Order and Online Shopping Guide to help you browse the virtual Asian grocer if a brick and mortar market isn’t close by. It is a wonderful source for noodles, pastes, spices, condiments, sauces, and other hard-to-find ingredients. You’ll find a wide selection of dry, canned, or bottled goods along with cookware, cookbooks, and recipes. Two sites in particular, templeofthai.com and importfood.com, even offer a short selection of fresh produce, which they sell individually or together in a kit. Once you’ve assembled your Filipino pantry, be assured that with practice and frequency you will become comfortable with what was once foreign to you inspiring you toward further culinary adventures.
THE BASICS
How do you prepare yourself and your kitchen for a Filipino meal? Naturally, you start with the building blocks: the sauces, stocks, and flavor bases that form the backbone of a cuisine. A good-quality stock is the foundation for soups and stews and can easily be the difference between creating either mediocre or memorable food. Seafood stocks are not only the quickest and easiest to prepare but, in my opinion, the most worthwhile since flavorful fish or shrimp stock is hard to find at your run-of-the-mill-grocery store. Chicken stock will require a couple of dedicated hours simmering on the stove and beef stock four to six hours, which is why the time invested into a homemade stock is certainly a persuasive factor in resorting to canned broth or bouillon. However, their inferior quality will become apparent when you try reducing your stock into a rich, bodacious sauce and the resulting liquid is flimsy and unremarkable. Good-quality stock is relatively simple to prepare and a powerful tool to add body, complexity, color, and flavor to any dish in any cuisine.
There are definitive flavors that either individually or in combination characterize Filipino cuisine. Adobo, a Spanish import from Mexico, is one of the culinary cornerstones that give Filipino food its flavor identity. Despite sharing a similar name, New World adobo is completely different in its anatomy than the island version, where adobo is as much a cooking technique as it is a specific dish. Literally translated, it means “preserved” or “marinated” in Spanish. In the Filipino kitchen, it refers to food cooked with five specific ingredients: vinegar, soy sauce, bay leaves, garlic, and peppercorns. This flavor formula is quintessentially Filipino and can be applied to any type of meat, seafood, or vegetable. Of course, there are variations on adobo that include the addition of coconut milk, ginger, tomato, or pineapple. But underneath the seasonings are the same five ingredients that support adobo’s recognizable flavors. Because adobo is considered a national dish of the Philippines eaten in some variation all across the islands, I wanted to address its importance here even though the adobo recipes are in later chapters.
Sofrito is another flavor base imported by the Spaniards that Filipinos integrated into everyday meals. Garlic, onion, and tomato sautéed together in oil is the triumvirate that underlies guisados (sautés), stews, and stir-fries. Sofrito may include bell peppers for sweetness or atsuete (annatto) seeds for color, which like adobo, can vary depending on which cook you ask.
Toasted garlic is on equal footing with soy sauce and pepper when it comes to seasoning Filipino food. Garlic is an essential ingredient cooked with tomatoes or onions in a sofrito base. But the flavor difference of garlic when fried to a crispy golden brown and sprinkled on top sinangag, fried rice with garlic, or arroz caldo, chicken and rice soup, is a subtle addition that lingers on the tongue and elevates the ordinary to a sophisticated plane. Once you’ve toasted your garlic, don’t feel as if you have to store it away until you plan your next Filipino meal. Add a dash to your container of sea salt or lightly crush it as a substitute for garlic powder in spice rubs or marinades.
A Filipino meal is hardly complete without an array of potent and vibrant dipping sauces (sawsawan), which add zest and balance to each bite. From bottled banana ketchup to sinus-clearing shrimp paste, there is always at least one sawsawan on the table to spoon over rice, to dip grilled meats or fish, or to mix into soups. A saucer filled