Burnt Lumpia

Unforgettably Fatty

There are quite a few food-related stories from my childhood that I have long forgotten, yet have remained firmly entrenched in the memories of the rest of my family (they never fail to remind me, and everyone else, about these supposedly "true" tales).

For instance, one of my aunts claims that I once poked my index finger through an entire carton of eggs that my grandfather just brought back from the market (since there's no memory of an ass-whoopin' that my grandpa would have surely given me, I don't believe this story for one second).

Also, according to my younger brother there was a time that I was so pissed off at him that I allegedly dumped a family serving of shrimp onto my own plate and quickly ate them just so he wouldn't have any (again, because I have no recollection of the smackdown my shrimp-loving father would have certainly laid upon me had this really happened, I don't believe this story either. And besides, I wouldn't have eaten ALL of the shrimp--leaving only one lone shrimp behind sounds more like my style).

And then there's the yarn that my mom often spins about how when I was a wee lad I used to eat only the chicken skin off of my chicken, or just the pork fat from my pork and not the meat. Although the image of a 5-year old stuffing his face with animal blubber is kind of disturbing, I do have some faint recollection of this actually happening (perhaps because a violent spanking wasn't involved, I didn't have to repress anything in the deep recesses of my brain).

Although these memories of fat indulgence were fuzzy at best, they all became crystal-clear after recently making my own adobo from fatty pork belly. After my first bite of jiggly pork fat layered between meat and skin, the memories of my lard eating youth came rushing back like an Anton Ego/Ratatouille-like epiphany.

Needless to say, it's been a while since I've eaten pork belly adobo.

Autumn Mix

Persimmons and pomegranates are rather persnickety specimens of fall fruit--the former needing nothing but time and patience for its flesh to go from hard and astringent to meltingly sweet and smooth, and the latter requiring a bit of excavation to find the juicy seeds inside.

There are a few different varieties of persimmon available. Some varieties, like the fuyu, are somewhat firm-fleshed and can be eaten like an apple. Other varieties, like the hachiya (gesundheit!), must be completely ripe and very soft before eating. I'd say the hachiya is my favorite type of persimmon.

If you happen to buy a hard unripe hachiya, just shove it in a brown paper bag with a banana, or a tomato, or both, and the persimmon should soften up in a few days. Once it's ripe and very mushy, you can cut a hachiya in half and then eat it out of the skin with a spoon. The flesh of a ripened hachiya is earthy-sweet, and almost jelly-like.

Gloopy, but tasty.

Pomegranates, on the other hand, require a little bit more work. You have to first lop off its crown, score its leathery skin with a sharp knife, and then pull it apart to find its sweet-tart ruby-red seeds.

 

Eureka!

Once the innards of the pomegranate are exposed, I usually place everything in a giant bowl o' water and gently pull the seeds away from the white pith. The seeds sink to the bottom and the pith and skin float to the top.

Clear water.

All of the juice is in the red seeds, so if you're gentle with the seeds, you won't waste any juice. But if you're a wee rough, then the water in your bowl will be bloodied with pomegranate plasma, you scoundrel! After gently separating seeds from pith, you can just skim the skin and pith away, then drain the seeds.

There are a number of things you can do with pomegranate seeds. You can sprinkle 'em on salads, on ice cream, or on your morning bowl o' Wheaties.

Or, together with the flesh of a hachiya persimmon and a few other goodies, you can use the pomegranate seeds in an autumn version of halo-halo.

Why, hello hello!

Halo-Halo is very much a summertime Filipino treat with layers of shaved ice, sweet beans, macapuno strings, ube, jack fruit, and any other number of sweet bits. And although pomegranates and persimmons are largely autumnal fruits, that doesn't mean they can't be used in halo-halo for a tasty dessert.

In a normal Halo-Halo, after the sweets are layered with shaved ice in a tall glass, some evaporated milk is poured in and allowed to seap into the ice. Then the whole shebang is topped with ice cream.

For my fall weather halo-halo, I used some of the Ube jam (it's still good!) that was given to me by Mila, some macapuno (coconut) strings, and some pomegranate and persimmon. Since I didn't have any canned evaporated milk, I just poured in some milk I had in my refrigerator. Lastly, I topped off my halo-halo with some ice cream--homemade Macapuno Ice Cream would be nice, but I opted for homemade Ube Ice Cream.

I do want to stress the importance of shaved ice in a halo-halo. I don't have an ice shaver, so I crushed some ice in my blender--this was not a suitable substitute! I had to crunch through larger pieces of ice as I ate my halo-halo, and crunching ice/breaking teeth is no fun. So if you do make some halo-halo, make sure you have a very powerful blender, or invest in some sort of ice shaving contraption--for the life of me I couldn't find the manual hand-cranked ice shavers I remember my mother using when I was a kid.

Also, I don't think a recipe is necessary here. Just layer sweet things with shaved ice in a tall glass, pour in some milk, then top with your favorite ice cream. For a more traditional halo-halo, Asian markets carry jars of sweet preserved beans, ube jam, macapuno, jack fruit, gelatin, etc. There are also jars labeled as "halo-halo mix" that have a combination of these items all in one jar.

And lastly, halo-halo is literally translated to mix-mix (so I'm told). So after I eat the ice cream, I mix-mix the rest of the contents with a spoon and make haste with the goodness!

The goodness!

I must say that the pomegranate seeds and the persimmon lend a very different twist, but also very welcome fall flavors, to an otherwise sweet and summery treat.

Fruitcake Fiend

I'm not exactly sure how popular Fruitcake is in the Philippines for Noche Buena (Christmas Eve Feast), or at any other time for that matter. But considering that fruitcake is mostly seen as a joke here in the states, I'm gonna go out on a limb and assume that this wintertime loaf rarely appears on any Filipino tables as well.

For the most part, I can understand Fruitcake's bottom position on the culinary totem pole. At its worst, fruitcake can be nothing more than a heavy brick studded with overly sweet, radioactive day-glo candied fruits. But at its best, fruitcake is wonderfully sweet and aromatically spicy--filled with dried fruits and toasted nuts and preserved with a hefty dose of good liquor.

So with the best fruitcake intentions in mind, I bake a couple of loaves at the end of every October every year--aging each cake for a few weeks and enjoying the first at Thanksgiving, and enjoying the second on Christmas Eve. Sure, fruitcake can be eaten straightaway right after baking, but the cakes are exponentially better after being spritzed with brandy every now and again.

My go-to fruitcake recipe is from Alton Brown's "I'm Just Here For More Food". The original recipe calls for golden raisins, dried cranberries, dried blueberries, dried cherries, and dried apricots, but I tend to use different fruits every year depending on what I can find. For this go around, I stuck with the dried blueberries and cranberries, but I also included some tropical fruits like dried mango, dried rambutan, and dried mangosteen that I found at Trader Joe's. Dried fruits are best for fruitcake because they won't spoil, and they're better for you than candied fruits.

This was the first time that I've ever seen dried rambutan and mangosteen before, so I was excited to open up the packs and give them a try.

At first glance, the dried mangosteen and dried rambutan look a lot like styrofoam, and sadly, they tasted a lot like styrofoam too. Luckily though, they were brought back to life after an overnight soak in rum with the rest of the dried fruits and some fresh orange and lemon zest:

Boozy Fruit

After a dip in rum, the fruit is then simmered with some hard apple cider, sugar, and butter, then folded into some flour and eggs to form a batter. After baking, I spray the fruitcake with apple brandy (100 proof!) that I've poured into a spray bottle. The original recipe calls for normal brandy, but I like the aroma of apple brandy too. Really, any brandy will do. Moesha!

Snazzy spritzer, eh?

At this point, you will be very tempted to cut a slice off of your fruitcake loaf because it smells amazing out of the oven! But I do encourage you to resist this temptation and wait. After the fruitcake cools and has been spritzed on all sides with brandy, I wrap it in plastic wrap, and then in foil, and then I even stick them in a giant zip-top bag on which I write the date.

2 kilos of, uh... 2 bricks of fruitcake, that is.

Every two days for the first two weeks I carefully unwrap the fruitcake and spritz every side with more brandy. After the first two weeks, I then spritz the fruitcake only once a week until I decide to eat it. Don't overdo it with the spritzing, you don't want to soak the cake every time. A light spritzing to wet the surface of the cake will do--it's a sipper, not a chugger.

As long as you keep the fruitcake well-wrapped and give it an occasional brandy spritz, don't worry about it going bad or growing mold. And remember, the dried fruits were preserved in rum to boot, so aging a fruitcake for a month or two is no big deal.

Waiting...

Like I said earlier, I'll cut into my first loaf for Thanksgiving after one month of aging, and I'll cut into my second loaf on Christmas Eve after two months of aging. But because I make this fruitcake every year, I can assure you it's worth the wait.

Fruitcake

Adapted from "I'm Just Here for More Food", by Alton Brown.

Note: Alton Brown's original recipe says it makes one 9-inch loaf, but I always seem to get two loaves out of the same recipe. Perhaps my loaf pans aren't as deep as the recipe needs, so do be wary of this if you try this recipe out. If it seems to yield more batter that will fit in your loaf pan, have a second loaf pan ready.

Any combination of dried fruits works well in this recipe. And don't be discouraged by the long list of ingredients--it's still a simple and worthwhile recipe.

3/4 cup dried rambutan
3/4 cup dried mangosteen
3/4 cup dried blueberries
3/4 cup dried cranberries
3/4 cup dried mangoes, chopped
1/4 cup candied ginger, chopped
zest from 1 lemon
zest from 1 orange
5 whole cloves, freshly ground
3 whole allspice berries, freshly ground
1 cup dark rum
3/4 cup apple juice
1/2 cup hard apple cider
1/2 cup butter (1 stick)
1 cup sugar
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup whole-wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1 cup toasted pecans, chopped
Brandy for spritzing

In a large bowl, combine the dried fruits, ginger, lemon and orange zests, ground cloves, ground allspice, and rum. Cover and soak overnight.

The next day, pour all of the fruit, zests, spices, and rum into a large saucepan. Add the apple juice, hard cider, butter, and sugar. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer for 10 minutes, stirring every couple of minutes. Remove from heat and allow mixture to cool to room temperature. Stir in the eggs.

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Spray loaf pans with nonstick spray, then line with parchment paper "sling" so that fruitcake can be easily lifted out of pans after baking.

In a large bowl, combine the all-purpose flour, whole-wheat flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon, salt, pepper, nutmeg, and pecans. Add the wet mixture to the flour mixture and stir just until combined. Pour batter into loaf pan and bake for one hour. Check for doneness with a skewer or toothpick poked into the middle of the cake--if it comes out clean its done.

Set pans on cooling rack and spray the top with brandy. Cool completely before removing cakes from pan.

Remove cooled cakes from pans, then spritz top and sides with brandy. Remove parchment paper, then wrap cakes tightly in plastic wrap, and then in foil.

Unwrap cakes and spritz with brandy every other day for two weeks, then once a week for the next two weeks.

I like to serve the fruitcake by toasting slices under the broiler for juuuust a minute, then topping with a dollop of mascarpone cheese. Tasty!

Spicy Sizzling Sisig

As mentioned in my previous post, I will be introducing, one at a time, 5 utterly fatty Filipino pork dishes I have deemed as the Five Point Pork Exploding Heart Technique. The first fatty pork dish I'd like to present to you in this series is Spicy Sizzling Sisig.

Sisig is a spicy and sourish Filipino dish usually comprised of pig ears, snout, and cheeks (and sometimes brain!) that have been boiled, grilled, and fried (yes, it's cooked thrice) with spicy chilies and then served on a hot sizzling platter. In other words, it's a platter of sizzling pig's face (and sometimes brain!).

Before any of you turn your own noses up at this dish, let me say that after I've had it in the Philippines in Boracay, and after making it myself, I can certainly attest that Sisig is a damn fine and tasty dish. (Market Manila also has some great Sisig posts here, here, and here.)

Ok fine, you'll give Sisig a try, but how does one obtain a pig's face you ask? Well, if you happen to have access to a severed pig's head, you yourself can easily butcher the face off, as shown in the following Gourmet Magazine video that shows Chef Chris Cosentino butchering a pig's head to make the Italian dish, Porchetta di Testa. Warning: the following video can be disturbing if you don't like to see meat being butchered, but it's pretty awesome and informative nonetheless:

See, Filipinos aren't the only ones to eat pig's face!

Of course, many of us probably don't have access to the severed head of a little piggy, let alone are we willing enough to butcher it ourselves. So making Sisig sans snout with just pork ears and jowl is the next best thing.

If you happen to have some pork ears with hair on them, just shave them with a razor and/or burn them off with a blowtorch as was shown in the Gourmet Magazine video above. Luckily for me, the ears I purchased were already clean-shaven.

To make my Sisig, I first boiled some pork ears for a couple of hours in some water along with a couple of dried chipotle chilies and bay leaves (the chilies and bay were more for aromatic purposes as I didn't want my place smelling like boiling pig ears).

Are you listening to me?

Some Sisig recipes I've seen say to grill the ears first to get rid of any stray hairs, and then boil them. But that seemed counterintuitive to me in that the boiling would probably wash away any desired char and smokiness from the grill.

I also took one of my pork jowls and trimmed away much (a whole friggin lot) of the fat because I thought it would be a shame to waste all the delicious jowl fat to the flames of my grill. Don't fret though, there was still plenty of fat left on the jowl and I saved the trimmed fat for another use down the road (another post for another time).

Fatty Jowl

For those of you unfamiliar with pork jowl, it is used to make the Italian cured meat called Guanciale--which is basically face bacon (rather than bacon made from pork belly). Luckily I ordered two jowls, one for Sisig and one for Guanciale. As soon as the weather cools down around here, I will be curing my own homemade Guanciale with the other pork jowl I have (yet another post for another time).

I then marinated the boiled ears and the trimmed jowl (no need to boil the jowl) in some soy, vinegar, kalamansi juice, garlic, and red pepper flakes overnight. After marinating, I grilled the ears and jowl over high heat until they were nice and charred. I tasted the ears and jowl at this point, and they were so good already--especially the 'qued jowl:

Tasty Barbecued Pork Jowl. Tender meat, quivering fat.

The pork ears were no slouch either, as they seemed to take up a lot of the flavor from the marinade. Although the ears are, of course, all cartiledge, they weren't tough to chew on at all as they were rendered tender from the earlier boiling. Although I used four pork ears for my recipe, feel free to tone it down to two ears.

Soft ears

After I removed the pork from the grill, I chopped everything up into small pieces. Along with some chopped onions and some thai and serrano chilies, I sauteed the pork jowls in a hot skillet--some of the fat renders out from the jowls and ends up caramelizing the onions into sweet bits. I added the chopped ears to the pan at the last minute, then presented everything on a hot sizzling platter as Sisig should be served. Sisig, it's spicy, smoky, tangy, and utterly porky delicious.

Sizzle fer shizzle, home skillet!

And that friends, is the first dish for my Five Point Pork Exploding Heart Technique. Use it with caution. Although there are four more dishes to go, I won't reveal them all here at once because there is indeed a rather effective defense against the lethal Five Point Pork Exploding Heart Technique: Moderation.

Spicy Sizzling Sisig

Serves 4-6

2-4 pork ears, cleaned and rinsed
2 dried chipotle peppers
2 bay leaves
1/2 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup cane vinegar
1/4 cup kalamansi juice (or a mixture of lemon and lime juice)
3 garlic cloves, smashed
1 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1 pound pork jowl, trimmed of excess fat (save trimmed fat for another use)
1 onion, diced
1 thai bird chili, sliced
1 serrano chili, sliced
1/4 teaspoon smoked paprika (pimenton)

Place the pork ears, chipotle peppers, and bay leaves in a large pot and cover with water. Bring the water to a boil, then reduce heat to a simmer. Cover the pot and continue simmering for 2 hours until the ears become tender. Drain the ears and allow to cool to room temperature.

Combine the soy, vinegar, kalamansi juice, garlic, and pepper flakes to make a marinade. Place the pork ears and jowl in a large zip-top bag, or in a shallow dish, and pour the marinade over the pork. Marinate the pork overnight.

Remove the pork from the marinade then discard the marinade. Pat the ears dry with paper towels, then brush them with oil (no oil is needed for the already fatty jowl). Place the ears and the jowl on a very hot grill and cook for a total of 15-20 minutes, turning the ears and the jowl frequently. Remove pork from grill and allow to rest until they are cool enough to handle.

Chop the pork ears into small pieces and set aside. Chop the pork jowl into small pieces and set aside, making sure to keep the jowl separate from the ears.

Add the pork jowls to a large skillet over high heat and saute for 3-5 minutes. At this point, you can pour off some of the rendered fat that collects in the pan, but I left it in there. Add the onions, chilies, and paprika to the hot pan and cook until the onions soften. Add the chopped ears to the pan and mix everything to combine. Cook for 1 more minute, then place the Sisig on a pre-heated sizzling hot platter.

Provide some fresh kalamansi (or lime or lemon) on the side for spritzing onto the Sisig. Serve the Sisig with rice and an ice cold beer.

 

The Five Point Pork Exploding Heart Technique:

• Dish #1: Spicy Sizzling Sisig
• Dish #2: Pork Belly Adobo
• Dish #3: Paksiw na Lechon
• Dish #4: Lechon Kawali: Deep-Fried Pork Belly
• Dish #5: Longanisa

Five Point Pork Exploding Heart Technique

Some of you may have heard of the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique in which a skilled assassin can deliver five well-placed strikes to an enemy's chest. After receiving these five strikes to the chest, the enemy's heart explodes after walking five steps. As you can see, it's a pretty awesome move:

Ah, Kill Bill Vol. 2. It's a classic.

Although that crazy old Pai Mei also taught me the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique, I've since had to reconsider my use of this skill on account of the time I was forced to kill a rabid unicorn that mistakenly wandered into my living room. It was an historic occasion considering the fact that I proved both the effectiveness of the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique, and the existence of a "mythical" creature.

Sadly, no one else was around to witness this feat, and I disposed of the unicorn carcass before the wife came home (though I did save the horn as it fetched a nice price on the black market). But I digress.

Not pleased with the too-instant results of my lethal palm strikes, I sent away for a more gradual solution for coaxing hearts into explosion. So sometime last week, a much anticipated package arrived at the Burnt Lumpia Worldwide Headquarters:

What's in the box?!!

What's in the box, you ask? A sweet pair of solid gold nunchucks? A blowgun? A machete-wielding leprechaun? None of the above, actually. It's a box o' pork parts:

More specifically, it was a cooler filled with pork from all-natural, pure pastured, heritage breed Ossabaw pigs: a couple slabs of pork belly, a couple pork jowls, and some pork ears. Why did I bother sending away for such fancy-pants pork? Because commercially raised pork is gross, plain and simple. Generally speaking, commercial pigs are raised in confinement (that's putting it nicely), are shot up with hormones and antibiotics, are raised to be lean and have less fat (what good is a skinny pig?), and are pretty bland in flavor (less fat, remember?).

Whereas the pork I purchased online came from completely pasture-raised all natural pigs that roam outside like pigs should, rather than being confined to a feedlot. There are a number of fine online purveyors of pastured pork (Niman Ranch, Flying Pigs Farm, and Heritage Foods just to name a few), but after much research I ended up purchasing my pork from Caw Caw Creek in South Carolina because it was the only place I could find that sold pig ears (I'll get to the ears later, but trust me, they're good eats). I initially wanted to keep things local and purchase good pork from California, but I could only find places that sold whole pigs and half pigs--and I don't have that kind of freezer space.

And sure, you could probably find pork belly and pork ears at Asian and/or Latin markets, but good luck finding some nice pork jowl (pig cheek).

Pork Jowl: Skin Side Up

Pork Jowl: Meat and Fat Side Up

Also, because my wife and I would be the ones consuming all this pork, why not order the good stuff? After all, it's our hearts that will be exploding so I'd rather they explode via the fat of humanely raised hogs. Ah yes, it's a little old fashioned, but there's nothing like stopping a heartbeat after years of eating delicious and fatty pork.

Now armed with these weapons of porcine pieces, I could explode hearts with the best of 'em--although at a much slower pace. As such, I have developed my own deadly martial skill that I call the Five Point PORK Exploding Heart Technique. Instead of striking five vital points around the heart with my palm, I can stop the heart via five secret delicious and porky Pinoy dishes (pretty much any and all Filipino pork dishes can go on this list, but I'm going with five of my choosing).

Death by the Five Point Pork Exploding Heart Technique is much slower than death by the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique, but it's just as awesome, and a lot more tasty. And I would like to pass these secrets on to you, dear readers, as long as you promise to use these powers for good rather than evil.

These five "secret" dishes of death are as follows...

The Five Point Pork Exploding Heart Technique:

• Dish #1: Spicy Sizzling Sisig
• Dish #2: Pork Belly Adobo
  
• Dish #3: Paksiw na Lechon
• Dish #4: Lechon Kawali/Bagnet/Chicharon
• Dish #5: Longanisa

Enjoy them all, if you dare!