Burnt Lumpia: Filipino Food | Filipino Recipes | Culinary Hijinks

Giveaway: Philippine Sea Salt

Ever since bringing back a stash of Ilocano Sea Salt from a trip to the Philippines a few years ago, I've been hooked on the salty Filipino crystals. I've used Philppine sea salt in everything savory--from adobos to salads--and believe it or not, in everything sweet--like cookies and ice creams.

I'm a fiend for that Filipino flake.

And although I've since exhausted that original stash of Badoc's finest, I've been lucky enough to have a network of enablers who keep my sea salt carousel spinning. Whenever a friend or family member makes a trek to the Islands, I make damn sure they bring me back a couple bags of the white stuff to replenish my home supply. And they gladly oblige.

Mules. Suckers.

Speaking of mules and suckers, my mom brought me back about 2 keys of Badoc Asin on her last trip there earlier this year. And even though I lace many a dish with Philippine sea salt, it isn't likely that I'll blow through that much shake any time soon.

But now, when I do run out of my prized salt from the South China Sea, I won't have to rely on my network of mules to go to the P.I. and back. I've now discovered a local dealer that can satisfy my salty needs.

xroads Philippine Sea Salts are purveyors of, yup, premium Philippine sea salts. xroads is a small outfit run out of Northern California, importing and selling two unique types of sea salt from the Philippines. Lucky for me, xroads was kind enough to send me some salty samples.

Bangus Sisig

Ah, Sisig! When prepared correctly, nothing quite captures the varied flavors and textures of Filipino cuisine like a sizzling-hot platter of chopped pig's face. It's true.

Chewy and crispy, fatty and meaty, sour and spicy--they're all there. Gustatory opposites complementing each other on a single plate of porky goodness. And thanks in large part to the increasing popularity of ethnic street food in the United States, and more specifically, to the growing interest in Filipino cuisine as a whole, more and more people have come to enjoy this once-obscure Pinoy dish.

Since my first post on Sisig nearly three years ago, the humble street food has gone on to enjoy some time in the limelight (err, kalamansi-light?). Sure, sisig has always been served in a handful of mom-and-pop hole-in-the-walls, but it didn't hurt that some yahoo started slinging pig face from a food truck, or that Anthony Bourdain sang Sisig's praises on TV:

Alas, despite the joys that come with eating the wobbly and chewy bits of a pig's face and ears, some people just can't bring themselves to eat the wobbly and chewy bits of a pig's face and ears. And that's understandable. I suppose.

But if you've got no qualms with stuffing your own face with that of a pig, there's also the not-so-small issue of fat--and there's a lot of it in pig cheeks. Take a look at a cross-section of a pork jowl and it looks a lot like that of a pork belly, hence the term "face bacon".

So what's a Filipino food lover to do when a hankering for sisig is had, but just sans fatty face? Luckily, there are more savory sisig scenarios besides pork. Filipinos have long sisig'd other proteins like tofu, chicken, and various seafoods.

But sisig made from Bangus (or milkfish), is perhaps my favorite non-pork face option for the classic street food.

LA Times' Pandan Chiffon Cake with Coconut Glaze

Walk into most any Filipino bakery (in the U.S. and in the P.I.) and you are just as likely to find a display of brightly decorated chiffon cakes as you are to see the plain-jane likes of freshly baked pan de sal and ensaimada.

Big chain Filipino bakeries like Golidlocks and Red Ribbon, as well as smaller mom and pop joints, all crank out various frosted, iced, and overly sugared chiffons ranging in flavors from chocolate, to mocha, to mango, to pandan, to macapuno, and the ever-popular (and ever-purple) ube. Heck, my family even loves the neon tropical chiffon cakes (passion fruit & guava!) from King's Hawaiian bakeries.

Yup. We Pinoys loves us some chiffon cake.

But how on Earth did an American cake come to be such a popular dessert amongst Filipinos? Well, probably in the same way that spam, ice cream, and hamburgers made their way into the Filipino culinary landscape--American tastes and food products crossed over to the Philippines during the American occupation of the Islands in the first half of the 20th century. Ever since then, chiffon cake (and spam, and ice cream, and hamburgers, and many other things) has stuck with us. Ah, colonialism!

Anyways, when the LA Times recently ran this story on chiffon cake (and provided recipes for a basic chiffon as well as chocolate, hazelnut-orange, and pandan-coconut) I knew I had to dust off my angel food cake pan and give one of the Times' chiffon recipes a try. Although I considered ube-fying the basic recipe for chiffon cake, I decided to instead give the pandan-coconut recipe a whirl (my cup runneth over with a crapload of ube recipes).

Rat Tails in the Garden

On most visits to my grandparents' house, I can usually be found in the kitchen, hovering around my grandmother and her two sisters (AKA "The Aunties", AKA my extra grandmas) as they prepare that day's meal. And while many of the kitchen ingredients come directly from the backyard garden that my grandfather usually tends, I rarely venture out there on account of things like bugs and dirt. I mean, I can't be bothered to have my nice kicks all muddied up now can I?

Truthfully though, my grandfather hasn't been himself for the past few months, so he and his green thumbs have been inside the house and away from his vegetables in the backyard. But despite my grandfather's absence from the garden, I still found my grandmother prepping a particularly interesting looking veggie on my last visit to their home.

On the kitchen counter were a bowlful of strange green pods resembling some sort of love child sprung from the loins of a green bean and a green thai chile. My grandmother told me that they were the pods that eventually grow from a radish root if left to its own devices.

Initially, I was quite dubious of this "radish pod" talk. Stuff grows out of a radish root? That's crazy I thought. Maybe my grandfather had been well enough to go outside and grow these magic beans. Or maybe my grandmother or her sisters had been tending the garden. So I actually went outside to the garden to have a look for myself.