Category: Cooking

In this series of posts, I’ll be discussing the different Filipino dishes that I’ve been cooking and experimenting on for quite some time now.

« You can find out more in the introductory post.

Just two quick notes for all recipes:

• Most of them, when paired with rice, will serve 3-5 people.
• I will only show pictures of the ingredients. I’m leaving the “take a picture of the dish” to the foodies. Go to Google Image Search if you want pictures of the dishes.

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For this first recipe, I present the very first dish I learned to cook on my own:

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Giniling

(Ground Meat Soup… ok, that translation sounds weird. It’s like saying Chili is “Ground Meat Chili Soup”)

in the picture: small carrots and potatoes in place of medium

1/4 kg ground beef
1 medium carrot, diced
1 medium potato, diced
1 small onion, minced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 beef bouillon cube
1 small bay leaf
2 tbsp soy sauce

Step 1: Put the beef in a pot (I prefer stainless steel) over medium-high heat. Stir the meat around once in a while to evenly brown it. As the beef starts to brown, dump in the onion and garlic and saute them along with the beef.

Step 2: When the beef has finished browning, add the rest of the ingredients. Add water until the vegetables are fully immersed. Cover the pot and let it simmer (stirring occasionally) until the vegetables are cooked. Season to taste and serve.

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Giniling (literally: ground- e.g. “giniling na baka” is “ground beef”) is a dish made with ground meat as the base. It has many variations, the most common of which resembles Picadillo – ground beef with minced/diced vegetables and tomato sauce. The dish can easily be tweaked to make the other versions and we will go through them later.

As mentioned above, this soupy, soy sauce-only variation is also the first Filipino dish that I learned to cook without any guidance as a grade school student, a testament to how easy this dish can be made. It’s also almost the same recipe, with slight modifications based on the lessons that I learned since the first time I made it.

Now on to the “Science”, starting with the meat.

Anyone who has made burgers will know the importance of the lean/fat ratio – lean cuts like ground sirloin (90/10) will reduce the fat at the price of flavor. Using cheap ground beef (70/30), however, tends to make the dish drown in fat. I would suggest using ground sirloin first then experimenting with mixing it with the cheap stuff.

Don’t wash the ground beef on a strainer! You might find this weird but some people actually do this. Some say it’s to clean the meat (no need, bacteria will die at browning), others say it’s to reduce the fat (just get a leaner cut or scoop out some of it after browning). The only good reason for washing beef is to find bits of bone in the meat, and this can easily be remedied by buying your beef at any decent meat store.

In terms of cooking, it’s ok to just cook the beef to gray done-ness especially if you’re pressed for time, but browning (i.e. Mallard reaction) imparts additional flavors to the meat.

(For the newbies: by “brown”, we don’t actually want you to overcook it to “totally brown”. It’s more like “gray with brown bits” like your favorite fast food burger. Browned meat bits covering a good portion of the bottom of the pot is a good sign to stop.)

With the meat done, step 2 is all about turning the dish from “Stir Fried Ground Beef” to “Giniling“. Let’s run through the rest of the ingredients and the possible variations:

The “add-ons” provide a contrast for the flavor and mouthfeel and should be small or at least bite-sized. Traditionally this would mean diced carrots, potatoes, and chayote (I love chayote, but I usually reserve it for other recipes so it’s not in this one). Variations include raisins, peas, corn (all 3 require no prep, and peas, corn, and carrots are the basic frozen mixed vegetables), and boiled quail and chicken eggs.

String beans as the lone addition is another option. This will turn the recipe into a cross between Giniling and Adobong Sitaw so no tomato sauce should be added. You can saute the green beans for a while before adding the water, or you can just let it boil/steam.

The remaining ingredients build the flavor profile. Soy sauce and/or tomato sauce/paste provide the base flavor (oddly enough, these two ingredients work well together). We don’t use tomato sauce in our household for practical reasons: while soy sauce is used everywhere, tomato sauce isn’t and will just sit idle in the ref. Not to mention that there’s no much difference in the flavor whether you use it or not (IMO).

The bay leaf is there for the aroma; don’t use too much of it or it will overpower the basic flavor. You can remove the bay leaf before serving if you want.

Beef bouillon cube isn’t a traditional ingredient, but I find bouillon cubes to be a better alternative than guessing the right amount of salt to bring out the body and flavor of many Filipino dishes. (Beef stock would be nice, but since when did you see beef stock in your average Filipino household?) Sometimes I also add oyster sauce for extra body and a hint of sweetness.

And finally, the last ingredient: water. Adding enough water to cover the vegetables will produce soupy Giniling. In some cases, you may not want a soupy dish e.g. you’re serving it along with stew. You can reduce the amount of water by half in those situations.

You shouldn’t remove water and rely solely on the soy sauce for liquid, however, as you need water to cook the vegetables and help >deglaze the bottom of the pot where much of the flavor is still stuck.

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And that’s it, a basic Filipino dish that a child can cook. You can’t really go wrong with it apart from adding too much soy sauce and making it too salty, and even then you can try to salvage it by adding sugar.

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Next dish: Bistek »

If I were to be asked about my specialty as a hobbyist cook, I’d say it’s Italian. Most of the food pics I’ve taken in the past years are either experiments in spaghetti or homemade pizza.

Through some unforeseen events, however, I had to brush up on Filipino cuisine earlier this year as I took on the role of designated dinner cook for our household 4-5 times a week. My productivity took a nosedive (I had to budget 1-2 hours a day out of my work) but it gave me a chance to experiment and level up my Filipino cuisine cooking skills.

In these series of blog posts, I’ll be discussing the various dishes that I have been making on a regular basis. To make this different from other cooking blogs, I won’t just be posting a recipe handed down to me by my mother/grandmother. Instead, I’ll try to look a bit deeper into the recipes and attempt to explain why some cooking techniques work and why some don’t. In short, I’ll be doing a mini Good Eats / Serious Eats Food Lab for every dish.

But before that, let’s get one thing out of the way first…

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The obligatory “Why hasn’t Filipino cuisine caught on abroad yet?” discussion

I’ve had some small discussions with friends about cooking recently and this topic came up a couple of times. Since I’m writing blog posts on Filipino cuisine, I might as well give my 2 cents on the subject now.

In my opinion, there are a few big reasons:

1. Filipino cuisine is rustic and practical.

For reference, look at Japanese cuisine. The “boom” in Japanese cuisine was through sushi – an exotic dish whose preparation takes years of experience to master. But do Japanese people eat sushi everyday? Not really. Their regular dishes are not that different from their East Asian and Southeast Asian neighbors.

I feel that many are trying to do the same thing with Filipino cuisine, find a class of Filipino dishes that will get a restaurant a Michelin star. But that won’t happen – while there are certainly a lot of exotic Filipino dishes, AFAIK none of them have the same level of sophistication as, say, French cuisine. You can certainly dress them up as such, but people will see through the farce.

On a similar note, the “practical” above also means that Filipino cuisine are often full of fat – something that you’d want to have to prepare for famine (especially in a country frequently devastated by Typhoons). Until the whole “fat is evil” propaganda is corrected to “excess food is evil” in the biggest accessible potential market for Filipino cuisine (USA), it will definitely be a hard sell.

2. Filipino cuisine is (and isn’t) fusion cuisine.

Being a colony and trade port for so long, Filipino food has been influenced a lot by other cultures, whether it’s the pre-colonial regional influences (Chinese, Malay/Indonesian) or the more recent influences (Spanish, American). Because of this, it’s hard to claim a dish is purely “Filipino” or not.

What some don’t realize is that it’s okay for a “Filipino” dish to not be “purely” Filipino. There are many dishes that we attribute to a certain culture that are actually heavily influenced by foreign cultures e.g. tonkatsu. All that matters is that we’ve adapted that dish into our lives, modifying it such that it is more practical given the availability of ingredients and such that it’s flavor fits in with what the mainstream considers “tasty”.

This also means that we probably shouldn’t market Filipino cuisine as “fusion cuisine” because we already adopted them as “Filipino” (with a few exceptions like, say, banana ketchup spaghetti). Just as forcing ourselves to find a “truly Filipino” dish is blindly nationalistic, going the opposite route may be perceived as belittling one’s own nation’s culture.

3. Pansit, Lumpia, and Adobo.

Screw Pansit, screw Lumpia, and screw Adobo. I’m ok with them, but they’re definitely not on my list of favorite Pinoy foods. I’m not even going to write about them in this series except for one of them, and that’s only because they’re so close to another dish.

But when you ask a 2nd or 3rd generation Filipino-American about their favorite food, it’s always these three freaking dishes that their Lola used to make. No mention of the various stews, grilled foods, deserts, etc. No mention of the regional dishes and how they contrast with the ones found in Metro Manila.

In other words, so many of these people are out of touch with what’s really being eaten in the “motherland” and we cannot expect them to promote Filipino cuisine well.

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With that out of the way, let’s move on to the first dish »