Chef Romy Dorotan of Purple Yam explaining the use of guava in sinigang

Sour Flavors of the Philippines: sinigang and adobo

How does Philippine cooking  differ from other Southeast Asian cuisines?  Sourness is at the heart of Philippine cooking:  sinigang (soups soured by sour fruits like tamarind, guava, kamias); adobos (natural vinegars) and kinilaw (citrus juices, sour fruits or vinegars).

Sinigang or Philippine sour soup

Sinigang is a sour soup that can be made with pork, beef and seafood (shellfish or fish).  And there are classic derivations of the dish called sinampalukang manok (chicken soured by tamarind flowers and leaves) and bulanglang in Pampanga (bangus or milkfish with guava and kangkong or water spinach)

For the cooking class, we decided to do pork belly sinigang with guava and kangkong.

Pork belly sinigang with guava and kangkong

The most important concept we wanted to teach about sinigang is the process of doing a broth first by boiling the meat with onions, tomatoes, guava, black peppercorns, celery and possibly any other vegetable that you might want to add to the flavors.  Once the meat is tender (about 45 min), the meat is removed from the broth and it is strained to remove all the solids esp the guava seeds.  I find it dangerous to leave guava seeds in the broth as an unsuspecting diner can break a tooth biting into these seeds.

Pork belly simmered just right

One big mistake most people do when making soups or stews is they think it does not matter how long they leave the meats on the stove simmering.  Overcooked meats have lost all their juices and flavors and there is nothing worse than eating disintegrating meat.

To finish the sinigang, the meat is reunited with the strained broth along with tomatoes, chilies, salt, crushed black peppercorns, taro, radish, lemon juice and finally the kangkong.  All leafy veggies must be added just minutes before the hot soup is served.

The best part of eating the sinigang is that you can season the soup according to your taste through the  sawsawan or dip: kalamansi or lemon juice with patis (fish sauce) spiked with sliced chilies.

Two Adobos: chicken and pork sparerib

coconut sap vinegar with coconut milk & turmeric and chiles

Adobos are vinegar-based stews.  If you use other souring agents such as citrus juices or sour fruits, it is no longer an adobo; the dish becomes something else.  Just like the sinigang cannot be soured by vinegar — it becomes paksiw.

Soy sauce is NOT an essential ingredient of adobo.  In fact, I still encounter Filipino purists who stick their noses up at people using soy sauce claiming that it is a Chinese ingredient and not Filipino.  The classic adobo was cooked carefully over slow heat and must be browned in its own fat.  Using soy sauce to brown the adobo was considered lazy cooking.  But today, the majority of Filipinos use soy sauce in their adobos and using it is perfectly fine.

Turmeric or dilaw in Tagalog is used in Central Luzon (Pampanga and Bulacan) to cook eels and catfish adobo style.  In India, the classic use of turmeric is with poultry and seafood.  So chicken turmeric adobo was something I wanted to teach students as this is part of our legacy.

The secret to a good adobo is the quality of the vinegar:  use natural vinegars which is why I went to Whole Foods to get Coconut Secret, a Philippine coconut sap vinegar that is organic and aged for one year.  We used this vinegar for the chicken.

Finishing the adobo

Adobos can either be served wet or dry

Adobos can be served straight with the sauce (wet) or it can be finished by frying, broiling or grilling.  Then the sauce is simmered and reduced to a thicker sauce and served either on the side or the meat is returned to the sauce.

grilled pork spareribs adobo cooked in organic apple cider vinegar and apples

We tried another adobo using a different type of vinegar:  Bragg’s unfiltered, raw, organic apple cider vinegar.  For me, pork and apples are a classic pair.  I like to add peeled apple chunks to my adobo stew for sweetness (pls NEVER sweeten your adobos with sugar; use fruits).  When the ribs hit the grill, the sugar from the apples caramelize the ribs and the flavors are truly addictive.

NOTE: For recipes of adobos, please check an earlier post on Adobos and Vinegars

fried whole garlic cloves harvested from the sauce

Chef Romy likes to put a lot of whole garlic cloves (as opposed to minced) into his adobo stew and can be harvested and fried to garnish the dish.  It is also delicious when eaten with hot steaming rice along with the adobo sauce.  As added note, use tellicherry black peppercorns and crush them in a mortar and pestle before putting them into the adobo sauce.

Members of CORE pose after the meal of sinigang and adobo.

The best part of the cooking class is to be able to sit down together to commune and share the food.  Along with the sinigang and adobos, Romy served them a cucumber, tomato and melon salad and to cleanse the palate, the students had ice cream: purple yam, mango, avocado, coffee and banana caramel.

It was a feast worth sharing and hopefully to be repeated as these students go home and cook sinigang and adobo for their family and friends.

Sarap!

Beef and vegetarian empanaditas (turnovers) and rice croquettes made a wonderful spread at the BBG

We were like children in a candy store –let loose to harvest anything in the Herb Garden of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden because we were cooking up turnovers and croquettes for the Sunday celebration of the opening of the Herb Garden.  This past Friday, Caleb Leech, Herb Curator of the BBG, toured us around the Garden which had expanded its reach beyond the typical Mediterranean herbs we are all familiar with.  The new Herb Garden had Malabar spinach (a Filipino veggie staple) along with veggies like eggplant, squash, longbeans and fruits like Asian pears, Bosc pears and apples.

Saturday night, Chef Romy had cooked two different types of filling for the empanaditas: beef with hyssop, fennel, Cuban oregano, garlic chives & lemon thyme AND a vegetarian one with corn, purple sweet potato, carrots and greens from the Garden such as red and yellow Swiss chard and beet leaves.  A week ago, I had a eureka moment and thought of inviting Ayesha Vera-Yu to participate in our project by presenting the organic rice grains grown in her family farm in Capiz, Philippines.  She and her mother are trying to test the US market for their grain varieties representing several stages of polish.  So she decided to ask her nephew, Casto Unson, a passionate cook, to make rice croquettes using their unpolished red rice with Casto adding roasted lavender and goat cheese to the mix.

Casto harvesting Thai basil, parsley & mint to top the rice croquettes

In the meantime, Perry Mamaril, our chef-artist (of bamboo fame) was busy harvesting chiles, tomatoes, sea fennel, lemon balm to add to the growing list of toppings to put on both the empanaditas and croquettes.  He sliced some chiles which added a nice kick to the beef turnovers squeezing lemon juice, sprinkling sea salt and a dash of olive oil to what was becoming an herb and tomato salad.

Different chiles harvested from the Herb Garden

Even though the crowd was light and our pace was leisurely, we ran out of food by 2:30 pm -  400 empanaditas and 100 rice croquettes gone in three hours.  What was surprising was to see children delight in the textures of unpolished red rice and many of them were turned on to herbs and tomatoes.

It was a very pleasant day — overcast with no sun and we were thankful that our spread was not rained out.  Thank you to the BBG staff: Katie Blumm who thought of matching us up with the Garden in the first place after seeing our little garden at Purple Yam; Josh Diamond for providing logistics and good cheer and to Caleb Leech, who gave us bags of harvested Malabar spinach and Swiss Chard for our vegetarian empanaditas.

We hope to have continued partnership projects with the BBG in years to come!

Bee feeding on the flowers

red leaf amaranth

Herbs from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden

Herbs harvested from the BBG Herb Garden: Thai basil, fennel, hyssop, lemon thyme, different chiles, bay leaves and Cuban oregano.  Outside the bowl: eggplant, okra, Malabar spinach leaves (alugbati to Filipinos) and Asian pears.

On Sunday, August 15, 2010, Purple Yam will be at the BBG to give out some Filipino home cooking using herbs harvested from the BBG Herb Garden.  Thanks to Herb Curator, Caleb Leech, we were able to go this Friday and get these precious flavor agents that nature gives us so freely (herbs are very easy to grow).

Purple Yam will be making two types of empanaditas (baked turnovers): vegetarian and beef.

The ground beef filling has fennel, thyme, garlic chives, bay leaves and chilies along with yellow peppers, carrots, potatoes and onions.

Vegetarian filling for empanaditas

This is the base for the vegetarian empanadita: corn, carrots, onions and purple sweet potato.  Then we have the harvested greens from the BBG garden (see below)

Swiss chard and beet leaves

Yellow and red Swiss chard

Aside from the two empanaditas, our friend, Ayesha Vera-Yu and her nephew, Casto, are cooking up a delicious rice croquette (which will be sprinkled with freshly harvested herbs from the Garden before serving) made with the rice grains grown in Ayesha’s family farm in Capiz, Philippines.  Ayesha and her mother are passionate believers in growing organic rice and rescuing heirloom rice species that are endangered bringing them back to Filipinos and sharing with us here in the US to get a taste of our heritage.

Whenever Romy and I are asked to cook to showcase Filipino food, I try as much as possible to cook something that came directly from the Philippines.  The rice grew from Philippine soil with grains that our ancestors harvested and ate.  There is nothing better to share with others than something that came from our land and tilled by farmers in the Philippines!

Enjoy and hope to see you at the beautiful Brooklyn Botanic Garden.  If not on Sunday, just go to the BBG and support what it does for our health and well-being!

BBG Herb Garden weekend, Aug 14 – 15, 2010

It was quite a pleasant surprise to get an email from Kate Blumm of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, to invite Purple Yam to provide some small treats for the weekend celebration of the Herb Garden on Aug 14 – 15.  She had come to PY and loved the food and the little corner of flowers, herbs and ferns we have in our back patio.  My post about the gumamela thriving in its new Ditmas Park home was the clincher.  I told her that Romy had been tending the little plots of earth and trees in front of our building on Cortelyou Rd starting last year while we were waiting for the seemingly endless construction and bureaucratic nightmare that the City imposes on any one who dares open a restaurant in this city.

herb garden release_finalJB

After reading the history of this 17,000 sq ft Herb Garden that took 3 years to build in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, there was no way we could pass up this opportunity.  How wonderful that the planners of this Garden looked at the communities that live in Brooklyn and sought to represent all these cultures and cuisines that use the herbs (and some vegetables) in their cooking.  Southeast Asians use a lot of herbs in their cooking: basils, lemongrass, mint, oregano, thyme, bay leaves, etc.

One bit of irony is that Filipinos are not heavy users of herbs the way the Thais and Vietnamese do.  Lemongrass is used in the Visayas and is mainly used for stuffing roast pigs.  In Ilocos in the northern part of Luzon, the Ilocanos use pasotes (epazote) that the Mexican galleons brought over during a 250-year period of shipping goods, people and food between Manila and Acapulco when the Philippines was a colony of  Spain.  In Bicol, they have herba buena (mint) and mountain oregano which they put in the Catanduanes tilmok and the Sorsogon kinagang  –  tamales like concoctions of young coconut, fermented tiny crabs (talangka), scallions, garlic, herba buena and/or oregano wrapped in either banana leaves or hagikhik leaves (if you really want to be authentic).

One of the most common flavoring agents Filipinos use is the bay leaf which is used in adobos and tomato-based Spanish-Mexican stews like apritada, kalderetta or asado.

I suppose a 50 year period of American colonization that followed Spanish rule did not improve our taste for herbs as the Americans institutionalized the use of processed American food in the Philippine diet.  Our native rice and fish were deemed inferior in providing the Filipinos with enough proteins and nutrients to achieve good health and well being, so we were taught to eat hamburgers, french fries, ice cream, donuts, cakes and candy.

So it is a wonderful way to circle back into August 2010 to have Filipinos help celebrate the BBG Herb Garden.  Herbs are nature’s best flavoring agents — so easy to grow, so accessible, so delicate and refreshing to the palate.  We will be serving vegetarian and beef empanaditas laced with herbs, veggie leaves or roots that the BBG can give us.  Kate gave me a list that were possible to use: Thai basil, cinnamon basil, Malabar spinach, leaf amaranth, chard, kale and beets.  In the Philippines, Malabar spinach is called alugbati which is usually blanched and made into a salad with sliced red onions dressed with a vinegar-water-sugar-black peppercorn mixture OR added as a leafy green to munggo (mung bean soup) that is a much beloved dish in the Philippines.

Brighton Beach guide NY Mag

My friend, Daisann McLane, former NYT Frugal Traveler, is in town for the summer and has enticed me to explore the world of Brighton Beach.  So next week,  we are going with a friend, Lilet Camara, who is also visiting NYC for the week.  Daisann has been living in HK for half of the year for the past several years now and has established a thriving tour business called Little Adventures of HongKong.  Now that she is here in Brooklyn, she did a Little Tour of Brooklyn for some of her clients in her HK tour business.  She took them to an Uzbek restaurant in Brighton Beach which I am dying to try out.  Daisann told me that the Russians sent a lot of North Koreans to Uzbekistan during the Cold War era and they have taken root in that country’s culture and cuisine.  Can’s wait to try out Uzbek kimchi and food flavored with sesame oil.

Will have stories and photos next week!  In the meantime, enjoy the kinder and cooler summer weather we have been getting.

22-23 Class Time

F&B World Philippines, July 2010 issue, has an article about Purple Yam.  Thanks to CJ Juntereal’s writing that captures all our hopes for Filipino food.  Thanks to Enderun Colleges for allowing me to do the Ang Sariling Atin Workshop in their campus.  Thanks to Nana Ozaeta, editor-in-chief of F&B World for featuring our work on promoting Philippine food as we embark on our latest project,  the Purple Yam in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn.

Purple Yam is more than a restaurant to us.  It has become an extension of our lives whose meaning has become so closely connected to our culinary roots and heritage.  As we get older, some truths are clearer to discern:  the survival of our society and civilization rests on how much we can save the past.  Without the past, the future looks barren devoid of all the wonderful things people have created over time.  Without the past there is no continuity.

The Cendrillon hibiscus blooms again (finally) at Purple Yam

This hibiscus (gumamela in the Philippines) was given to us by  Stewart, Tabori & Chang, the publisher of our cookbook, Memories of Philippine Kitchens when Frank Bruni, then food critic of the New York Times gave us a 2-star review of Cendrillon on August 3, 2005.

This gumamela flowered and gave us so much pleasure for several months that we decided to keep it indoors at Cendrillon during the winter and outdoors as our mascot by the door during the warm summer months.  But for the last three or four years, it was just a plant and it never bloomed again.

When we closed the Cendrillon doors in March 2009, the gumamela came home with us and stayed indoors in our house until early this spring when we were putting out as much greenery and flowers for the Purple Yam backyard.  Perry Mamaril, our resident artist and lunch chef, never gave up on this gumamela.  “It will bloom again, believe me,” he reassured me.

Today, one of the hottest days on record, as we were suffering triple digit temperatures here in Brooklyn, the first bloom came out.  “And there are more buds in the offing,” Perry told me like a proud Dad.

Thank you Leslie, Marisa and all the wonderful people at STC for giving us good memories (and a very beautiful book, too).

Yes, we are open for dinner starting at 5:30 pm Monday, July 5, 2010.

For those of you who are tired of spending many hours before the grill, let us do the cooking for you tonight.  You don’t have to wash dishes either.  So relax and come to Purple Yam!

Hope everybody had a relaxing weekend!

Crispy pata or deep fried pig trotters are a Filipino delicacy

I distinctly remember the year when I was a teen-ager in Manila when crispy pata became the rage and Filipinos discovered one more way to enjoy an otherwise ignored part of the pig.  This dish, along with sisig (sizzling pig cheeks, snout & ears marinated in lime juice and spiked with chopped onions and chiles) illustrates how we Filipinos do not like to waste anything and how imaginative cooks can create new cravings that have withstood the test of time.

The trotter is boiled with  garlic, onions, black peppercorns and bay leaves until tender (about 1- 1/2 hours) seasoned with sea salt (or patis or fish sauce if you prefer), and then air dried on a rack.  Or you can brush it lightly with some rice vinegar and roast in an oven until the skin is dry.  Once the trotter is thoroughly dry, you can deep fry until the skin is crispy.

Note: the secret to deep frying is whatever you are frying has to be thoroughly dry or else the moisture will defeat the process of creating something crispy.

Serve with a delicious dip of soy sauce, rice vinegar, sliced garlic, scallions and  chopped chiles.

Our Melissa enjoying the red (raspberry), white (coconut) and blue (blueberries) dessert at PY

Chill out with our homemade ice creams and sorbets at Purple Yam.  Melissa Gregoli (my nephew Tim Quirino’s love of his life) tried our triple hitter: raspberry & coconut sorbets with blueberries.

Chef Romy has also come up with a delicious sour cherry-blueberry caramel sauce that can be paired with our vanilla bean ice cream (or any ice cream such as macapuno or jackfruit ice cream) to match the red, white and blue motif of the weekend.

Happy Fourth of July everyone!  Enjoy the ‘cue and the fireworks.

White House Exec Chef Cris Comerford (center) and WH Pastry Chef Bill Yosses (foreground) with Chef Romy

It was a leisurely Saturday brunch at Purple Yam and we were enjoying a visit with Clarissa delos Reyes and Steve Payne.  Clarissa had just come back from Bohol, Philippines where she worked as second camera for John Sayles’s latest movie, Amigo, a fictionalized moment of the Philippine American War.

Then Romy excitedly told me that Chef Cris from the White House had just come in.  What a treat and a great surprise.  It was even a bigger thrill to find out that she and WH Pastry Chef Bill Yosses had just decided to take the train from DC to NYC and go to Brooklyn to have brunch at Purple Yam.  Bill had been several times to Cendrillon with his partner, Charlie (seated on the far right) even before he took over the pastry dept at the WH.

So after posting on FB (and a whole slew of people excitedly commenting and clicking Like on the post) some people were curious as to what they ordered. Well, they ordered just like everybody else: ukoy (fritters), chicken adobo with bagoong fried rice (coincidentally that was the combo that NYT food critic Sam Sifton had recommended), pancit luglug, and Romy gave them a taste of Chef Perry Mamaril’s Ilocano-style dry dinuguan which we serve during our Lutong Bahay (home cooking) lunch from Wed – Fri, 11 am – 3 pm.  For dessert, they ordered buko pie and champorrado and Romy gave them a taste of more homemade ice creams: avocado, banana rum and mango.

Chef Cris looks like she is unaccustomed to her newfound celebrity (avoiding the hysteria wherever she went when she visited the Philippines recently).  You can tell she would rather be in the kitchen whipping up great food and sometimes giving special treats to Bo, the Obama family dog.  She proudly told me that her little 11-year-old just recently asked for milk fish (bangus) and so she had to hunt down a bangus in the DC area for her.

Then it was getting late and they said that they had to catch a train at Penn Station to get back to DC.  Her parting words to me were:  “It makes me so proud to walk into a restaurant like this.”   Well, thank you Chef Cris, but we were busting with pride that we have a Pinay as Executive Chef of the White House!