Reasons to Love Filipino Food
Silogs are the way to start the day. Rice and eggs is great. Garlic fried rice and eggs with your choice of meaty accompaniments is infinitely better. Silog is your breakfast of champions.
Homestyle cooking that doesn’t forget its roots. The complexity of Filipino cuisine is finally getting the recognition it deserves on the global culinary stage (Filipina chef Margarita Forés won Best Female Chef in Asia last year). But that doesn’t mean those on the islands (and many of us in the U.S.) don’t love us some Filipino spaghetti.
Halo-Halo — Holla! There are so many Filipino dishes to love — pancit (noodles), adobo (meat braised in vinegar), and sinangag (garlic fried rice), to name just a few. But, the mind- and palate-bending dessert halo-halo (which translates to “mix-mix”) is a confusingly beautiful conflagration of textures and flavors: ube (purple yam), flan, mixed fruit, young coconut, sweetened mung bean paste, shaved ice, evaporated milk…you get the idea. Somehow it’s perfection.
Delicious in multiple languages. Deep Malaysian roots branch out with Chinese influences (noodles, egg rolls, soy sauce) and Spanish ingredients (tomatoes, chilis, cacao) to blossom into a cuisine that is truly its own rare flower.
To boldly go where millions of Filipinos have gone before. Filipinos aren’t afraid of bold flavors — the condiment ginisang bagoong, made with fermented shrimp, garlic, onion, chilis, tomato, and sugar is proof of that — but balance always tempers boldness: sour is paired with sweet, salt is brightened with acidity, bountiful white rice is a foil for deeply savory stews.
Wholesome, whole animal cooking. From lengua (beef tongue) to sinigang (fish head soup), Filipinos are experts at using every part of the animal. Waste not, want not. (And in the right cook’s hands those underutilized bits are the very best bits.)
