Things I might have in the fridge or larder… above, an experimental kaffir or makrut lime sugar that turned out BRILLIANTLY. Take some beautiful makrut limes (in this case, a neighbor’s gift) and zest them into some white sugar. I stored this in the fridge thinking it might keep it fresher. It is SO FRAGRANT and just that beautiful hint of flavor in whatever you put it in… sugar cookies, pie crusts, etc.

We ALWAYS have a jar of vanilla sugar in the kitchen. Used vanilla pods are simply buried in white sugar, and we keep adding pods and topping off sugar. It’s amazing how fragrant and flavorful the sugar becomes.

Even better, cinnamon and vanilla sugar. I used to have a jar of just cinnamon sugar but our cook mistakenly added vanilla pods to it. So we just kept it going for years and years… A simple piece of bread, with butter and cinnamon/vanilla sugar toasted in a small oven is love.

Finally, we dry out own chilies whenever we run low on our stocks… here dried labuyo and habanero peppers. We always make too much, but it’s always good to have it in stock. We never keep them more than 6 months so they are fresh and vibrant. So many homes have given up the tradition of making and storing some of their ingredients, condiments and preserves and pickles. I can understand that convenience and groceries have probably killed off that tradition. But on any given day, in our cupboards or fridge/freezer, you will find several bottles of things we have made over the last few months, and sugar and spice is always nice… :)

The post Sugar & Spice… appeared first on Market Manila.

Somehow, the promise of what lies within is almost always overestimated when it comes to quesong puti wrapped in fresh banana leaves. It seems as though the more layers of banana leaves that enrobe the simple, soft, briny white cheese made from carabao’s milk, the more likely you are to get a puny portion of the native delicacy. Gone are the days when 500 gram squares of cheese could be had for a reasonable sum. Knowing all this, I bought three parcels at the market today, for PHP40 each.

Back at home, for breakfast, I fried up one portion of cheese and added some halved grape or cherry tomatoes to the pan and watched it sizzle. I could immediately hear my mom’s voice somewhere out there saying “you have to fry it to kill the cooties…” which just seems a bit ridiculous, doesn’t it? But then again, we have ALWAYS fried it, despite the fact that I have tasted it “unfried,” soft and unctuously simple (an oxymoron) and I never gotten sick or died of hepatitis.

Tucked into a large pan de sal that was still warm (from the bakery on the way back home), this was a really pleasant surprise, what I called my “Pinoy Caprese” if you will. Totally hit the spot. But ever so annoyed by the shrinking portions of cheese within the leaves, I weighed two portions and found out they were just 50 grams of cheese each, or the equivalent of a whopping PHP800 a kilo, the price of decent mozzarella that has traveled across continents to make it to the local grocery or deli! Yes, why is that? Why is a local artisanal product with just one or two middleman from producer to buyer, made with local ingredients, purchased at a market, just as expensive as it’s imported counterpart? Oh well, I’ll just have another sandwich instead of worrying about it too much.

The post Quesong Puti / Filipino White Cheese appeared first on Market Manila.

Back at La Casa del Trifulau after an hour hunt in the woods, our hosts/guide laid out the spoils of the day… one medium sized black truffle and some modest sized white truffles. You don’t get to keep the truffles found on your hunt, but you could offer to buy them if you liked. At Euro3,000 per kilo, white truffles are a luxury, but dial that gasp back and realize that 5-10grams shaved over your risotto or pasta is enough to give you a heady experience, at say Euro20-30 per serving. So while it is incredibly pricey, a little goes a long way. In London, New York or Tokyo you might be charged anywhere from $100-150 for a shaving of truffles (say 5 grams), so that’s 4-5x the price at the source, but when in the heart of white truffle country, I say what better time to indulge…

Our guide had found this rather substantial white truffle earlier in the day, but note that the dogs had scratched the surface of the truffle, so it was “damaged” goods so to speak. At roughly 60 grams in weight, it would be worth approximately Euro180 or $200 but could serve some 7-10 people.

Natale bought out a dish of sliced robiola (or at least I think it was robiola, a cheese made with cow’s, goat and sheep milk)…

…took a stainless steel shaver and picked up the nice white truffle…

…and proceeded to shave…

…shave…

…and shave a VERY GENEROUS amount of white truffles on the cheese!!! We were quite taken aback by this snack for peckish guests while sitting outdoors enjoying the view of the Alban countryside.

The combined aroma of the freshly found white truffle combined with the tasty three-animal milk cheese was definitely a once in a lifetime taste experience, for sure.

Natale also took out a sampling of recently found black truffles that had been brushed clean of dirt, cross sections that showed the density and patterns within. These were fragrant, but again, a different level of aroma and intensity than the white truffles.

Now this, is REAL truffle oil. Most food experts would worry about chopping up a moldy bit that has come out of the soil and may contain several kinds of bacteria that would happily breed into a deadly cocktail in a bottle of oil, but at least this is the real thing. Almost all commercially sold truffle oil is made with synthetic flavoring, so you aren’t getting any real truffles at all.

The post Hunting for White Truffles in Alba… The Spoils… appeared first on Market Manila.

Perhaps the main reason for our journey to Piedmont and the area around Alba, was to savor eating, and just as importantly, experience “hunting,” for the prized white truffles of the region. This is definitely one of the items crossed off my personal food bucket list. While our trip to the region fell two days short of the official start of the white truffle “season” for 2016, we were hopeful that we would be able to find something or at least experience what it would be like to traipse through the woods in search of fungus…

Mrs. MM had booked a private hunt through a tour expert that booked La Casa del Trifulau, and we ended up going with another couple of guests for an hour or more long trek through hilly woodsides. Truffle hunting is a passion and the skills are handed down through generations… in this case, our guides Natale and Giorgio having hunted truffles for decades and their ancestors did it before them. To be honest, I was a bit skeptical that the hunt would include “planted” truffles, but I really don’t think that was the case in our experience…

We entered the woods owned by the family of Natale across the road, these were once planted with grapes, and several decades ago allowed to return to wild forest and underbrush. It’s a continuing battle between wine and truffles in Alba, with the latter requiring natural forested areas to thrive. It is said that when it is a good year for wine (generally a hot late summer, minimal rain, etc. so you end up with very intense robust wines) it is a horrible one for truffles. Truffles prefer wet, damp and cold conditions and this year it was not that at all…

So the key is man’s best friend, the dog, in our case his name was Brio. They once used pigs to do the sniffing, but they were rabid about eating their finds so dogs were trained instead. The dogs help locate the truffle, and are more easily distracted/rewarded with a grocery liver treat while yielding the truffle to their masters. In this case, our wonderful companion was Brio, a mixed breed of English(?) pointer mine with a local Italian breed. Truffle hunters work with their dogs from birth, and the first two years are really spent training the dogs how to find the elusive white truffles.

The first clue is that truffles grow around the root systems of only 3-4 types of trees, poplars being one of them. The root systems of oaks and possibly hazelnuts were also a desired home for white truffles. So basically the dogs and humans tend to perk up near the right kinds of trees…

…after several minutes heading uphill, and looks between Mrs. MM and myself that it obviously wasn’t going to be a leisurely stroll on flat land… Brio our hound started sniffing excitedly and quickly started digging furiously, kicking up dry dirt and leaves…

…it was incredibly fascinating and exhilarating to watch. And Giorgio immediately got in there to intervene should the truffle be close, as scratch marks and nicks to the fungus totally diminish their value and desirability amongst the cognoscenti…

…in this case, the first find was a tiny white truffle, smaller than a marble, but Brio got a treat nonetheless. Truffles are unusual in that they ripen at a particular time, with no regard to shape or size, so they could be tiny or enormous, up to say a kilo in weight. And you could apparently hunt through a part of the forest in the morning and turn up empty-handed, but find a ginormous truffle in the late afternoon.

A little further down the path, Brio started circling and getting excited and went full force into digging furiously…

…to yield this pretty hefty black truffle. I had no idea they grew together, black and white (though that was obviously a duhhh moment), and frankly, Giorgio was a little cross/disappointed with Brio as apparently he is trained to ignore the black and just look for the white truffles. The locals poo-poo the black variety and I had visions of his tossing the black one into the woods and my scrambling to go find it myself.

The truffle, caked in dry mud, was incredibly fragrant, but noticeably different from the intense fragrance of white truffles. It looked pretty big to me, but apparently wasn’t of the most ideal shape and condition.

A close-up of the black nugget. Brio happily gave it up for two treats. As with many delicacies around the world, it seems poop plays a role here. Animals eat the truffles, poop and leave spores all over the forest. The spores develop when the conditions are right, and they have a two month cycle to ripen and they are eaten by animals and pooped out again. Civet coffee is another example of having to be associated with poop. And so are wild mushrooms. :)

A little further down the path Brio found something else, another tiny white truffle, and I was beginning to think the larger ones would be elusive that day.

Notice how “pleased as punch” Brio is with any discovery. The symbiotic relationship between master (who could be rather strict and firm) and lovable hound was almost as interesting to watch as the actual truffle discoveries…

And then about 45 minutes into the hunt, Brio found this beautiful white truffle — it had a nice shape, heft, density and amazing amazing fragrance. We were so excited and in that one hour our trip seemed to have been made so special, so complete. We would go on to find a few more white truffles of a diminutive size, and our guide Giorgio kept shaking his head about the weather and poor conditions for truffles this year.

Meanwhile, between the diggings, I noticed the abundance of wild laurel plants all over the paths. Such lush, and when you crushed the leaves in your fingers, fragrant fresh laurel.

There were two interesting distractions for Brio during the hunt, one was several sirens from ambulances that careened some 300-400 meters away. He got so discombobulated by the sounds that he stopped following instructions and just kept looking in the direction of the sirens. And as the walk was ending, he really perked up, looked like he was on the hunt for something alive, and kept looking in a particular direction. Giorgio said he had probably smelled a rabbit or hare, and we didn’t see a thing or hear any movement in the underbrush.

But about 80 meters down the path, I snapped this, can you see it? What I would give to have the olfactory capacities of a hound. Overall, the truffle hunt was a fantastic experience, and now every time I savor shavings of white truffles, I will know exactly how they are discovered in the woods.

The post “Hunting” for Truffles in Alba… appeared first on Market Manila.

An enoteca regionale is the equivalent of regional wine shop/repository that stocks many wines from a particular region, and you have a wonderful opportunity to taste a lot of what that particular region has to offer. Rather than spending several hours each visiting particular vineyards and doing tastings at say 4 properties in one day, we decided to start our day at the enoteca regionale of Barolo instead. Apparently, there is an Italian saying that basically says the best time to taste wine is after breakfast and before lunch. Or I would say, around 10-10:30 am. :) Actually, it has to do with the freshness of one’s palate so the earlier in the day the better…

One of the reasons we hired a car/driver was to free us to taste as much wine that day as we could handle… The entice was located in a beautiful space and the various wines from around the region were displayed for all to see.

It’s interesting that NO OVERT RECOMMENDATIONS are made by staff at the enoteca, instead they want you to taste and decide for yourselves which wines appeal to you.

When we arrived, we were the only visitors at the enoteca, though it got busier just a few minutes later. On one wall were a line of say 30 bottles from various manufacturers from around the region and you purchased “debit cards” that entitled you to say 8-10 glasses of wine per person. Technically, between Mrs. MM and myself we could have tasted some 16 wines that morning, but I think we stopped at 8-10 or so generous tasting portions (about half a normal serving of wine).

Our guide explained some of the history of the Barolo region, and most importantly that there were three distinct areas of wine production based on the quality of soil, from sandy/sandstone based, clay and a mixture of the two. It’s amazing how different the soil is in such a small area of land, but it had to do with how far the sea used to to come up in this part of Northern Italy so there is a distinct dichotomy between one end of Barolo and the other.

After the briefing, we set out to taste wines from all three regions, following the guides suggestion of starting with wines from the sandy terroir and moving towards the mixed then clay. The latter had the best wines, in our opinion, but we are amateurs when it comes to wine, so who are we to say…

I took photos to record all of the bottles we tried, but honestly, I couldn’t be bothered to figure that all out now. Suffice it to say some were unremarkable, but others were both amazing in taste and color… The advantage of tasting so many wines in a short period of time is that you get to compare and contrast them. And if you aren’t disciplined and start spitting your wine into the provided buckets, you can’t possibly last until mid-afternoon without a serious nap. :)

The enoteca posts the price tags of each bottle so when you taste it, you are docked a corresponding amount for the wine. It also helps you decide if there is really a difference in quality/taste/appeal based on the price… and yes, for the most part, the pricier bottles did seem to be the more appealing…

Most of the wines we loved were in the Euro40-50 ($45-55) per bottle range, and I suppose these would be nearly 50-100% more expensive in a wine shop back home or elsewhere in the world. Not the cheap stuff, to say the least. But not outrageously pricey either.

This bottle of “Azelia” Barolo from Luigi Scavino was quite nice, and we would actually have more wine from this vineyard several weeks later, at a special dinner in Makati we attended the other night (more on that later).

Barolo are big bold wines with lots of tannins, and they are often best when aged for quite a while. Enjoy them with game, beefy stews or even steak tartare. Think heavier, winter like meals with a substantial wine… At this point of the morning, I was looking into packing and bringing several bottles of local wine, but the reality of non-existent luggage allowance on domestic puddle-jumpers meant that excess baggage fees would double or triple the cost of each bottle so we decided to just drink and be merry…

…and perhaps the reason so many people were amused by this photo I posted on instagram the very day it was taken, is that wine (too much good wine) must make you look better than usual. Hahahaha.

The post A Wine Tasting at the Enoteca Regionale del Barolo appeared first on Market Manila.

We were in the middle of the most ginormous wholesale mall on the planet in Yiwu, China. Or at least that’s what it felt like. Having walked a good 12 kilometers so far that day, with a bum foot, I was relaxing on a bench while our managers were scouring stores for more stuff we needed to buy for the restaurants. And along comes this vendor, pushing a cart down the hallway on the fourth floor of the building!

He stopped a few feet away from me and started peeling something as several customers came up and bought little bags filled with small little fruit or vegetables. On closer inspection, it turned out to be freshly harvested water chestnuts.

He would peel the water chestnuts so that customers wouldn’t have to bother with that task once they got home and prepared their dinner. Some folks popped a few chestnuts into their mouth like you might do with peanuts, though these were significantly bigger! And hadn’t been rinsed after they were peeled. :(

The peeler was a bit intimidating, much bigger than a standard western kitchen peeler, but it seemed to do the job well. I was worried that he would shave off part of his finger as he made quick work of the peeling, while smoking a cigarette, no less.

He didn’t speak a word of English so I couldn’t ask how much the water chestnuts were, nor what people tended to cook with them, but it was a nice diversion to watch him for a few minutes while I tried to give my feet a rest. :)

The post Full-Service Water Chestnut Vendor… appeared first on Market Manila.

A good friend recently returned from a tour of Japanese temples and brought this unusual ingredient… some preserved cherry blossoms in salt. I understand you can re-hydrate them and add them to a cup of tea, but other than that, does anyone have any clever ideas how else to use these? Thanks.

The post Preserved Cherry Blossoms… Any ideas?! appeared first on Market Manila.

I think I like this (almost single-use) pot even better than our fish pans… This copper jam pot was the item I was holding in this old post on Dehillerin in Paris (my favorite cooking utensils store). At the time, I was a bit crestfallen, and this pan was my “consuelo de bobo” after a brief possibility of acquiring a brilliant large copper ham braiser, that turned out to be mispriced by a factor of 7x. :(

Copper is the material of choice because it conducts the heat better and more evenly, avoiding super hot spots on the bottom of the pot. The wider top of the pot allows the moisture from the jam to evaporate faster, and prevents boiling over that tends to happen in a straight sided pot. It also looks just stunningly beautiful when it just sits around and can double as a flower vessel, fruit bowl, Christmas goodies bowl, etc. Surprisingly, it doesn’t need much polishing if you use it fairly often. The inside is brilliantly polished after a batch of jam or jelly, and the outside looks properly used and you can use copper polish in case you want that looks like new feel all the time. I also raise my eyebrows when I see “show kitchens” with all gleaming copper pots. Absurd.

In these photos, is a batch of native guava jelly in the making. Prior to the photo up top, several kilos of native guavas were washed and sliced up and placed in a large pot with water and brought up to a boil. After say 15 minutes, we turned off the heat, let the pot cool and carefully strained the liquid through cheesecloth, taking care not to press the solids to a mush so that the jelly is the clearest it can be. The straining took several hours so that we collected all of the flavorful liquid.

You then place that guava broth into the copper pan, turn on the heat, and reduce it by about 10-15%, to concentrate the intensity of the native guava. Add sugar (photo up top) and stir gently and some pectin mixed in with sugar as well. Stir every once in a while and bring to a boil, making sure you have a candy thermometer to keep track of the temperature of the mixture. Skim the scum off the surface. The color with turn a deep amber and the bubbles get much larger as it nears the ideal temperature around 220F. Do a freezer test on the jelly if you want to be sure.

Turn off the heat, let the bubbles all settle and after a few minutes, place in bottles and put the bottles in a pot of boiling water for say another 10 minutes to vacuum seal them and make them last well over a year in storage. We made several batches recently, to stock up of guava jelly for our new pasalubong outlet in Cebu. Here’s an insider tip. Every single bottle of guava jelly we sell is made in Marketman’s home kitchen, in this copper jam pot. Kalamansi marmalade and mango jam are now made in our commissary kitchens (still in small batches) but if you want a bit of this arte pot for your breakfast pan de sal, get the guava jelly that is only in stock for a couple of months a year. You’ll know I picked out each and every one of those guavas myself. :)

While I think the days of histrionic reactions to jam pans (or fish pans) are long over, here are the details for those of you raising your eyebrows. I bought this pan for roughly Euro110 or roughly USD130 at Dehillerin without VAT, as I was a tourist. You can order it online for just a tad more, here. It was hand carried on a train back to London, where it was safely packed into my luggage and hauled back to Manila. If you are in the U.S. and flush and impatient, you can order it here, for more than double the price at USD280++, and I’m sure other folks carry it as well.

So roughly PHP6,000 for the copper jam pot. If I make 600 bottles of jam in it, then roughly PHP10 per bottle is the amortized cost of the flashy copper pot. Hmmm, not bad at all. And I am pretty sure we make 500+ bottles of jam per year! Now if only I could say I would make 600 hams a year (instead of 2 or 3), that large copper ham braiser for nearly Euro800 that’s still on my bucket list might be easier to justify. :)

The post A Copper Jam Pot from Dehillerin… appeared first on Market Manila.

After touring the Muslim market in Xi’an, we headed to the edge of the market, and before getting back into our tuktuk, we had two quick bites… First, these persimmon cakes that I just had to feature and the post is dedicated to Footloose, who is somewhat appalled by my limited and unfavorable stance towards persimmons. I will be honest, and say, I just haven’t tasted a nice ripe persimmon yet, so I am definitely a neophyte. At any rate, these fried persimmon cakes are common in Xi’an, and legend has it they go back hundreds of years to the Ming Dynasty, when on a military quest, soldiers decided to incorporate fresh persimmons with flour and fry them and they were so delightful that the snack are credited with helping overcome the opposing army… or at least that’s the shorthand version of the story.

Simply mix flour, ripe persimmon mash and sugar and form a batter/dough. Here it is a rather wet looking dough. Form into patties and put into hot fat and let it fry into a solid persimmon doughnut of sorts.

Notice the beautiful orange hue of the batter. I want to try this with ripe mangoes to see if that works… Or bananas for that matter.

The deep-fried cakes are cooled and sold for maybe 50 cents or so.

It was incredibly tasty, with enough fresh persimmon to make it fruity and flavorful, but with all the goodness of fried dough. Very nice. Footloose would be in persimmon heaven. :)

And nearby was a table of dried persimmons as well.

The night before, Mrs. MM and I bought several dried persimmons and I ate one of them while walking around. They were VERY good. I liked the dried version much, much better than the fresh persimmons I have tasted before — the flavor was sweet and concentrated, the texture a softer version of dried turkish apricots, and the color quite appealing. I should have definitely bought more dried persimmons to take home in our luggage. I am not a full persimmon convert yet, but the dried and fried versions were a pleasant revelation.

The post Deep-Fried Persimmon Cakes appeared first on Market Manila.

In the middle of the market in Xi’an, a young vendor was hammering and smashing away at a block of what looked like sugar or candy. Turns out it was his grandmother’s old recipe for natural throat lozenges. A mixture of fresh pear juice, sugar and eucalyptus oil. How fantastic is that?

It was quite delicious, quite strong, and well, effective. We purchased about $1 worth and he whacked away at the block and gave us a little plastic bag filled with the shards. I loved how he separated the really find dust, not including it in our bag, as if that was not the good thing to do.

He explained to our guide that they made this in small batches, according to his grandmother’s recipe, with all natural ingredients. Compared to the stuff you buy in groceries and drugstores in snazzy packaging and relatively exorbitant prices, these artisanal lozenges were a real treat.

The post Artisanal Throat Lozenges appeared first on Market Manila.