Market Manila

No, this isn’t a post on the porcine equivalent of the Jonestown massacre. I just thought that all of the seafood posts lately have been so healthy, and I was concerned that bonafide pork lovers, like commenter “Lee” from Bacolod, might be having pork withdrawal syndrome, so I decided to skip a few posts and do this one on a bunch of pigs that we walked into in the “backwoods” of Malapascua island. It was mid-morning and a bit warm, but under a grove of coconut trees, in the shade and on dark sand, about 8 pigs were napping and resting in their shallow and self made sand wells…

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I am often asked how to pick fresh produce of all sorts, but fish seems to elicit the most number of inquiries. And frankly, until a few years ago, I wasn’t such a huge shopper of seafood at the wet markets, so my ability to choose fresh fish is something I have only acquired in the past 5-7 years. Obviously, practice makes perfect, so the first piece of advice I can give you is that if you buy enough fish, often enough, you can figure out the cues for yourself. But it helps to have some expert guidance. And mine came in the form of a crew member who grew up in Northern Palawan and seems to know a LOT about fish. Over the years, at various markets around the country, I have received many selection tips that I have added to conventional wisdom, personal experience, etc. Here are some of the things that may help you pick out the freshest fish and seafood around.

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I wrote about eating swaki even FRESHER than the ones in these photographs, taken while on a trip to Bohol several years ago, and while on a huge sandbar, one of the bangkeros pulled some sea urchins out of the sea and opened them up and let us eat the bright orange yellow roe right then and there… they were superb. But these sea urchins weren’t too shabby either, just 10-20 minutes out of the water and still very much alive, I spied them being opened for someone’s lunch appetizer not far from the Bogo market and close to the sea shore.

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They call these small, 8-12 inch saltwater eels “bakasi” throughout the island of Cebu. They are particularly abundant near the town of Cordova, in the Southern part of the island, where they even have an annual festival in August to celebrate this local “delicacy.” I have never eaten them before, or even seen them in markets for sale alive. So when I ran into them in droves at the Bogo market, I was certainly intrigued. All I knew for sure was that they were eels, they were caught in the sea, and that the locals cooked and ate them. But there was a part of me that was hoping these weren’t baby moray eels. I had seen far too many enormous moray eels for sale at the Pasil market just days before, and while I understand that moray eels are not endangered and are a good source of protein, I felt they should be spared from being eaten… why morays and not lapu-lapu or talakitoks, I can’t explain, nor am I being rational about it, I agree… Plus to complicate logic, I have eaten angullas in olive oil and garlic, a Spanish delicacy, and I also love unagi, that japanese eel with a sweetish sugar and soy sauce, so what is the big deal, anyway?

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Cebuanos consume quite a bit of corn. I suspect that is because there wasn’t much rice grown on the island, so to supplement rice which was “imported” from other islands in the archipelago, locals turned to corn during difficult times and eventually it became a natural part of their diet. They had to get their carbohydrates from somewhere… Some folks in Cebu mix corn and rice in one pot; and sometimes, they simply boil up some corn meal, somewhat similar to grits or polenta, though polenta is a much finer grind of corn…

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I found these unusual, frilly light and tasty seaweeds at the Bogo market. Didn’t catch the appropriate local name (had no ballpen) but they seemed to lump them all together with other seaweeds such as guso and lato. If I am not mistaken it was something like “saang bulaklak” and they said it only grew on a particular type of specimen sea shell. It looked exactly like a seaweed I had recently enjoyed at the Tsukiji restaurant on Pasay Road so I was rather excited to see it at the market. In Manila, a top quality mixed seaweed salad fluffed up with lettuce and a good sesame seed dressing can run upwards of PHP650 for a tiny bowl, so how I wished I had brought the other ingredients for this salad as I would have had these for breakfast as well!

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They looked like really cool noodles, and in varying shades of green. Sort of like sea soba. But lukot, a Visayan ingredient, is something that I had NEVER seen before. So I asked the vendor at the Bogo market what it was… They smiled and said it was sea cucumber poop, or what appeared to be translated as sea cucumber poop. Omigod is right! Perhaps something was lost in translation, so I asked several others what it was… and roughly translated, they said “it comes out of a sea cucumber, they leave it in piles on the sea floor…” well, that didn’t help. So I took the photos and figured I could do some research later. Then just hours later, I saw the same ingredient on the island of Malapascua, and they said it was sea cucumber eggs, but they couldn’t explain why it came in so many shades of green and yellow brown, nor why a sea cucumber would just lay them on the seabed, for all the predators to scoop up with ease. And I admit I have bad eyesight, but I looked at these “noodles” really closely and couldn’t discern any individual eggs so I was a bit concerned… A little more googling back home yielded some alarming results. Was it actually sea cucumber poop? Bunches of sea cucumber eggs? Some other unusual stuff??? Some writers or bloggers simply ignored or avoided mentioning what it actually was altogether, choosing to call it marine spaghetti, spaghettini look-alike, seaweed, etc.

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Now this is FRESH. In stark contrast to the fish in the previous post from The Pasil Market, all you have to do is take a look at these photos to realize the quality of seafood at the Bogo market was far superior to the large wholesale market in downtown Cebu. Bogo is a fairly large town near the Northern tip of Cebu, near good fishing grounds, and with a medium sized market. We scheduled our trip to depart from Cebu City at 5 a.m., precisely in order to reach the Bogo Market at around 7a.m., on a Thursday, one of two tabo or major market days each week. There wasn’t as much volume or variety of fish/seafood at the market when compared to bigger city markets, but the quality was so darned good that if I had an LPG tank, burner and pan, I would have been cooking up a storm for breakfast. We were still on our way to Malapascua, so we didn’t buy any perishables, but I could have easily filled a cooler at this market… And for some strange reason, despite many of the fish here being similar to those photographed at Pasil, I got the feeling there was a lot more dignity for the produce here. They would end up in people’s stomachs all the same, but here it was more genteel, more human, less ruthless… does that make any sense?

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