Rarely have I tried to replicate something I have never ever cooked before and end up with results this good, the first time around. So the inspiration was the legendary lines and forced rationing of salted egg fish skins by a purveyor in the lobby of SM Megamall. The things people did to get their cravings satisfied. So when one of our managers from Cebu had someone line up before the stall even opened (the advantages of having earlier access for employees) I knew I had to check this product out. I must state categorically that I am not really a huge fan of salted egg dishes, and missed most of the current trend to have it on everything under the sun like potato chips, so I was not the fawning fan of anything salted egg… but when we finally opened a PHP600 large bag of the legendary Singaporean fish skins, I must admit I was intrigued enough to give it a very objective taste, meaning, without wanting not to like it. It was pretty good, and I can see how some folks would really like it, but it wasn’t going to take over my personal preference for say, Doritos or Salt and Vinegar potato chips, but that’s just me. The story could have ended there. But everyone else seemed to think I was a strange bird for not jumping on the salted egg bandwagon.

But as usual on this blog, there is a back story to all this. A few months ago, shortly after we opened Zubuchon in Manila, an old friend and avid blog reader from a decade back, Marla, handed me a bag with a weighty present inside, she was kind of sheepishly amused how I would react to a commercial, foil-wrapped bag of Knorr salted egg powder… I noticed it was MSG-free (yay!) and I promised to put it to good use at some point. One thing led to another and it ended up in an office cabinet for a few months, untouched.

I had tried cooking salted egg based dishes before (see here, inspired by another long-time reader, Millet of Davao), using real salted eggs, but now I know exactly why this trend was expanding at a rapid pace, because the key ingredient was now so conveniently and readily available. Unilever and Knorr are brilliant in many ways, my only wish is that they make sinigang mix and other local mixes with an option that is MSG-free, like they do with chicken cubes elsewhere in Asia… So thanks Marla, this experiment is thanks in part to your key “secret” ingredient… :)

But the other part of the story is that local, artisanal dried fish skins are something we have in stock at Zubuchon. We serve a dish that pairs fried fish skins with kinilaw, and it has since been copied by many other restaurants in Cebu and elsewhere. So besides the salted egg powder, we had the fish skins. And as luck would have it, I have a small curry leaf tree growing out in the yard, so all I needed was some margarine and chilies. I couldn’t get myself to use margarine, just couldn’t, and opted for canned Queensland butter instead. Though perhaps I should have stuck to the margarine called for in most recipes on the internet.

Into a pot I put some butter, chilies, fresh curry leaves and brought this to a simmer and added several tablespoons of the salted egg powder.

I eyeballed it at this point, and if anything, I could have added even more salted egg powder as my sauce was kinda thin. I added two teaspoons of sugar for a touch of sweetness as well.

Meanwhile, fry up the fish skins and take care NOT to over-fry them, which is a just a split second longer than you think. It is critical they are slightly under- rather than over-done as they get another round in the oven to dry the sauce out. Notice the skins in the back, they were overcooked and bordering on evil. :( Salt the freshly fried fish skins as soon as they emerge from the fat. If you use lard, you will be on my short-list of FWAFOL’s (Friends Who Are Fond of Lard). Hahaha.

Take your previously made sauce and sprinkle liberally over the fried fish skins and sprinkle some salted egg powder over everything. I did this on both sides of the fish crackers, which was a bit exagge, but more is better in this case, I think.

Stick this all into a low heat oven say 230-250F for 15 or so minutes until the sauce dries out a bit. Dry on paper towels to mop up excess oil and enjoy. They were delicious! But delicious! And relatively oh so easy to make, albeit with a few hard to find ingredients. I am thinking of offering a variant which would include fried fish skins with the butter and salted egg sauce on the side to dip into… Experiment was a total success! :)

The post Fish Skins with Salted Egg, Butter and Curry Leaves a la Marketman 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.

I have written about kabog or millet seed for years. It is just one of those iconic marketmanila.com ingredients. In April 2005, just months after I started this blog, I wrote about budbud kabog available at a local weekend market, here. Then in September 2006, I wrote about my attempts to develop a recipe for budbud kabog from scratch, without any reference material or anyone to show me how it was done. That seemingly innocuous post led to this somewhat amusing one, called “Gi Bogbog Ko Sa Kabog!” that is now vintage Marketman-rant-speak. I finally published a Budbud Kabog recipe a la Marketman in October 2006, and we have been making it ever since.

Then in November 2006, I published a recipe of a dear friend (now), Manang Lima, who we discovered selling budbud kabog on the street in Mandaue, Cebu and who so graciously agreed to come teach me how she made her version, which was only slightly different from mine. At the end of that post, I encouraged readers to buy their budbud from Manang Lima, and some of them did. But roughly a year later, I wrote about Manang Lima in the Mabuhay Magazine of PAL, introducing the phrase “JERK MAGNET”, and that article was read by tens of thousands of people resulting in hundreds of orders for Manang Lima, enough for her to make 5-10x what she used to earn selling budbud kabog the street! Manang Lima became a friend, we helped her through thick and thin, and when we decided to open Zubuchon restaurants 5 years ago, she volunteered to and STILL COOKS all of our budbud kabog and biko, even though she is well beyond normal retirement age. And she only does this for us. :) She visits our kitchens once or twice a week to cook these delicacies herself. But I still wanted to chase down millet or kabog to its source. After all, Antonio Pigafetta wrote in his chronicles that they were fed some millet when Magellan feasted in Cebu in 1521, before he was killed by an alleged distant relative of mine… So this post is about that quest to go to the source of kabog, and here in Cebu, that source is now located around the hillsides near Catmon, Northern Cebu.

One of our backyard-raised pig scouts mentioned that she was from the hillsides near Catmon. When asked if she knew any kabog or millet seed farmers several months ago, she answered in the affirmative, and she promised to let us know when it was nearer to harvest time. Last week she said the seeds were heavy on the plants, but it would be another couple of weeks before the harvest, hopefully after some searingly hot dry weather (it has been raining a lot in Cebu). I decided not to take any chances waiting too long and arranged to take a day trip up North. We started out of Cebu at the crack of dawn yesterday, and made it to the foothills of Catmon two hours later, and Manang Lydia met us on a motorcycle. We drove another 20-30 minutes on increasingly narrow and potholed roads, until we got to clearing beside the road and we parked the car. I looked around, seemingly surrounded by cornfields.

We walked through cornfields also heavy with fruit, and just when I was beginning to regret my choice of shorts that morning, we emerged from the corn fields to a fabulous patch of kabog or millet grasses with seeds. Often referred to as a grain, some googling suggests they are seeds, and ancient seeds at that. Think nearly 10 millennia of cultivation. I once wrote I thought these were a variety of foxtail millet, but perhaps they are proso millet instead.

It was amazing to see the plants up close, basically a kind of grass with these wonderful seeds, that don’t need much water or any care at all. No pesticides used, just plant seeds, hope for some rain over the course of the 3 months or so they grow, and hopefully they yield a hefty harvest. They are not irrigated, and they don’t really need a fuss. Kabog costs several hundred pesos per ganta (a measure of volume) that is roughly 2.2-2.4 kilos of millet seed (up to 2.5 kilos of rice) and is increasingly difficult to find, because so few people still cook with it, and therefore less and less farmers plant it. It is a personal quest to bring awareness to this ancient seed, and we serve budbud kabog in our restaurants to try and help the farmers who grow it. It’s trivia, but there is a whole other post that should be written on a gantang or ganta as a unit of measure that is shared with our Malay neighbors…

When it is scarce, kabog can rise to as much as PHP800-900 per ganta in Cebu, or roughly PHP300-400 a kilo from wholesalers! We really should package it up as an ingredient and sell it on our pasalubong tables to further encourage people to discover and use the ingredient!

We drove further into the hills and saw several more areas planted to kabog. This large area on one hillside was a 500 meter walk down a steep hill and another kilometer up so I decided to just take these telephoto shots instead… I was in dire need of a Coke Light at this point, and the nearest source was about 1.5 hours away!

In total, the excursion took some 6 hours or almost an entire day. But it was totally worth it. Now that I have seen where the seeds are grown, met some of the farmers, and appreciate the difficult conditions everyone undergoes to grow them, harvest them, process them, bring them down from the hillsides to the main road, I am going to double my efforts to make the grain available to our customers, and encourage them to buy and use it. Curious what else you can use millet for instead of just budbud or suman? There are lots of interesting western recipes, here.

Chasing kabog back to the source? Done. :)

The post Hillsides Brimming with Kabog… appeared first on Market Manila.

Today I took one of those trips/adventures that I used to do far more often for my own benefit and that of the readers of marketmanila.com. We woke up at the crack of dawn, drove several hours on highways and paved roads, then turned off abruptly and continued our journey on at first, narrow paved roads, that turned to cracked and slightly dangerous roads, then nearly un-passable muddy and rutted country lanes and finally, on foot for a serious hike uphill and down… Just to seek out this elusive ingredient that I have written about, cooked and eaten quite often. It had taken on “legendary status” in my mind, even though I knew it just grew peacefully on remote hillsides for several millennia or so. Today, I got to see it in all its beautiful, bountiful glory, just a couple of weeks shy of being harvested. Care to guess what it is? A classic Marketman ingredient post coming up soon. :)

The post Take a Wild Guess… appeared first on Market Manila.

Our wonderful guide Ruixi had been previously advised that Marketman was big on markets, so she made sure that a market was on our itinerary that day. After the fried pancake and hearty bowl of lamb meatball soup, we needed a short break from the eating. The market in the Muslim quarter was bustling, and we only managed to see a small fraction of it, but it was totally worth the trip. As soon as we got out of our tuktuk, we were greeted with this abundance of freshly picked strawberries. Wow!

Dried lotus seeds…

…goji berries…

…black raisins still with their stems…

…green or golden raisins (a personal favorite, so I bought a kilo’s worth) sourced straight from the farms…

…oddly shaped nectarines…

…mulberries, or I think they are mulberries…

…dressing a chicken (why do they say that, when Undressing the chicken is probably more descriptive) or is it a pigeon?…

…lotus roots…

…various green chilies…

…fresh water chestnuts…

…the most incredibly intense red dried chilies I have seen in a while…

…and crushed or ground as you pleased…

…sichuan peppercorns and star anise…

…seeds of all kinds, melon, squash, etc.

I can’t remember what these were, but if I had to guess, seaweed of some sort.

Tons and tons of apples. One forgets when you are conditioned as a child that all red apples are from Washington state, that they probably grow more apples in China than anywhere else on the planet. In fact, China grows nearly half of all the apples commercially sold on the planet, or a whopping 8x the apples grown in the U.S.!

And finally, walnuts and dates. If we weren’t headed to another city and we weren’t so limited by minimal luggage allowance, I would have filled a box with things we saw that day. More market finds in the next few posts…

The post To Market, To Market, in Xian, China appeared first on Market Manila.

I have always loved a properly made Melanzane a la Parmigiana or Eggplant Parmesan. There’s something so incredibly comforting about the texture, the oozing cheese, the tomato sauce that makes this almost as comforting as Spaghetti with ragu or Bolognese sauce. It’s also pretty high calorie, I suspect. But sometimes you just want a shortcut version, or at least I do. So when I came across this recipe from the New York Times, and I happened to have several large western eggplants wallowing in the fridge, I decided to make my own version for dinner that evening.

Instead of frying the eggplant naked like in the NYT recipe, I decided to coat the eggplant slices in a bit of seasoned flour, egg and breadcrumbs and deep fry them for a couple of minutes and let them rest, hoping the heat would fully cook the eggplants interiors, and they did. Just make sure you don’t cut the eggplants more than say 1/2 inch thick or you risk a bit of raw eggplant at the center, and that’s unpleasant.

On a large platter, I put down a bed of of wild arugula, topped that with the fried eggplant slices, a quick tomato sauce made from canned san marzano tomatoes crushed and sautéed with olive oil and salt and pepper, then slices of good mozzarella, lots of ripe tomatoes sliced in different ways, lots of shredded basil and drizzled some olive oil and balsamic vinegar over everything. Oh, don’t forget some salt and pepper as well. This wasn’t really a gooey eggplant parm, more like a hot and cold salad with all the right flavor highlights. It was a HUGE HIT at dinner that evening, and something we will definitely be doing again soon.

The post Easy “Eggplant Parmigiana” a la Marketman appeared first on Market Manila.

It must be almost summer if there’s ripe sampalok appearing in the markets… and once you’ve made some tamarind puree, put everything in the sieve (from the first pass) back into the pot and add say 2-3 cups of water and enough sugar to make a thin but flavorful tamarind concentrate. Put that into a pitcher with cold water and add enough tamarind concentrate to your personal taste and serve with lots of ice cubes for one of the most native, natural, refreshing juices you can make. It is so simple and so delicious it reminds me of the santol juice that we always make later in the summer when santol is in season. I suspect this concentrate would also be delicious with some soda water for a bit of carbonation. I also wonder how this would taste as a fruit shake… :)

The post Tamarind Juice appeared first on Market Manila.

I absolutely love canned tuna. Ever since my high school days when our cafeteria at school had these phenomenally large hot pan de sals that they used to fill with a tunafish palaman or spread. In college, I had canned tuna at least twice a week while on a very modest food budget. Despite warnings of potential mercury content, higher income in the years since, I still looked for canned tuna at least twice a month. I once wrote this post on some superb premium quality Century Tuna several years ago that caught the eye of the company that very kindly offered to send me a box of the extremely hard to find stuff, and I agreed, but I insisted on paying for it. Our top local canned tuna is high up there when compared to several European brands, in fact, I understand that several European brands actually can their stuff in General Santos, and have the tiniest reference to the source of Pacific tuna instead of mediterranean fish. However, there are, to this day, incredibly premium bottled and canned tunas in Spain that command prices of up to PHP8,000+ for a bottle roughly the same size as the one above. Are they 20x better tasting or more satisfying than Century? I think not. But are really pricey women’s handbags really worth 39,000 bayongs or market baskets? :)

I decided to try a new recipe for “canned” or “bottled” tuna. The last time I made some, the tuna was poached in olive oil, and it turned a bit harder than I would have liked, see post here. For this version I used a recipe from the cookbook A16, and bought 1 kilo of premium tuna, removed the blood veins and skin, cut this up into large chunks and salted it generously all over and let it rest in the fridge for 3-4 hours, covered. In a pot of water, I added some chopped up fennel bulb, celery, onions, and two cloves of garlic and several fresh/dry bay leaves and a tablespoon of peppercorns. Bring this up to a gentle simmer, add the fish and let this cooke for roughly 8-10 minutes until just pink at the center (check a piece with a knife). Don’t overcook, and don’t leave the centers raw either. Take the tuna out and let it cool to room temperature. Add the tuna to a sterilized bottle and pack tightly and fill with very good olive oil. Make sure all the fish is covered with oil and try to get out any air bubbles. That’s it. Store in fridge for up to a week or so.

This batch turned out utterly delicious. A lot less hard than the last version I made. And the huge flakes make it clear this is a premium homemade version. But the catch? This bottle of roughly 1 kilo of tuna had a total cost of roughly PHP800 because of the fresh tuna, fennel and oil, and six cans of of Century tuna is roughly PHP240 or so, or 1/3rd the price! Was the homemade version 3x better? I’m not sure about that, but it was obviously different, artisanal and delicious! For my next tuna experiment, I will try this Saveur recipe/version now that we have a pressure cooker in the house.

Wondering what to do with the freshly made canned tuna? Try this recipe for a Salade niçoise, deconstructed. Or this terrific Thai tuna salad. Or an Italian tuna and bean salad, here. Or a “Malipayon” salad with Gejo’s wonderful produce, here. Or maybe a tuna fennel and celery salad? Or you can always just make a good old tunafish sandwich. Or tuna melt even. Can you tell I really like my canned tuna? :)

The post Tuna “Conserva” or Bottled/Canned Tuna… :) appeared first on Market Manila.

Pinipig crunch, that magnolia ice cream bar variant with vanilla ice cream coated with chocolate, studded with bits of toasted pinipig, was one of my favorite sweet things as a kid. Pinipig crunch and orange twin popsies were COVETED whenever the magnolia man with the bell announced his presence on our street. It’s the only reason I knew of the word pinipig, though for many years, I had no idea what it really was.

In the past few years, I had come across fresh pinipig at markets, and first wrote about it here, learned more about duman, and started to see it in use in rice cakes and other delicacies. I don’t buy it often, but think of it as a uniquely Filipino ingredient (lots of puffed rice in other cultures, but not sure if they have the smashed and dried glutinous rice).

Sister bought a kilo or so of pinipig at the Nasugbu market recently, and I asked her what she was going to use it for… apparently, back in New York, she likes to make simple butter cookies that have toasted pinipig incorporated into the batter for that characteristic crisp/chewy texture they provide. I don’t think I remember having these cookies so I decided to cook up a batch yesterday, but incorporating some chocolate as an homage to my childhood favorite, pinipig crunch bars…

I googled recipes on the internet and top finds point to a recipe of Romy Dorotan and Amy Besa in their cookbook “Memories of Philippine Kitchens” published in 2006, but I knew the recipe went back much earlier than that. Other recipes on the internet seemed to be lifted (some of them at least) directly from the Dorotan recipe, without attribution (don’t you just hate that?), but I wasn’t quite happy yet and kept searching. I found a recipe for “Pinipig Biscuits” in a book dedicated to Philippine rice entitled “Beyond Rice” written by Ma. Elena Paterno-Locsin, and she credits the source for the recipe to “Philippine Magazine, October 1933”! So the treat does go back nearly a century at this point… This early recipe relied on shortening or lard and milk, and I was wanting a more modern richer cookie with butter and perhaps some muscovado sugar.

Trying to clean out our larder/pantry, I had cans of queensland butter, mini-chocolate chips, pinipig and suddenly the “aha!” moment was to make a chocolate chip style cookie, with lots of pinipig taking the place of the nuts. This would have the butter and muscovado and it would hopefully bring back memories of the pinipig crunch bars.

Here is the recipe I used, and it is credited to the back of the toll house chips package, though with some slight changes. I made a huge double batch, yielding over 100 thin but medium sized cookies, so feel free to cut the recipe in half or a fourth if you prefer. In a bowl mix all the dry ingredients: 4.5 cups flour (I used unbleached all-purpose), 2 teaspoons baking soda, 3 teaspoons salt (the pinipig is bland, hence more salt). In your mixer bowl, add two cups of butter (I used canned Queensland, to use up stocks but unsalted butter would do nicely as well) and cream this together with 1.25 cups of white sugar and 1.5 cups of muscovado or dark brown sugar. Add 2 teaspoons of good vanilla extract, and incorporate 4 eggs, one at a time until fully mixed in. Add the flour mixture then 3 cups of mini-chocolate chips and 2 heaping cups of toasted pinipig and your batter is done. If you are not in a hurry, chill the batter for say an hour or so before scooping onto your pan and putting them in a 360-370F oven. Btw, photo above has some pinipig “garnish” on top, to make sure you knew what the cookie contained, but you can skip that step… they were just as good all mixed in.

The results? I LIKE THEM A LOT. They have that somewhat unnerving quality to them borne out of the crispy/chewy pinipig (how do you translate makunat?) but the flavors of chocolate and butter and muscovado with the texture of the pinipig is delicious. And I have one more way to make use of this cookie, up next. :)

1. WHAT

The post Pinipig & Mini-Chocolate Chip Cookies a la Marketman appeared first on Market Manila.

On the left, what I typically refer to as pinipig. It’s young glutinous rice that’s been pounded and dried. You need to either dry toast it in a pan to crisp it up, or bake it in an oven until crisp.

It’s color is often greener than it naturally should be, either rubbed between banana leaves (as Millet once wrote on this blog) or with added green food coloring. In it’s natural state, it has just a tinge of green I would imagine. But toasted, it turns a light off white or tan (unless colored). This is to be treated separately from Duman, a delicacy from the plains of Luzon that takes green palay which is toasted or roasted then crushed or pounded. Karen of Pilgrims Pots and Pans has a wonderful post on authentic duman.

On the right is a bowl of what many also call pinipig, but which I personally think is more of a “puffed” rice. Rice grains (not necessarily glutinous) are steamed or boiled then dried/baked and sometimes fried until puffed. Both are often sold as “pinipig”. But then again, I could be wrong, I am not a pinipig authority. I bought some of the “left” pinipig at the Nasugbu market last week as Sister was searching for it, to make a childhood favorite pinipig cookie with a basic butter batter and toasted pinipig added in. My version up next.

The post Pinipig vs. Pinipig… appeared first on Market Manila.