The Metro Channel teaser for the “Show me the Market” premiere episode. For folks abroad, I understand they will be putting all of the episodes on the Metro Channel Youtube Channel eventually so they can be watched from anywhere at anytime.

Don’t ask me for a recipe, I just winged it. :)

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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… :)

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This is my recipe for homemade pancetta. It is extremely easy to do, but the ingredients, how you prep them, how long you cure them and where you cure them matters. Repeat, it matters. So please don’t make the recipe and substitute several ingredients (as many are tempted to or do) and then blame me for the odd results. It’s sort of like my Sister’s vaunted fruitcake recipe which folks always ask for, then replace specified dried fruit with things like dried pineapple and papaya then they have the nerve to bitch that it doesn’t taste the same as the original, duhhh. So you are forewarned. Once you have made a recipe or two and are confident about the results, feel free to alter ingredients to your own preferences, I do that from time to time for slight variations on the theme…

First start with 7.5-8.0 kilos of skin-on boneless belly (I buy in large slabs, you can do that from any decent grocery butcher). If you are anal, trim the slabs so that they are a uniform size and relatively uniform thickness. You will then have to remove the skin, so if you have a particularly good relationship with your butcher, ask him to remove the skin for you if possible. That will save you significant stress and grief as skinning the pork is not one of my favorite chores. I am assuming you will then have a cleaned slab or two of pork with a total cleaned weight of 7 kilos, give or take a few grams. Cut these into say 3-4 pieces of roughly 1.5-1.7 kilos each.

Next prepare your rub. Into a bowl, add 400-450 grams of kosher salt (available in good groceries, you can use other sea salt (NO IODINE PLEASE) but I am not responsible for translating weights due to different salts and moisture levels, it may rise or fall by as much as 25% depending on the type of salt you use… I know that sounds illogical, but that just seems to be the case for me); for the easy answer, buy kosher salt for your first attempt. Measure using a scale.

To the salt, add the following:

350 grams white granulated sugar
100 grams of dark muscovado sugar
130 grams of pink salt or curing salt
80 grams of peeled and smashed or roughly chopped garlic
several sprigs of fresh rosemary roughly chopped up

and mix this up well. Then into a frying pan, toast the following spices over medium high heat for a minute or two until fragrant but NOT burned.

20 grams of white peppercorns
20 grams of black peppercorns (or if you don’t have white peppercorns you can use all black peppercorns)
25 grams of dried juniper berries
40 grams of coriander seeds

Crush all of the spices above in a large mortar and pestle until roughly smashed up. Add to the salt/sugar mixture. Then add the following:

30 grams of dried bay leaves, crushed and broken up.
25 grams of dried thyme (or some fresh thyme chopped up, if you have it).

Dry your pieces of pork belly with paper towels. Then take your dry rub and coat all of the pieces well. Rubbing mixture onto all surfaces of the meat, including the sides, etc. I then place these in food pans and cover with plastic wrap and let them sit out on the kitchen counter for say 45 minutes or so to get the rub starting to dissolve. Then I place all the food pans in a fridge to marinate or cure for between 4.5-6.0 days. If the pieces of pork are quite thin, you will find that 4.5 days is enough; but if you have extra thick slabs of pork, you may need 6.0 days or so. The texture of the pork is what will give you the right cues. It should not be soft and squishy like the day you bought it; it should be firmer and harder, though not hard. Does that confuse you? :)

Flip the slabs of pork DAILY until you ascertain that they have cured long enough. If you let them go too long, they become very, very salty. If you don’t let them cure enough, they may lack salt and worse, may start to rot during the drying process. You may notice that you lose some liquid in this stage and that is good. Some slabs of pork lose more liquid that others.

Once you are happy with the degree of curing, then rinse the pieces of pork quickly and dry well with paper towels. At this stage, I just lay them on cookie racks on top of a cookie sheet and let them dry out uncovered in a clean fridge (I use one dedicated pre-cleaned fridge to cure 15 kilos of pancetta at a time) for say 6-8 days until quite firm. They are now ready for use. They will last several days in the fridge, wrapped up, or several months in the freezer, properly wrapped up. If you live in places where you might have a garage with a temperature of 50F or so at the moment, and no critters or bugs, then traditional recipes suggest you can just hang your slabs of pork to dry for 5-7 days until done. While I wish I could tell you I have tried this, I have not. Maybe if I had a cellar or mud room in New England just about now, I would. Most folks roll up pancetta before drying, but I find it a bother, it increases the risk of bacteria thriving, and in the end, it is just easier to cut flattish pancetta… so that’s up to you. I can only advise that if you roll it up, use some cracked black peppercorns inside the roll and do it so tightly that there is a minimum of air in there. It helps keep the cooties at bay. I kid you not. :)

My favorite use for the homemade pancetta? Bucatini or spaghetti a la Matriciana. Or you can use it in a clams and pancetta recipe. Cut it thinly and fry like bacon for sandwiches or to top salads. Use it as a base flavoring agent for minestrone. Top your pizzas with it. Saute cabbage and pancetta for a quick vegetable dish… Once you master this pancetta recipe, you won’t be tempted to buy pancetta from fancy purveyors for upwards of PHP1,200-1,500 a kilo. And it’s so much more satisfying to think you made it yourself. Enjoy!

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This is one case where BITTER is definitely BETTER. Meals in Rome and other parts of Italy are often accompanied by a side dish of bitter greens. There are several varieties of chicory or dandelion greens that are used, and the foil of rich meat or grilled fish against a bracingly bitter vegetable is a classic mouthful of flavor. I happen to like bitter greens these days (though not always) so I was intrigued by the rather vibrant bunch of “Italian Dandelion” that I spotted at the Teraoka family farms stall at the recent Philippine Harvest bazaar. I bought two bunches…

The leaves struck me as being a bit bigger than they should have been, either a result of our bright sunny hot weather at the moment, or they were left too long before harvest. So I expected that what is normally bitter, even for Romans, would be even bitter-er, if you can imagine that.

When we returned home, I immediately cut off the tougher ends of the stems, near the roots, and soaked the greens in cool water for 30 minutes or so, to rehydrate the leaves. I find this a useful step in our incredibly hot and humid weather. It’s amazing how lively your greens will look after the soak. Store in the fridge until ready to use. Cut the greens into 2-3 inch pieces.

If I were using younger more tender greens, I wouldn’t bother with this next step, which was to blanch the greens in salted boiling water for say 30 seconds or so, to tenderize the stems a bit more, and perhaps modulate the likely bitterness factor. Drain well.

Into a medium sized pan, add some olive oil and several cloves of garlic and saute until lightly browned. Add the dandelion greens and cook for some 5 minutes or so over medium heat (not wok sizzling heat) and salt generously and add some cracked black pepper and dried chili flakes. Take off the heat and serve hot, or at near room temperature, as desired. This batch was WICKED BITTER. I could only manage a third of this small dish of greens, but they were delicious nonetheless.

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A palate puncher! Shock those tastebuds! Scare the bacteria right out of your jaded mouth! Yup, this was that much needed departure from what has become rather predictable lunch time fare (pork and its by-products) at the Zubuchon main office… One of our newest employees took some murky JB fish sauce into the kitchen a half hour before lunch and emerged with this bowl that can only be described as having the potential for waking the dead. And I mean that in a good way…

Folks always refer to “sawsawan” or a dipping sauce these days as an “essential part” of Filipino cuisine, but the nature and quality of sawsawan is increasingly being determined by a commercially available, supermarket sourced list of ingredients that are often a shadow of their original or authentic cousins. Think “white” vinegar from white gallon containers instead of artisanally fermented nipa (or recently, from a friend, homemade buri) vinegar. Or large red but mild taiwanese-bred finger chilies rather than fiery smiling labuyo grown wild from bird droppings (after the bird feasted on ripe chilies elsewhere in the archipelago presumably. Or salt with iodine vs. just plain sea salt, or worse pure MSG. Soy sauce that is oddly thick as sin that’s salty but oddly lacks flavor, etc. Younger diners today who are so used to creating their sawsawan (particularly in urban areas) by pouring things out of bottles, perhaps are no longer aware that so many of the “sawsawans” or condiments used by their parents and grandparents were things that were cooked or prepared along with a meal. And in the Visayas, a lot of these “condiments” were really more than just dips. Think guinamos dips that could just as well be a viand, here. Or kamias with bagoong, here or here. So a plate of blandish food might be “ramped up” with a shockingly salty, sour, umami-ish side dish. That’s what this particular post is about…

Vern took 750 grams of ripe tomatoes and sliced them, seeds and all. PHP8 from the Carbon market at the height of summer. Tons of tomatoes on offer. Then she chopped some onions and garlic, sliced some ginger, chopped some taiwanese chilies (no ripe labuyo in the larder or garden) and extracted the juice of 15 kalamansi fruit. She measured out roughly a tablespoon (yes, a tablespoon!) of homemade siling labuyo flakes, roughly 1/2 a cup of JB murky brown-grey fish sauce with no bones, and roughly 2-3 tablespoons of lard.

Into a pan over high heat, add the lard. Repeat, lard. It adds flavor that is distinct from vegetable oil. Then the onions and garlic, ginger and sauce until softened and fragrant. Next add the tomatoes and lightly mash them as they cook, creating essentially a fresh tomato sauce. Cook this down for roughly 10 minutes, before adding the fish sauce, chilies (fresh and dried) and finally the kalamansi juice and cook this down further for 8-10 minutes until it is the consistency you desire. Serve with grilled or fried food, vegetable dishes, mild soups with protein and veggies in it that require a hit of tongue lashing flavor and spice. This particular concoction was mind-blowingly good. Spicy, saucy, intense, salty, etc. I could see this working well with fried chicken, grilled tanguigue, sautéed dark greens, platters of bihon,etc. Absolutely delicious. So much so, just after lunch, I asked Vern to cook the dish again, so I could take these photos and write this post. :)

P.S. I have written this exactly as Vern prepared it. But as a personal note, I would mince the ginger instead of large chunks used in the photos here. Now that I finish this post, it triggers thoughts of some Indonesian sambals we enjoyed when we lived there many years ago…

The post “Wake the Dead” Sauce/Condiment/Elixir a la Vern… appeared first on Market Manila.

I haven’t been experimenting as much as I used to. It’s something I really miss doing, but all the other things that vie for attention have gotten in the way recently. For months now, I have had this idea on the back burner, and yesterday we were able to finally take a first “crack” at it. I wanted ginormous chicharon. More for the novelty factor and to have something on display for tourists at our airport kiosk this summer that would draw attention (good or bad)… but also so a bunch of friends traveling together might break off bits of chicharon while chatting about nothing in particular. A social chicharon. :)

In theory it seemed simple enough, take a huge piece of skin (skin only in this case, as skin and fat as we normally use for our meaty chicharon is too big and cumbersome) and boil it until tender then render it in lard and finally deep fry it in hot, hot lard. But in practice, it’s hard to prevent the skin from curling up, and thinner parts burn faster than thicker parts, edges cook faster than the center, etc.

So I approached our chicharon supervisor and explained what I wanted to attempt. He was a bit skeptical at first, but no one is really allowed to be skeptical at Zubuchon, since they have seen bizarre idea after bizarre idea end up working, and I simply told him to experiment, and not to worry if we ended up going through several skins in the process. I sort of gave him a couple of weeks to play with the idea. But he is an overachiever, so about 4 hours later, he presented me with the platter up top! OMG, that’s a show stopper of a chicharon, if you ask me. Wicked good with chili vinegar. Not perfected yet, but way ahead of the experimentation curve, if you ask me!

To prevent curling, Gidor inserted bamboo sticks into the skin to keep it spread out. He rendered it in lard as other typical pieces of skin/fat were being rendered. Then he removed this, heated up a vat of more lard and flash fried the rendered skin to see that final miraculous explosion into chicharon occur. He proudly brought it into the office with a smile on his face, as if his earlier skepticism was now well and truly gone. Of course we are still several versions away from the final, as we have to figure out how to produce this in bigger quantities?, how do we package it so it doesn’t soften, how much seasoning is required?, how can we make it even more ginormous? etc., etc. Then of course I want to try the long curly chicharons from Bangkok markets, tiny bit sized pieces of thinly cut chicharon, and so many others… :)

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Whenever I come across a sack (they are inevitably transported and displayed in sacks) filled with freshly harvested peanuts, soil bits and all, I buy a few kilos worth. They remind me of my parents, who were huge peanut fans, in almost any form — boiled, fried, roasted, brittle, etc. Back at home, we washed the peanuts several times in water until all traces of soil were removed, then simply boiled them in some salted water. They take longer than one might think to get them just right, and somehow al dente peanuts aren’t a thing…

I like to sprinkle them with some good sea salt and I just sit there in front of the television and eat way too many. Something about cracking the soft shells open (oxymoronic, soft shells with a sharp edge to crack) and scooping out the almost bland yet still distinctly flavorful “nuts” is addictive and habit forming. And for me, they MUST be freshly cooked. Do you think this is a “Visayan” thing or did folks from the North do this as well?!

P.S. My apologies for photos in some of the last few posts, readers pointed out they might be blurry and yes, I was in fact taking “auto macro” photos when I meant to have it on “auto” only… :)

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It looks a bit like a brain, doesn’t it? This one kilo block of “ripe” sampalok cost me just PHP60 ($1.20) at the FTI market the other day. I keep typing “ripe” as it wasn’t exactly naturally sweet like the whole tamarind pods that come from Thailand (do they sweeten those somehow without peeling them?). In fact, this tamarind was so sour I can’t imagine how much more sour it was when it was green and unripe!

I put the entire block of tamarind into a pot, added maybe 7-8 cups of water and turned the flames to medium high. I wrote about some freshly peeled ripe sampalok before, here and here, and I wanted to make some sampalok puree once again for other uses… I added 2 cups of white sugar, tasted it and freaked out at just how sour it still was. I added another 2-3 cups of brown sugar and it took on a beautiful deep caramel color and it started to taste nicely tart and sweet at the same time. Once it was just the right consistency (it thickens a bit as it cools, I took it off the heat and passed it through a sieve

Once it was just the right consistency (it thickens a bit as it cools), I took it off the heat and passed it through a sieve and bottled up half the yield for uses in marinades, sauces, etc. Now if only I could get my hands on say 100 kilos of this stuff, I would make hundreds of bottles of tamarind puree to use in our restaurants… because right now I realize we use commercial thai tamarind puree (for our roasted chickens) that costs 5x the cost of doing it ourselves, with local produce to boot!

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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.

The nice thing about making your own gravlax is that it costs just 1/4th of the price compared to your nearest snazzy delicatessen. So you can be generous with it. And you can intentionally make more than you need, so the cook has a “treat” when the meals are done. I am an early riser by nature, so when I get up after a big dinner the previous night and go rooting around the fridge for something to eat, a toasted bagel, generous amounts of cream cheese and heaps of gravlax are one of my favorite treats. Leftover deluxe. Alternatively, try the salmon in some scrambled eggs or an omelette. Yum.

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