Filipino Cuisine, an exceptional taste!

From breakfast, lunch, dinner, merienda and even dessert time, we Filipinos prepare to eat a feast. We are really fond of eating. We eat anytime, anywhere. Street food is one of the accessible foods for Filipinos. Examples of these are fish ball, squid ball, and kikiam skewered in bamboo sticks then dip them on the sauce of your choice. We are also famous for our “out of this world” names of our food. One of these is “kwek kwek”. This is a quial’s egg coated with orange flour which is then dipped into vinegar. We also named different kinds of barbecue like “betamax” or a diced pig’s blood, “adidas” or chicken’s feet, “helmet” or chicken’s head, lastly “isaw” or chicken’s intestine. We also made slangs for combinations of food, like tapsilog which is composed of tapa, sinangag (fried rice) and itlog. We may not be creative in naming our cuisines, but we are good in complementing distinct flavors. We pair a sweet choco sticky-rice champorado to a salty tuyo (sun-dried fish), dinuguan with a bit of salty taste matched with sweet tuyo. Lastly, the common dessert, the unripe mangoes with a blend of sweet and sour taste dipped into a salty bagoong.

Filipino cuisines was influenced by the countries Spain and America its former colonizers, China its early traders and other nearby Asian countries like Indonesia and Malaysia. It is a merge of different cuisines around the world. Noodles were adapted from Chinese, fast-food originated from the Americans and rice plus a main dish from Spaniards. Even though we inherited few of our food recipes from them, we still have unique, original and exotic dishes. And one of these exotic foods we have is the well-known “balut”. It is a pre-hatched duck’s/ chicken’s egg boiled when its embryo already reached its desired size. It is said to be nutritious and that once you eat that, it will make your knees stronger. Another, food made from animal’s organ. Dinuguan which is made of pig’s organ (with chopped pig’s meat and organ), bopis a yellowish food colored by atsuete which is also made of finely chopped pig’s organ, papaitan a goat’s innards simmered with bile that creates its bitter taste in it and lastly a famous soup made of bull’s testes, Soup no. 5. Even though these foods are not appealing to eat, but ones you try them, you’ll crave for more!