EatingAsia

Tap Lessons

Sago isn't the only palm that's mined for food in the Philippines. Nipa (Nypa fruticans) - and other palm varieties, including coconut and aren - are tapped to produce suka (vinegar), a Filipino kitchen staple, mildly alcoholic tuba, and more alcoholic laksoy. Elsewhere in Southeast Asia this same sap is boiled to make sugar. Such may also have been the case in the Philippines before the Spanish introduced cane sugar cultivation.

You'll often hear it said that coconut, aren, and nipa vinegar (and gula Melaka) are made from the sap of palm trees. That isn't quite the case - what's tapped are not the trunks of these trees but the stalks of the trees' flowers. Among the three varieties the nipa palm is unusual in that its stalk is cut and the sap harvested only after the flower has bloomed.

Nipa palms grow in muddy areas near brackish water. Unlike coconut palms, they're low-to-the-ground; their trunks actually grow horizontally beneath the surface of the earth, with branches jutting up in clumps. This makes harvesting the tuba (sap) relatively easy as the tapper doesn't have to scale a ladder to ready the flower stalk and collect sap.

Above, a resident of Barangay Banza in Mindanao's Butuan City prepares a flower stalk for tapping, by bending it down and away from the trunk of the palm, rubbing it with mud, and massaging it. The idea is to loosen the fibers inside the stalk enough to get the sap flowing without pulverizing them; this he'll do a couple times a day for a couple of weeks.

To determine whether or not the stalk is ready to be cut, he hacks away a bit of the flower to get at one of the white crispy nuggets hiding inside each 'petal'. These 'nuts', by the way, are also harvested and eaten as is or candied to make a nata de coco-like treat sometimes called 'palm seeds' and sold in jars of sugar syrup. They show up in halo-halo, and, in Vietnam, in a similar ice treat called che.

The stalk is ready for cutting when the flower's nuts are sweet (they also taste a little coconuty). The flower is taken off about six inches from where it attaches to the stalk and, once again, mud is rubbed along its length to draw the sap out (this is the last time the stalk will be mud-rubbed).

If the tapper has accurately gauged the readiness of the stalk then sap should start flowing right away.

It's captured in a bamboo tube that's attached to the end of the stalk.

The tuba is collected twice a day. Its sweet stickiness gums up the end of the stalk, so after each collection the tapper slices off about a half centimter or so to keep the sap flowing.

One stalk will produce tuba for about thirty days, by which time it will have been sliced, bit by bit, almost to the trunk.

Tuba begins to ferment almost as soon as it drops into the bamboo tube (sugar makers employ a variety of means to hinder fermentation). After it's collected it's added to a big wooden barrel. If left for three days it becomes bahal, the lightly sour, ever-so-slightly alcoholic beyond-tuba-but-not-quite-vinegar that Butuan City Market's kinilaw master Leo uses to dress his fresh fish.

After thirty days the tuba becomes suka. Our host in Butuan City adds extra flavor to his suka in the form of fresh chilies, onion, garlic, ginger, and lots of black pepper. This elixir we greedily spooned over everything from rice to grilled fish to fresh seaweed.

Or, fermented tuba can be made into laksoy, a clear alcoholic beverage. This still, set by the river and shaded by nipa thatch (yet another use for the palm - roofing and walling), is fueled by wood and turns twenty gallons of tuba into about one gallon of laksoy. The stills here in Banza are made of lawaan wood or stainless steel. Wood makes for a much more fragrant laksoy, we're told.

Inside the still, the tuba is heated to boiling. The steam that rises condenses on the still's concave metal cap and then drips through a tube, out and into a waiting jug.

The first round results in a lightly cloudy beverage. Laksoy isn't crystal clear - and doesn't earn the designation 'first-class' - until it's been distilled a second time. We found first-class laksoy to be more palatable than expected, with a wee bit of a floral scent - definately not rot-gut 'white lightning'. Some locals let raisins and/or ripe jackfruit macerate in the laksoy before cracking the bottle. If we had a jug of laksoy we'd treat it as we sometimes do rum: add mango, pineapple, lime rind, and a bit of vanilla bean and stow it away to flavor for thirty days.

In the barangay stills are a communal asset, supporting on average twenty families each. One lapad (flat, 'pocket-sized' 375 ml bottle) of laksoy fetches 10 pesos (about 25 US cents).

It may not be the tree of life, but the nipa palm is integral to the livelihood of this barangay, at least. The captain tells us that seventy percent of Banza's population is involved in the production of tuba, suka, and/or laksoy, as well as the harvesting of nipa 'nuts'.

Welcome

... to readers of The Edge Financial Daily (and any other first-timers, for that matter), which made EatingAsia 'Pick of the Day' in yesterday's edition (click and enlarge to read). I'm particularly chuffed that the writer chose to highlight what must be one of my all-time favorite posts, on getting (sugar) high in the Philippines' Pampanga province. Makes me think we should add a 'food culture' category to the side bar (and for more photos, food culture-focused and otherwise, drop by this work in progress).

Thanks Edge!

What Do You Do With a Squid the Size of Your Arm?

One of the most arresting sights at Butuan City's Seafood Market is the rows of giant squid, slippery bodies big as a small cat, tentacles thick as thumbs, and eyes that are eerily human-like. As I perused the market's offerings thoughts like 'Mmmm, red snapper, chuck it on the grill' and, 'Ooooh, octopus, Italian tomato stew with spinach,'  danced through my head.

Then my gaze fell upon the squid, and the only words that came to mind were 'Now what the he** do you do with that!?'

Luckily our host in Butuan City is quite a kitchen wizard, and during that week of non-stop sport eating he turned out a couple of personal favorites that take advantage of the sea beast's bounty.

Who doesn't love grilled squid? The problem, if you're preparing this at home, is that there's such a fine line between 'done' and 'rubber' that the risk of turning squid into something with a texture akin to a Superball is exceedingly high. With these babies, sheer volume lifts the getting-it-just-right pressure.

After severing (but not discarding) head and tentacles our host stuffed the skin-on bodies with a mixture of chopped onions and tomatoes and laid it all over low coals. We had a long wait for lunch but the wonderfully tender squid rings sporting a good bit of smoky char on the outside were well worth it. Bigger squid means, of course, more tentacles and Dave, an afficianado, especially appreciated the bounty.

Giant squid heads are a bit of a delicacy and our host urged us to give the eye a try. I passed.

The most surprising giant squid preparation we ate that week was an invention of the house: seafood Bicol Express. Bicol Express, a beloved Philippine specialty alleged to have originated in Bicol province (a vendor at Makati City's Salcedo Community Market also also claims to have invented the dish, so who knows), is a fiery dish made with chopped garlic, onions, chilies, pork, and plenty of rich coconut milk.

Our host's twist supplements pork with a variety of seafood (including squid tentacles, the nubs you see below), adds salted black beans, and enriches the coconut milk with smashed chicken liver. This will sound like blasphemy to many Filipinos, I know. (Does coconut milk ever need to be enriched? Liver will obliviate any delicate seafood flavor, right? If you add black beans and substitute seafood for pork is it still Bicol Express?) But the result of our host's experiments (he's been perfecting the dish for years, he says) is a sublime - if very rich - stew that, in spite of the presence of pork and those livers, tastes quite forcefully of freshness from the sea.

Especially wonderful were the squid tentacles, with a texture and flavor resembling small scallops. (And that's seaweed salad in the back, by the way.)

Apologies to those of you with access to giant squid (how do you like to prepare it?) - I didn't think to get the recipe because the beasts are nowhere to be seen in our neck of the woods.

But at least I'll know what to think about the next time I encounter them in a market: 'Mmmmm, giant squid - seafood Bicol Express.'

Philippine Food Reads: Of Bananas and Drinking Food

The Philippines is blessed with a substantial body of good food writing, both serious literature and research by the likes of Edilberto Alegre and the late Doreen Fernandez, and less 'learned' but nonetheless enjoyable books by professional and amateur food lovers. An hour spent browsing the shelves in the food writing/cookbook section of a Manila bookstore never fails to deliver something surprising and delightful.

In December I found a couple of gems: a thirty-year-old publication by the Philippine Banana Export Industry Association called 100+1 Banana Recipes, and a slim paperback called Pulutan: From the Soldiers' Kitchen. The first is what its title suggests, a straightforward collection of recipes (written in both Tagalog and English) featuring banana as the main ingredient. Included are fairly mundane dishes such as banana muffins and banana pudding, as well as recipes for more curious (to the non-Filipino, at least) concoctions such as banana omelet, banana-stuffed bangus (milkfish), banacorn soup (made with corn grits, unripe banana, and green onion), and banana chicken with ubod (palm heart). It's a quirkily enjoyable illustration of the centrality of the banana in Philippine cuisine - for less than U$5.

Pulutan: From the Soldiers' Kitchen is, perhaps, an 'only-in-the-Philippines' sort of creation: a book of anecdotes and recipes written by two junior military officers serving time for their alleged involvement in what is referred to in the Philippines as the 'Oakwood Mutiny', an event in which some 300 soldiers took over the Oakwood Hotel in Makati (Manila) and declared their withdrawal of support from the government of current Philippine president Gloria Arroyo. The recipes in the book are all for pulutan, a category of food perhaps best explained by the authors:

'Pulutan conveys many things Filipino. That is probably why there is no English word that truly captures the concept of pulutan.

Finger food is not quite accurate because many pulutan are eaten with a fork or with a spoon. Neither is appetizer quite right because pulutan is a meal by itself. In fact, when the plate stops being replenished, that means it's time to go home.

Pulutan conjures comraderie. A drinking session is the Filipino concept of breaking bread. Pulutn is the bread.

The word pulutan has also evolved to mean being a main topic of conversation. If one is absent in a drinking session, he gets talked about and becomes the pulutan. (p. xv)

Each chapter ('All Time Favorites', Goat Meat, Lasang Exotic, 'Not the Usual Parts', etc.) opens with a discussion that mixes memories and anecdotes ('For my twenty-sixth birthday in 2005, I wanted something different to celebrate it with classmates who were also fellow detainees. I didn't want the usual spaghetti and fried chicken.'); Philippine food-related factoids (humba, a pork and vinegar dish, is often served at festive occasions in the Visayas, and a Philippine drinkers' tale says that fathers cook better than mothers because while the latter only learn to cook when they marry, the former learn to cook as soon as they start drinking alcohol); and kitchen tips (when preparing Bloody Belly Grill, an Ilocano dish, 'the swine's blood must be fresh and pure. Do not add water to increase the volume').

Many of the recipes are for dishes that might be 'challenging' to the Western palate. I doubt that I'll ever cook Vampires' Delight, a pork loin preparation that also includes intestines, liver, and fresh blood, or Sinigang na Adidas, sour soup of chicken feet (nails removed). But Ginataang Kuhol (snails cooked with coconut milk, squash blossoms, ginger, and chilies - mussels or other shellfish might be substituted for the snails) sounds delicious, and how can you go wrong with Steamed Stingray?

I love books of this sort for the highly focused and sometimes offbeat slices of culinary culture that they offer the reader.

Ginataang Kuhol (From Pulutan: From the Soldiers' Kitchen, Ellen T. Tordesillas and Yvonne T. Chua, eds.)

30-50 pieces edible snail

2 Tbsp. chopped garlic

4 medium onions chopped

2 Tbsp. grated ginger

1 cup gata (coconut milk)

4 pieces siling haba (finger chile)

1 cup water

1 cup squash shoots and/or flowers

1. Wash the snails in boiling water and set aside.

2. Heat oil in a pan then saute garlic, onions, and ginger.

3. Add snails. Cover pan and cook for 10 minutes.

4. Add coconut milk, siling haba, and water. Cover pan and bring to the boil.

5. When the sauce is thick, add squash shoots. Season to taste.

6. Turn off heat but leave the pan covered for 5 minutes before serving.

The Tree of Life (Part 3)

The trunk of the sago palm hides more than carbohydrates.

If the tree is cut down and left on the ground - or if the trunk is split open and its shavings set aside in a container - for about three months, the eggs of a type of beetle hatch into plump white larvae that are a well-loved (by some) source of protein.

After we'd seen the sago's trunk processed into flour and sampled a few sago starch snacks, we turned our attention to sago worms. Longtime readers of EatingAsia know that we are not 'adventure eaters' and that we have a problem with the 'Bizarre Foods' approach to food travel reportage. We don't land in a locale and ask to be directed to the weirdest, wackiest, wildest food possible, because we're interested in learning about cultures and people via their food, not in characterizing a locale's cuisine based on the Eeewwww Factor.

But, we came to Banza barangay to learn how a palm tree is turned into a foodstuff basic to many Southeast Asian cuisines. The larvae that grow in the sago palm are also eaten. It seemed to be something we should investigate.

In this case the larvae were 'incubated' in a mound of sago trunk shavings. After the critters are unearthed they're dropped in a cup of water for a rinse.

The worms varied in size from about two to five or six centimeters. Squishing one in half reveals the source of their appeal: sago worms are nothing but head and gooey fat.

Here, the worms are often eaten as is, uncooked, just popped in the mouth after perhaps a dip in nipa vinegar or tuba (sago worm kinilaw, as it were).

We couldn't go there, and here's where nurture-not-nature comes into play. We simply could not bring ourselves to place one of those fat, wriggling things in our mouths. Our Filipino companion, a Manila native, had come determined to try sago worm kinilaw. He couldn't do it either.

Happily for us - because we did want to taste the worms in one form or another - they're also eaten cooked.

Fried in a dry pan over high heat, to be precise, with a couple of pinches of salt.

As the worms cook they become translucent and, after a few minutes, we could literally see the fat bubbling underneath their skins. At this point the cook used the sharp edge of his spatula to break the skins and allow the liquid fat to escape into the pan.

After about fifteen minutes the larvae were transformed into the golden brown, shrunken specimens in the opening photograph, something much easier to contemplate putting in my mouth than the very worm-y worms they'd started out as.

And frankly, they were delicious. Crispy, salty, and greasy, with a lick of smoke - what's not to love? Our friend said they reminded him of chicharron; we wished for vinegar for dipping. After munching on several of the smallest larvae I went for a meatier specimen. More fat and some chewy 'meat' which, to me, evinced a pleasant bit of prawnish brine.

Most of the villagers declined to partake when we offered the plate around. Many wrinkled their noses in disgust (especially the ladies - sago worms are pulutan or 'drinking food'; they're also, as with so many other 'difficult' foods, said to be an aphrodisiac).

Would I seek them out again? No. Tasty as they were, they were far from the most delicious thing we ate during our time on Mindanao. But if a serving were laid in front of me I'd probably down a few, especially if I had an ice-cold San Miguel in one hand.

The Tree of Life (Part 2)

So, you've chopped down a fifteen-year-old sago palm, scraped out its insides, bathed them in water and kneaded and squeezed them dry, collected the starch from the bottom of your processing vessel, crammed it into waist-high cones you made from the base of the palm's leaves, left it to drain for a few days, and ended up with more sago flour than you'll ever eat in a year.

What to do with it?

If you're in Banza Barangay,Mindanao (Philippines), you might cook up some sago flatcakes called tumpi.

You'd begin by heating some sago flour - which is sometimes white and sometimes brick red and sometimes a shade in between - in a dry skillet so that later, when the tumpi are on the griddle, they don't get hard.

As the sago toasts it comes together in tough little clumps, so after emptying it from the pan you'd  break it up into small pieces.

Then you'd add freshly grated coconut and knead the two ingredients together with your hands, long and hard enough to thoroughly incorporate the coconut into the flour. (If you were in the mood, you might also knead in some mashed banana or sweet potato). You would add cane sugar, white or unrefined - enough, but not too much, because tumpi isn't as much a dessert sort of snack as it is a lightly sweet bit of nourishment.

You'd take balls of the sago-coconut-sugar mixture and pat them between your palms into flat cakes. (If you didn't want to be bothered with all that patting and pressing you'd skip this step entirely, and cook your sago-coconut-sugar mixture loose, for inisab.)

You'd put your sago pattycakes in a dry pan over a medium-high fire, and cook them on both sides until they're dark and a bit crisp,

and then you'd serve them to your visitors and chuckle at the way they rave over the crunchy-chewy texture of your everyday, no-big-deal creation.

Or, if you didn't mind expending a bit more energy you might try your hand at palagsing, mixing the grated meat of a coconut not as soft as buko (young coconut) nor as hard as the old coconut you grated for your tumpi with cane sugar, and then gradually adding in uncooked sago flour.

You'd spoon your palagsing 'dough' onto banana leaves, shaping it to form a log of sorts,

carefully wrap it side-to-side and tuck top and bottom edges under, and tightly tie two logs together, seam side in, to make water-tight seals.

You'd build a fire, bring a pot of water to the boil, and add the palagsing bundles.

After about thirty minutes you'd pull the palagsing from their bubbling bath and pull away their banana leaf cloaks to reveal tubes that, from a distance, resemble fat-marbled pork sausages.

You'd offer these, too, to your visitors, who would find them to be a fine combo of tender chewiness and - from the moist and super coconuty shredded fruit - crunch but who, residing in Malaysia (the home of gula Melaka) as they do, might think to themselves that as tasty as these palagsing are, the substitution of palm sugar for cane sugar would elevate them to a higher plane.

The Tree of Life (Part 1)

For years we've been eating sago - in the form of the pearls that float about in Taiwan bubble tea and the flour that lends a wonderful chew to various Southeast Asian sweet treats - without knowing exactly where it comes from.

Nor did we know that Mindanaoans owe their survival of Word War II, in large part, to lumbia, the local name for the sago palm. During the war sago flour, a highly absorbent carbohydrate source that expands in the belly to make one feel full, stood in for rice. This we learned from the residents of Barangay Banza (Butuan City), where last month we were gifted the opportunity to watch the processing of this ancient foodstuff from start to finish.

The sago palm grows wild near brackish water in much of coastal Southeast Asia; in some areas it's also cultivated. At the end of its fifteeen-year life cycle, right before it begins to flower, the tree is felled for the starch stored in its trunk.

Getting at the stuff is no easy task (using traditional methods, that is; these days much sago is industrially processed). The trunk is splt and its insides hacked out, bit by bit, by a blunt hoe-wielding strongman.

It takes a few hours of strenuous labor to shred the trunk to nothingness. As the 'shredder' works, trunk innards are transferred to a large container - in this case, a disused dugout canoe - and doused with water.

 

As he adds water to the sago palm shreds, the man responsible for processing the sago kneads them repeatedly to extract their starch. It turns the water the color of milky Thai iced tea.

After the sago shreds have been thorougly moistened and kneaded they're squeezed dry, handful by handful. The final squeeze takes place over a mesh-lined sieve suspended over the boat, and the spent shreds are discarded.

This gentleman was washing and kneading and squeezing when we arrived around 9am. He was still at it a few hours later. After years of making sago flour he knows by touch, he says, when all the starch has been squeezed from the sago shreds. When he's finished, a mound of fine white starch hides underwater, in the depths of the canoe.

Left aside for a day, the water evaporates. What little is left the next morning can easily be scooped, without disturbing the puddle of sago starch, out of the canoe with a shallow pan.

At this point the flour is scraped off of the bottom of the canoe. It comes up willingly, in big, flat slabs of snow-white velvet.

Though it feels dry when rubbed between the fingers, the sago flour hides moisture. Setting it aside in storage at this stage would result in much moldy flour and hours of wasted effort,

 

so the starch is further drained in ingenious and beautiful conical sieves made from the base of the leaf of the sago palm from whence it came.

The hole at the bottom of the cone is loosely blocked with a bit of discarded shredded sago palm trunk,

and then the flour, just scraped from the bottom of the canoe, is packed tight within.

A triangle of palm leaf, placed inside the cone with its point covering the very bottom,insures that the packed flour can effortlessly be dislodged from its sieve once it's completely dried.

 

The cones are then tied upright and the flour left to finish draining and drying for several days. When all is said and done each cone will hold about ten kilos of sago flour.

The resulting sago flour - or unau, as it's called in these parts - can be used immediately, or it can be transformed into kinabu, which is essentially toasted flour, via a few turns in a dry pan. Kinabu can be kept without spoiling for up to a year. It's used to make a number of cakes, and can also stretch a meal if added to cooked rice at a ratio of about 1 cup kinabu to 1 kilo rice.

Next up, sago nibbles.

The Naked Truth

At the end of last year in the Philippines, we were treated to lechon.

The pigs, two of them, were brought to the house the night prior to roasting. They were killed before dawn thirty feet from our bedroom window, behind an old granary on a concrete slab overlooking a field. Laying in bed, Dave heard frantic squeals right before the pigs met their end. It was quick, he said, just a burst of noise and then nothing. I'm glad I slept through it.

I'd planned to wake in time to see them prepared for the roasting pit. The food journalist in me was determined to watch the whole process - the killing, the bleeding, the removal of hair, the gutting, the anus-to-mouth skewering.

In fact, I missed most of it. I forgot to set my alarm. Or did I? By the time I got there the lechonero and his assistant were stitching up bellies, rinsing big floppy livers and coils of intestine and stomach, slitting bladders and emptying bile onto the grass. The pigs' faces wore sweet, peaceful smiles. Their hairless skins glowed pale pink, like babies fresh from a hot bath.

Four hours later I lay a piece of that skin on my tongue and savored its salty fattiness before shattering it with my teeth.

I've always eaten meat, but since moving to Malaysia my consumption has increased. Ironically, it's during this same period that I've also been closer than ever to my meat before it is meat. This is no alien concept to those of you who grew up with wet markets, with live chickens killed to order, whole pig halves hung on hooks, ox tails intact and sprouting hair, and whole skinned sheep heads displayed on tables, lifeless eyes bulging.

But where I grew up, in 1970s midwestern United States, meat was meat and animals were animals. The former, trimmed or chopped and wrapped in plastic or displayed in a sterile, refrigerated butcher case, had no connection with the latter, which one might see on TV or caress in a petting zoo. Meat was something you ate. An animal was something you might raise as a pet.

Pigs are intelligent animals, I know, at least as intelligent as dogs. I befriended one decades ago, when I worked at my agricultural university's large-animal veterinary facility. He recognized me after only two days - trotted right to the edge of his pen every morning when I entered the barn, pointed his snout up at me, and grunted until I scratched his bristled head. He had a name and came when called, turned around on command. Back then, I never gave him a second thought when, at home on the weekends, I tucked into my mother's pork chops. Lately I've thought of him every time I'm face-to-face with a lechon.

I love animals. I mourn for the frogs and lizards squished flat on the road in front of our house. I'll go out of my way to move a snail from a well-trod piece of concrete to a safe patch of wet dirt. I ache for homeless dogs and cats and over the years I've adopted many, not one of them a planned acquisition.

So how can I do it? How do I watch a vendor grab a chicken by its feet, suspend it over a barrel, and slit its throat? How do I watch its body jerk as it bleeds to death, and then turn around and carry its head-on, feet-on carcass home to the soup pot? How can I rub a cow's head and look into its limpid eyes, as I used to do when we hiked in northern California's parks, and then salivate over the thought of a grilled steak? How do I witness the indignity to which a pig is subjected when it's killed (or, if not witness it, read about it in gruesome detail) and still rub my hands with glee at the thought of lechon?

Lately, chefs and writers and farmers and food bloggers have been arguing for the importance of getting up close and personal with what's on our plates, formerly living protein included. In a piece about staying on a working farm in Tuscany in the February issue of Bon Appetit, Ann Hood writes about the satisfaction of witnessing the cycle that brings pig to the plate in the form of prosciutto (well, not all of the cycle - she wasn't there for the slaughter), noting that it's given her a 'new respect' for the meat she eats. She writes:

There is something about knowing the pig whose head you are eating that makes it more palatable.

Really? I have my doubts. If I knew an animal well enough to actually respect it, could I end its life (or have someone else do it in my place) just to fill my belly and satisfy my palate? Honestly, if I knew the pig whose head was on my plate I'd never put it in my mouth in the first place. I don't, and won't ever, eat dog or cat - or raise a pig as a pet, for that matter - for that very reason.

It's a very good thing, I think, that more and more carnivores are truly aware that pork and beef and lamb used to be pigs and cows and baby sheep. And it's a good thing that we know more about how they got from the one state to the other, if only because shedding light on the process might attract support for more humane living (and killing) conditions for the animals that we consume. But some arguments for looking one's dinner square in the eye border on the extreme, intimating that those of us who can't - or wouldn't even if we could - go the distance to know our meat aren't quite morally qualified to eat it.

Two weeks ago we visited a lechon shop in Mindanao, and watched the preparation of lechon post-slaughter to post-spit. At one point I wandered over to the pen in the corner of the shop where a few cute suckling pigs awaited their fate. I looked down at them, out the door at the spot where they'd soon be killed, and over at their brethren browning on the spits. And turned my head and walked away, quickly. And then ate lechon for lunch later that week.

I know that the seared-on-the-outside, pink-within slab on my plate used to be part of a living, breathing being. And that's as much as I want to know. When it comes to 'knowing' my meat, I'm going to buck the trend and admit that I have my limits.

From Boat to Market

Before it's kinilaw, tuna is just one of many catches of the day, here arriving at one of Surigao City's fish landings.

This landing is a small stretch of beach wedged between a wholesale seafood market and a disintegrating pier extending out into the water from a collection of stilt houses varying in condition from basic to decrepit. Not very far offshore are several islands - alluring masses of verdant green, some ringed by pearlescent sand.

 

While Dave is wandering around with his camera I speak with a man named Eric Estaban, owner of some of the boats unloading in front of us. He tells me there are several kinds. Banca are the largest, so large in fact that they have to weigh anchor offshore and pass their catch to smaller boats for transport to shore. (In more general terms boats of almost any size can be a banca, including passenger boats.) They're deep-sea boats with crews of about 30 men that spend 2 weeks at a time in the Pacific, returning with up to 7,000 kilos of seafood.

The medium-sized boats pictured above are called lawa-lawa. Many lawa-lawa carry spear-caught coral reef fish (some of them endangered, unfortunately). Spear fishing is done by 2 or 3 men at a time, at night with the aid of a torch.

Kaka are the smallest boats here. Some, outfitted with lights, are squid boats (lights attract squid to the surface of the water), and some are 'service boats' whose sole purpose is to accompany fishing boats and carry the catch. Squidding can be lucrative, Eric tells me. His boat, which cost 60,000 pesos (about U$ 1,500), usually brings in 8,000 pesos (U$ 200) worth of squid a day. From that amount, of course, he has to pay the middleman and his crew, buy fuel, keep the boat in good repair, and support his family. Still, at age 32, he's managed to make enough from the fishing business that he inherited from his father to grow it to 4 squid boats, 4 service boats, and 6 lawa-lawa.

When we arrive at dawn much of the landing's activity is already over, but every ten minutes or so a couple of boats pull to shore and are quickly unloaded.

Large catches are carried straight into the wholesale market, where they're watched over by the guys who hauled them in until someone makes a bid.

Bids are spoken here, not whispered as they are at some other Philippines seafood markets.

Once a bid is accepted (it's up to the fisherman) it's recorded by the market's managers, who act as middleman (and woman). They record each transaction in a couple of notebooks (no computers here!) and collect the money from the buyer, which is in turn passed on to whomever is representing the boat that brought the fish in, minus ten percent.

The product is then dispatched, via various modes of transport.

We found this tuna being packed into styrofoam coolers in preparation for its journey to a destination four to five hours inland.

While all this is going on a parallel process takes place out on the beach, where small-time vendors not registered with the market wholesale small catches from their portable tables.

What's on offer here can vary in size from a just three or four 6-inch squid to a good-sized single fish. As inside at the market, fishermen hang around their middleman waiting for an offer.

It can be a good place to pick up a recipe or two.

The seller of these slender squid advises turning them into kinilaw:

'Mix coconut vinegar with lots of chopped ginger, sliced red onion, chili chopped fine, and green onion leaves. Clean the squid and slice it, then add it to the vinegar mixture. Eat it with tomato. And eat it right away. If you leave the squid in the vinegar more than one or two minutes it will shrink and get hard. Then it's not tasty anymore.'

Eric tells me that most of the fisherman on these boats are from Hikdop, the largest island opposite this boat landing. By now it's 8am, the end of their day nine hours until they return to their boats and prepare to head out after another catch.

From Sea to Mouth

Or, in Butuan City, from shoulder to spoon.

The waters around Mindanao yield seafood the likes of which we've not seen before. Butuan City isn't a major fishing port, but it's located just two hours from Surigao City, which sees its fare share of good catch, and less than half a day's drive from General Santos (or Gensan, as it's usually called), a major exporter of blue fin tuna, many of which end up on the auction floor at Tokyo's Tsukiji Market.

We traveled to Mindanao to eat seafood, in as much quantity and variety as we could. The minute we stepped inside Butuan City's breathtaking seafood market we knew we'd come to the right place.

The place is as pristine as any wet market dealing in fresh goods can possibly be: gleaming white tile-topped cement stall after stall displaying delicacies from the deep. It smells like the water its products came from. Even late in the afternoon, when many fish markets would be in a sorry state, Butuan City's is hopping, with shoppers still thronging the stalls.

Specifically, we went to eat kinilaw, kinilaw, and more kinilaw. The word 'kinilaw' is derived from 'kilaw', which refers to a way of preparing food - usually protein and, very often, fish - in vinegar or another souring agent. We had our eye on seafood kinilaw (Philippine ceviche, if you wish), and who better to prepare a dish of raw fish than a man who makes his living selling the stuff?

Leo and his wife Eva sell blue fin tuna and malasugue/malasogi (which, depending on where you are, can mean swordfish, sailfish, or marlin) at the Butuan City market. They are specialists - it's tuna and malasugue only (and at home, they eat seafood six days a week). Locals come to Leo for sashimi, which he slices with a covet-able knife that he bought at a Japanese market in Cebu, and they come for kinilaw. Leo is the Butuan City seafood market's indisputable kinilaw master.

We ordered up half a kilo of tuna, to eat right there among Leo's big-eyed fish heads and meaty fillets and perkily upright tails, and Leo and Eva good-naturedly set to work preparing ingredients and lining a couple of plates with banana leaves.

Vinegar is a common kinilaw souring agent. Cane and coconut palm vinegars are found throughout the Philippines, but in Butuan the preferred vinegar is made from nipa, a multi-stemmed palm that grows in brackish water. The 'sap' that is collected from the palm's flower stalk is called tuba, and tuba left to ferment turns into vinegar (distilled, it becomes laksoy, nipa liquor).

To make his kinilaw Leo uses bahal, nipa liquid that's past the tuba stage but is not quite yet vinegar. It's the color of honey, sour but not puckeringly so, and has a slightly alcoholic under note. Kinilaw connoisseurs agree that the best kinilaw is one that retains the freshness of the ingredients (kinilaw should be eaten right after the fish is added to the dish), and Leo prefers bahal over vinegar because it flavors the dish without 'cooking' the fish too quickly.

Leo's tuna kinilaw includes sliced cucumber, daikon radish, red onions, scallions, tomatoes, chilies, ginger, kalamansi, and a super-fragrant local lime called biasong. He flavors his bahal with tabon-tabon, a brown hard-shelled fruit that's said to remove fishy smells and prevent stomach upset.

It was the discovery of tabon-tabon halves, in the proximity of fish bones, during an archeological excavation in Butuan City in 1987 that led to the conclusion that kinilaw is at least a thousand years old, a purely indigenous dish in a cuisine with many foreign influences. (Butuanons also claim a long history; a local saying goes, 'Before there was the Philippines, there was Butuan.') 

Sliced open, tabon-tabon looks a bit like whole halved nutmeg. The flesh is dry and firm, but easily scraped out of its shell with the back of a spoon.

For a half-kilo order of kinilaw Leo mixes the grated flesh of one tabon-tabon with about a quarter of the 1 cup of bahal he'll use for the kinilaw, massages it a bit into the liquid, then squeezes it in his hand to extract its flavor. (He uses the same technique, substituting grated coconut for tabon-tabon, when he makes malasugue kinilaw. 'Tabon-tabon for tuna, coconut for malasugue', he says.) Then he strains the flavored bahal into the unflavored, discarding tabon-tabon innards.

While an assistant trims the fish Leo slices and then places in a bowl daikon, cucumber, and red onion. Before slicing the biasong, or local lime, he taps them all over with the back of his cleaver. From several feet away, with a lot of fish between us, the almost flowery scent of the lime is as strong as if it were waved right under my nose. He grates over ginger, then adds finely chopped chili, a touch of sugar, and a pinch of salt. He squeezes kalamansi juice into the tabon-tabon/bahal mixture and then adds it to the other ingredients, then sets it aside to tend to the fish.

He carefully cuts the tuna into two-centimeter cubes, then adds them to the bowl and gives a quick stir

before turning the kinilaw out onto a plate, laying sliced tomatoes and scallion greens on its surface,

and finishing with a final flourish of grated ginger. It's at this point that Leo's nephew, who works elsewhere in the market and has been standing silently next to Dave watching his uncle in action, pipes up: 'He's a master, you know.' 

To go with the kinilaw, Eva sources cooked kamote (cassava) and banana from elsewhere in the market. It turns out to be a brilliant pairing - a balancing of the sourness of a dish with sweetness from fruit or vegetable eaten alongside that's very Filipino.

Standing there at 9am surrounded by the bustle of Butuan City's seafood market, eyeball to eyeball with fish heads almost the size of our own, listening to seafood-toting porters clear a path through crowded aisles with a 'sssst ssssst', and alternating spoonfuls of kinilaw so fresh it might have jumped off the plate into our mouths with gulps of briny sea creature-scented air, we didn't want to be anywhere else. Stallside at Leo and Eva's must be, we think, one of the best places in the Philippines to eat kinilaw, a beloved Philippine specialty.

Need I say it? Leo's kinilaw is superb. There's a reason Eva took more than a few orders for kinilaw even as Leo was bringing ours together, and it had absolutely nothing to do with the camera-toting foreigner and his wife hanging out at their stall.

If you make it to Butuan City, head straight for Leo and Eva's stall. Kinilaw is dished up (to go, if you wish, fish packed separately from other ingredients) from about 9am, Monday through Saturday and a half day on Sunday.