Bangus Sisig

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May 17, 2011Bangus Sisig

Ah, Sisig! When prepared correctly, nothing quite captures the varied flavors and textures of Filipino cuisine like a sizzling-hot platter of chopped pig's face. It's true.

Chewy and crispy, fatty and meaty, sour and spicy--they're all there. Gustatory opposites complementing each other on a single plate of porky goodness. And thanks in large part to the increasing popularity of ethnic street food in the United States, and more specifically, to the growing interest in Filipino cuisine as a whole, more and more people have come to enjoy this once-obscure Pinoy dish.

Since my first post on Sisig nearly three years ago, the humble street food has gone on to enjoy some time in the limelight (err, kalamansi-light?). Sure, sisig has always been served in a handful of mom-and-pop hole-in-the-walls, but it didn't hurt that some yahoo started slinging pig face from a food truck, or that Anthony Bourdain sang Sisig's praises on TV:

Alas, despite the joys that come with eating the wobbly and chewy bits of a pig's face and ears, some people just can't bring themselves to eat the wobbly and chewy bits of a pig's face and ears. And that's understandable. I suppose.

But if you've got no qualms with stuffing your own face with that of a pig, there's also the not-so-small issue of fat--and there's a lot of it in pig cheeks. Take a look at a cross-section of a pork jowl and it looks a lot like that of a pork belly, hence the term "face bacon".

So what's a Filipino food lover to do when a hankering for sisig is had, but just sans fatty face? Luckily, there are more savory sisig scenarios besides pork. Filipinos have long sisig'd other proteins like tofu, chicken, and various seafoods.

But sisig made from Bangus (or milkfish), is perhaps my favorite non-pork face option for the classic street food.

Bangus, the other sisig meat.

You remember bangus don't you? It's the meaty and flaky national fish of the Philippines that's great grilled, stuffed, deep-fried, smoked, and in soups (I'm expecting a check from the Philippine Council of Bangus Anglers any day now [not really]).

And because it's got a lovely layer of blubber in its belly (I didn't say it was totally fat-free), Bangus is also perfect for sisig.

To make Bangus Sisig, first head to the freezer section of your friendly neighborhood Asian market and find yourself a deboned and butterflied bangus. Yes, you can find whole fresh bangus (loaded with a gazillion pin bones) at Asian markets, but the packaged and frozen variety are more convenient and sisig-friendly.

After thawing your bangus, marinate it in a simple mix of soy, vinegar, garlic, and pepper, then throw it on a hot grill as outlined in this post. After grilling, flake the fish into pieces--skin, meat, blubber, and all.

Now that you've got some fish flake fodder for your sisig, heat a cast iron skillet over high heat, add bit of oil, and quickly saute some chopped shallots, garlic, and a thai-bird chile or three. Add the fish to the hot skillet and mix--some of the meat and most of the skin will crisp nicely in the pan.

And finally, throw an egg onto the hot skillet and allow it to fry to a sunny finish, or break and swirl the egg so that it coats everything in a velvety sheen.  Squeeze some fresh kalamansi over the top, grab a beer, and you've got yourself some damn-fine bar food straight from the streets of Manila.

Chewy and crispy, (less) fatty and meaty, sour and spicy--all the hallmarks of a good sisig can still be had with the right fish.

Bangus Sisig. It's got all the street cred of pork sisig, but without all the pig face fat.

Bangus Sisig

Serves 2-4 as an appetizer

1/2 cup white cane vinegar (Sukang Maasim)
1/4 cup soy sauce
6 garlic cloves, smashed and peeled
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
1 boneless and butterflied milkfish (can be found frozen at Asian markets)
4 tablespoons canola oil, divided
2 shallots, finely chopped
4 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1-3 thai bird chilies, finely chopped
1 egg
kalamansi limes, for spritzing

Combine the vinegar, soy, garlic, and pepper in a shallow dish. Place the fish, flesh side down, into the marinade. Spoon some of the marinade over the skin side as well. Cover dish with plastic wrap, place in refrigerator, and allow to marinate for 6 to 8 hours and turning the fish over during the last hour.

Place the fish, flesh side down, on a hot pre-heated and well-greased grill and cook for 3 to 5 minutes. Brush the skin side of the fish with about 2 tablespoons canola oil, then flip fish over and cook for another 3-5 minutes. Remove from grill and allow to cool.

When the grilled fish is cool enough to handle, break the fish up into small pieces, including the belly blubber and the skin. Discard the head and tail. Place the flaked fish into a medium bowl and set aside.

Heat a small cast iron skillet over high heat. Add 1 tablespoon of oil to the hot skillet, then quickly add the shallots, garlic, and chillies to the skillet. Saute the vegetables until shallots begin to soften, and the garlic just begins to brown, about 1 minute.

Add the flaked fish to the skillet and toss to combine with the vegetables. Form a well in the middle of the skillet, then add 1 tablespoon of oil. Crack the egg into the well, then remove the skillet from the heat. The egg will continue to cook off the heat.

Squeeze some fresh kalamansi juice over the fish, and serve immediately with a side of rice and lots of beer.

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Comments

OMG, I laughed all the way through this post! I've no problem with pig face. At all.

Posted by:Darlene |May 17, 2011 at 01:12 PM

You make everything look so good!

Posted by:Belinda @zomppa |May 17, 2011 at 01:40 PM

Another fun post Marvin. Glad to see that you're blogging again. Will try out this recipe at our next tagayan.

Posted by:Pinoy Panda |May 17, 2011 at 01:42 PM

I was only introduced to sisig Reve Ty thanks to the Manila Machine :) never knew you could make it with bagnus. I'll have to give it a shot! Thanks for the inspiration.

Posted by:Bianca@South Bay Rants n Raves |May 17, 2011 at 02:16 PM

I had bangus sisig out of a can last week. Yeah. This would be better. Yeah.

Posted by:elmomonster |May 17, 2011 at 02:20 PM

Though I love the unctuousness of pig face sisig, it is rather nice to be able to enjoy it without risking certain cardiac arrest with each bite. The egg on top just seals the deal for me!

[Apologies if this is a repeat comment.]

Posted by:Tracey@Tangled Noodle |May 17, 2011 at 06:16 PM

Mmm, I love all kinds of offal. I would love to try the pig face and the fish as well!

Posted by:Jojo |May 19, 2011 at 07:39 AM

No problems with pig face here! I love sisig! :) But I also love bangus, and bangus sisig. I've had it in some restaurants...but now you've just made me realize, why am I not making this at home??

YUM!

Posted by:joey |May 19, 2011 at 07:49 AM

goodness man, you made me watch no reservations: philippines all over again. and thanks for reminding us that we can actually make bangus sisig. I usually make my sisig with pig's ears and belly if pig's face is a no-show in the asian market. how come i've never thought of making it with bangus? i think because usually in the Philippines, sisig bangus is a lame-as excuse for not being too brave for pig's face. all hail the milk fish. cheers man!

i just kind of feel bad that I didn't have the chance to savor Manila Machine. But I'll be waiting for your cookbook...

Posted by:Ziggy |May 21, 2011 at 05:50 AM

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Vietnamese Coffee Filter

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Larb Mu – Thai Ground Pork Salad

Pork salad! If these two words make you perk up at your desk, please read on.

[But before I begin, an apology first to anyone who has used the "Contact Me" form in the past couple of months. It had been broken for a while before a vigilant reader got a hold of me through Facebook and I realized this error. (And I've always wondered, when using contact forms myself on other websites over the years, if messages just disappeared into a black hole because of coding errors.) So I got rid of the form, but still want to hear from you guys! From now on, just email me at appetiteforchina (at) gmail (dot) com with any questions or comments.]

Now on to the salad. I first learned how to make larb mu (also spelled laap mu, larb moo, laap moo, etc.) from my friend Sandra, who taught cooking classes with me at the Hutong in Beijing. When we met, she already had already built an impressive globetrotting life, having lived and worked (mostly for NGOs) in Haiti, Vietnam, Taiwan, and mainland China, with Afghanistan soon to follow. In her spare time she made a habit of sniffing out the best local restaurants and street food wherever she was, and developed a ravenous curiosity for ingredients and techniques. Lucky for me, she had also spent a good amount of time traveling in Thailand and Laos, where this salad comes from (it originated in Laos and spread to Northern Thailand). After Sandra taught her Thai cooking class at the Hutong and made 4 pounds’ worth of larb mu, I couldn’t stop talking about the salad for weeks.

Over the years it’s become an standby for whenever I crave Northern Thai food and want it fast. 

Larb mu, though eaten as an appetizer at room temperature, isn’t the type of salad that is dominated by leafy greens. It’s actually mostly ground pork, sautéed until done and tossed with fish sauce, chili sauce, sugar, and fresh lime juice. (Is your mouth watering already?) The only green things present are herbs – mint and cilantro. But really, you have to taste this to become a believer. I would take this over a Caesar salad any time. 

One important component to larb mu that many recipes leave out is toasted rice powder. It doesn’t look or sound all that significant, but adds a really lovely nuttiness to your salad. The lucky few of us who live near a Thai grocery store can just buy it, but, as I discovered this week, you can also easily make it at home. What you do is take a handful of uncooked jasmine, long grain, or sticky rice and toast it in a dry skillet for about 3 minutes, stirring often. When your rice turns golden brown, just remove it from the pan and grind it up with a mortar and pestle or in a spice or coffee grinder. 

The recipe I’ve included below includes my proportions of the seasonings and herbs; feel free to play around. If you’re not too into pork, try this same recipe with chicken to make larb gai, Thai ground chicken salad. The traditional way to eat this is wrapped in cabbage or lettuce. But for lazy weeknight meals, I love reheating the leftovers, still heavily infused with chili and fish sauce and lime, and spooning it over rice. If you happen to have a Singha or Beerlao or just about any lager lying around, by all means pop it open. 

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Thai Pork Salad (Larb Mu)

1 pound ground pork
1 tablespoon peanut or vegetable oil

3 tablespoons uncooked jasmine, long-grain, or sticky rice, (or 3 tablespoons store-bought toasted rice powder)
1 tablespoon fish sauce
1 to 2 teaspoons chili sauce
1 teaspoon sugar
Juice from 1 small lime

1 shallot, thinly sliced
1 or 2 scallions, chopped
1 small handful cilantro
1 small handful mint
3 or 4 dried red chilis for garnish (optional)
1/2 head Chinese cabbage or green lettuce for serving, separated into leaves

1. Heat the cooking oil in a wok or large skillet over medium heat. Cook the pork for 3 to 4 minutes, breaking up larger clumps with a spatula, until no trace of pink remains. Set aside to cool.

2. If you’re making the toasted rice powder at home, heat another skillet over medium heat. Toast the uncooked rice in the dry skillet, stirring every few seconds to avoid burning, until the rice is golden brown and has a nutty fragrance. Remove from the heat and pound the rice with a mortar until it turns into a powder (or use a spice grinder or coffee grinder.)

3. Once the pork has cooled for at least 5 minutes, stir in the toasted rice powder, fish sauce, chili sauce, sugar and lime juice. Add freshly ground pepper to taste. You can also add a bit of salt if you’d like but I find the fish sauce already adds just the right amount of saltiness. Toss the pork with shallots, scallions, cilantro and mint. 

4. Transfer to a large plate and garnish with optional dried red chilis. For an appetizer, serve with cabbage or lettuce leaves and wrap up a leaping spoonful of the pork salad into the leaves. For an entree, serve with white rice or sticky rice. Either way, extra lime wedges for squeezing over the salad is highly encouraged. 

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Other salads to get you in the mood for warmer weather:

Vietnamese Pomelo Salad

Tofu Almond Salad Bowl

Sichuan Cucumber Salad

Grated Carrot Salad (Salade de Carottes Râpées) from David Lebovitz

Green Papaya Salad with Beef Jerky from Viet World Kitchen

Wild Seaweed Salad from 101 Cookbooks

Tagged as: Pork, Recipes, Salads, Thai

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Sweet and Sour Tomatoes

Well, to begin with, thank you, dear readers, for being very patient with me on this blog. I really can’t believe it’s been over three weeks since I’ve last posted. Or the fact that it’s almost April. Or that I didn’t even take the subway or go into Manhattan for two weeks, which, as a New Yorker, seems very strange.

What I did do was spend an sizeable portion of the month in my apartment, working on the manuscript for my cookbook for an upcoming deadline. As luck would have it, I also caught the flu from goodness knows where. It was a pretty bad one, which even DayQuil and juice and attempts at R&R couldn’t do much to alleviate. So that also put a damper on any blogging plans or extra cooking.

But enough with the excuses. The good news that I’m turning in a hefty chunk of the book this week…yay for milestones! There’s still some last minute editing to be done, and much more recipe-testing and writing in the coming months. But I’m considering baking a cake once I email this baby off, just because. Don’t be surprised if you start seeing recipes for more desserts on this blog in the coming weeks.

In the meantime, I’ve been perusing my cookbooks for ideas for easy side dishes to get me in the mood for warmer weather. Ideally, I could also snack on them when recipe-testing stir-fries, which I have been doing a lot of lately. Yesterday, while looking through Kylie Kwong’s Simple Chinese Cooking, I hit jackpot on one of the last few pages. It was a recipe for sweet and sour tomatoes, an incredibly easy salad-like side dish that also seemed chock-full of flavor. The ingredients? Tomatoes, onions, vinegar, sugar, salt, fish sauce. That’s it. As far as I can tell, fish sauce is a fine ingredient that doesn’t get used enough in salads outside Thai and Vietnamese cuisines.

I made a few big changes to the book’s recipe, such as significantly reducing the amount of liquid, which seemed overwhelming for the number of tomatoes. I also substituted shallots for onions because of the slightly sweeter natural flavor, and used cider vinegar instead of malt vinegar for a fruitier flavor to the sauce. There was no mint in the original recipe, but it just seemed to fit. And wow, these tomatoes turned out so well, with such a great mellow balance of sweet and sour flavors, that wedge by wedge, they slowly disappeared before my chicken stir-fry was done. 

I can’t even wait to try it with the candy-like heirloom tomatoes that show up everywhere late summer. It’ll be like an appetizer and dessert in one, and a perfect snack if I happen to be holed up in the apartment again, cooking and typing away.       

________________________________

Sweet and Sour Tomatoes

adapted from Simple Chinese Cooking by Kylie Kwong

Serves 3 or 4 as an appetizer or side dish, or 1 tomato enthusiast as an afternoon snack

1 shallot, very thinly sliced
1 tablespoon sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt, plus more to taste
3 medium tomatoes
1 tablespoon cider vinegar
2 teaspoons fish sauce
1 tablespoon chopped mint

1. In a small bowl, toss the sliced shallots with 1 teaspoon of the sugar and a pinch of the salt. Stir and let stand for 5 minutes.

2. Slice the tomatoes into wedges, removing the hard cores. 

3. In another small bowl, mix together the cider vingar and fish sauce with the remaining 2 teaspoons of sugar and the remaining salt. In a large bowl, toss the tomatoes with the cider vinegar mixture and wilted shallots. Sprinkle the chopped mint on top and serve.

________________________________ 

More vegetarian appetizers and sides:

Pumpkin Hummus

Black Bean Quinoa Salad with Cherry Tomatoes

Tomato Egg Drop Soup 

Eggplant, Cumin, and Black Bean Salad

Shandong-Style Asparagus 

Sichuan Cucumber Salad

Baked Eggs with Saffron and Cumin

Tagged as: Appetizers, Chinese, Recipes, Tomatoes, Vegetarian

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Soy Sauce Chicken

I first blogged about soy sauce chicken back in October, 2007, when my mother showed me her simple but fool-proof method for this Cantonese home-style dish. Really, who can resist juicy chicken wings braised in a bath of soy sauce, garlic, cinnamon, and star anise? (Probably only vegetarians and the alliumphobic.) I recently updated this recipe with revised instructions and new photos. Hope you enjoy revisiting soy sauce chicken as much as I did!

The Cantonese often go ga-ga over Hainanese chicken, a dish prepared by boiling a whole chicken in pork and chicken stock. It originated on the island of Hainan, became a national dish of Singapore, and is enjoyed anywhere on the globe where the Cantonese dine.

Chicken without sauce allows you to taste the freshness of the skin and meat, much like eating shrimp with nothing but a spritz of lemon. But no offense to Hainanese chicken – sometimes your tastebuds just cry out for something savory that just melts off the bone.

Soy-braised chicken is a simple casserole dish can be whipped up within 30 or 40 minutes. A Dutch oven or earthenware casserole dish is ideal, but a medium sized pot also works. (My mother believes that moist-cooking methods with a lot of soy sauce is bad for metals. I haven’t had too much problem aside from marks on my stainless steel cookware that can be easily scrubbed off with steel wool, but maybe some food scientists out there can explain the cause?)

And just a note – you’ll definitely want to prepare a side of rice or plain noodles in broth head of time, to soak up all the extra sauce.

____________________________

Chinese Soy Sauce Chicken

Serves 4 to 6

1 cup soy sauce3 cups water2 to 2 1/2 pounds chicken wings, drummettes and wings separated1 2-inch piece ginger, peeled and sliced3 cloves garlic, smashed3 tablespoons sugar1 cinnamon stick2 pieces star anise1 scallion, shredded or chopped

*More if needed to cover chicken at least 3/4 of the way, but maintain the 1 part soy sauce to 3 parts water ratio.

In a large Dutch oven or pot, heat the chicken, soy sauce, water over medium flame. Bring the liquid to a simmer. Reduce heat to very low and cover the pot. Make sure heat is as low as can be without turning off; simmering soy sauce can easily become rapidly boiling soy sauce, which can easily become a big mess to clean up.Add the ginger, garlic, sugar, cinnamon, star anise, and sugar. Allow the chicken to simmer for 25 to 30 minutes, or up an hour if you want falling-of-the-bone tenderness.  Ladle the chicken and sauce into a deep platter. Garnish with scallions and prepare to enjoy some savory, succulent chicken.

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More chicken recipes to enjoy:

Coca-Cola Chicken Wings

Chicken Adobo

General Tso’s Chicken

Three Cup Chicken

Kung Pao Chicken

Beer-Braised Chicken with Sriracha

Tagged as: Cantonese, Chicken, Chinese, Recipes

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Maruchan Ramen, Roast Beef, 3-Ounce Packages (Pack of 24)

Flavored ramen noodles in broth. quick and easy.

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