Filipino Street Food

November 5, 2010

Filipino street food

If you’re traveling to the Philippines, make sure to hit the dusty, sweltering hot and lively streets of Manila for a taste of a quirky and unique culture that is Filipino street food!

Balut is deemed as the unofficial symbol of Filipino street food culture. Eating balut has become a kind of ‘rite of passage’ for anyone traveling to the country and an expression of his or her willingness to experience the quirks of our culture.

Balut is a boiled fertilized duck egg with a nearly-developed embryo inside. It is usually eaten by partially peeling the top of the eggshell, sipping the broth inside and then eating the rest with salt or vinegar with chili. Although the white part seemed the ‘safest’ part to eat, it is oftentimes too chewy or tough. Many people attest that the yolk and the partially-formed chick are the best-tasting parts, even if they had to close their eyes to avoid visible eye sockets or beaks. Balut is widely believed to have high protein and aphrodisiac properties and has recently entered haute cuisin, being served as appetizers and included in dishes in restaurants. Penoy, hard-boiled duck egg without a fetus, is an option for the less adventurous.

Isaw is one of the most popular that you can find in the streets. Also called IUD because of its resemblance to an intra-uterine device, isaw is chicken intestines on a skewer that is grilled or deep fried and served with sweet, sour or spicy sauce.  There is also a pork variety called isaw baboy.

Wherever you find isaw (which, according to some, is the collective name for grilled chicken or pork innards), you will most likely find other bizarre delicacies on stick with equally bizarre names:

Betamax – curdled chicken or pig blood that are cut into little cubes (like Beta Max tapes, thus the name) and grilled on a skewer.

Helmet – grilled chicken heads

Adidas – grilled chicken feet

Walkman – grilled pig ears

Other parts are pig lungs, pig skin, chicken neck, chicken gizzards, chicken liver and other rarely known, edible parts like chicken crop (called butse), a bag-like organ just below a chicken’s neck at the center of its chest where the first part of digestion takes place.

But if you think these are bizarre, the One-Day-Old Chick is probably the most bizarre yet, maybe even next to balut. One-Day-Old Chicks are newly-hatched male chicks which are the rejects of poultry farms. Male chicks are useless in the egg production and do not grow fast enough for meat production so poultry owners choose only the female chicks, and the male ones are sold to be cooked.

The chicks are coated with batter and deep fried on skewers. These are eaten whole, including the bones which are soft, usually with vinegar, chili or other sauce.

Other common street food:

Kwek-kwek – Hard-boiled chicken egg coated in a batter mixture of flour, baking powder, water, salt, pepper and bright orange food coloring and deep fried in oil. Usually served with chili and vinegar, sweet and sour or other vendor-made sauce or gravy. The quail egg version is cooked and eaten the same way, sometimes served on a stick, and called Tokneneng or Tukneneng.

Fish balls – Flat balls of fish meat, usually cuttlefish or pollock, that puff up when newly cooked usually served on skewers and dipped in sweet, sour or spicy sauce.

Squid balls – Like fish balls, but made from squid meat.

Kikiam – Ground pork or fish meat and vegetables wrapped in bean curd sheets that are deep fried and served with sweet, sour or spicy sauce, sometimes on skewers.

There are many other interesting and cheap food available in the streets of Manila and the rest of the Philippines, including taho (bean curd delicacy served in plastic cups with liquefied raw sugar called arnibal and tapioca pearls,  sold by roaming vendors in special contraptions made of two large buckets hanging from opposite ends of a narrow wooden plank), sorbetes (Filipino ice cream made on a small scale and served in regular/sugar cones or bread buns and sold in colorful pushcarts along the street), kakanin (sweet delicacies made from rice or glutinous rice, like puto, kutsinta, kalamay, sapin-sapin, etc.), and turon and banana-cue (saba or Cardava bananas coated with brown sugar and deep fried in oil, the former wrapped in spring roll paper and the latter served in sticks). And if you brave the heat or rain and prowl, you might just discover more treats waiting around the corner.

Sources: http://my_sarisari_store.typepad.com
http://tourism-philippines.com

Filed under: Pinoy Culture, Uncategorized