The Food
Lami kaayo – Ang Sarap
Well, if there is one thing you can be sure about Filipinos, then it is their love for food. Filipinos love to eat and they love to share. The Philippine cuisine has their own traditions which differentiate each other from region to region. You will have one dish in an Ilocano version, a Tagalog version or a Cebuano version. And then you have dishes which you will find only at that particular area. Some foods have influences from China and Spain that enriches the food palate. The range of dishes is very wide and you will experience so many that makes it always very hard to choose.
The Filipino cuisine is especially interesting because the dishes are always paired to complement each other, like sweet and salty or sour and sweet. And rice is always the basis of neutrality. This flavourful cooking style to create contrast in the dishes makes it very special because you will experience a lot of flavours while dining. Filipino food is not spicy despite having Asian neighbours who eat a lot of spicy food. There are few spicy dishes like the Bicol Express or Laing (which has also non spicy ways of cooking), but generally it is a non-spicy cuisine.
As a country surrounded by water they have a lot of dishes with fish and a particular is called Bulad, or Daing in Tagalog. It is a salted dried fish and is fried in a pan. For foreign people it may have a funky smell, but it tastes very delicious in combination with rice and fro example Monggo. Filipinos are very creative people and this comes very much into play in their food.
The importance of rice can be measured by the huge amount the more than 110 millions strong country eats per year. According to PSA, a Filipino consumes approx. 118 kilograms of rice per year. That’s a lot of rice. And this is also one of the reasons why the Philippines imports a lot of rice. It helps in one way to secure the supply and demand as well as to lower the price of it and make it affordable for everyone. Rice is the center of nearly all dishes in the Philippines. It is unimaginable to eat Filipino food without rice.
More Food
The Philippine cuisine makes use of the available vegetables and fruits they have and this why the food tastes so ‘Filipino’. They use Kalamansi as a lemon substitute and this gives its dishes a very distinctive taste. Another popular vegetable is Ube. A purple sweet potato which is used to make all sorts of things like jam, cakes, bread, donuts, yogurt, you name it. The creativity of the Filipinos has led to so many dishes that it would take you days to list all of the different kinds of foods they have. And this, may be the reason why Filipinos love to eat. Because food is much more to them than just eating. It is a part of the day where they can enjoy themselves, together with family and friends.
There are lots and lots of things you can write about the food in the Philippines and it would fill up entire pages by only brushing the surface of it. The best way is to try these delicious recipes on your own. Visit our recipes page to find them all. Keep visiting, because that page is continuously updated!