Traditional pandesal, to the rescue!

How our favorite breakfast bread can save dollars, reduce imports, and help farmers

BY SOL VANZI

Feb 1, 2024 09:30 AM

  

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AT A GLANCE

• Our mad dash to the bread bag ensured that the pandesal was still hot and not soggy from the steam of freshly-baked bread.

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FILIPINO BREAKFAST STAPLE No Filipino breakfast is complete without hot, fresh pandesal

Every barrio in the Philippines has a community bakery, its own panaderya that supplies freshly baked pandesal from dawn to midnight.

Growing up at the south end of Pulang Lupa in Las Piñas, we were awakened daily by the honking of the pandesal delivery bicycle, which sent us kids rushing to our front yard where the day’s ration of pandesal was carefully nestled atop a gumamela bush, out of reach of dogs, cats, chicken, and other free-range creatures.

Our mad dash to the bread bag ensured that the pandesal was still hot and not soggy from the steam of freshly-baked bread. We paid for the bread by leaving money in a paper bag atop the gumamela bush every Sunday morning. We never lost a single bag. 

Pandesal was the breakfast staple in our five-generation household. There was no dietary precaution against pandesal raising the blood sugar of my grandparents and great-grandparents.

The old pandesal recipe saw drastic changes, especially during the hot “pandesal” craze. The staple shrank, was tinted with yellowish food color, and sweetened.

Community bakers, according to Lucito Chavez, president of the Asosasyon ng Pilipinong Panadero (APP), are pushing for the nationwide adoption of a “standardized pandesal” formula, using less sugar to avert future price increases.

The standardized formula will return pandesal (salty bread) to its traditional recipe. 

The pandesal currently being sold by both community and industrial bakeries, Chavez explained, has deviated significantly from the traditional formula, requiring a huge portion of sugar, which has recently become expensive.

Agricultural products like squash, camote, potato, sweet potato, carrot, malunggay, as well as ube, can be incorported to pandesal to as much as 25 percent. These local products face supply and quality challenges due to poor post-harvest capacity, lack of a robust cold chain infrastructure, and high transportation cost.

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) projects the Philippines will import 240,000 MT of refined sugar this crop year 2023-2024.

Tinapayan Festival, a community bakery which has been around for 40 years, introduced nutrient-packed, cost-efficient pandesal varieties that solve the rising prices of fuel, sugar, and wheat. Use of bountiful vegetable harvest in pandesal is a novel and practical solution for farmers’ seasonal problems while providing nutritious and affordable bread. 

Filipinos’ love affair with soups through the years

BY SOL VANZI

  

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Rain or shine, it is always a good time to have a bowl of soup

I am a soup person. Rain or shine, I love a bowl of soup with dinner. Sometimes, a bowl of thick soup is dinner.

Like many people my age, I grew up knowing only one kind of sopas—a broth with elbow macaroni and some kind of meat: canned corned beef, ground beef, chopped Spam, or bony chicken parts. The broth is enriched with evaporated milk. It was always served as breakfast, snack, or merienda, an alternative to goto and arroz caldo and very seldom as a separate lunch or dinner course.

Sopas

Goto (Image by Judgefloro)

SOUP AS MAIN COURSE  

Soup can be as simple as canned relief goods sardines with miswa noodles, as rich as San Francisco’s seafood cioppino stew, or as grand as cognac-flamed lobster bisque.

Tinolang Manok

Bulalo

When Filipino groups or families eat out, the soup course ordered is often a viand like sinigang, tinola, or bulalo. The Pinoy way of dining does not follow the Western appetizer-soup-main course program. Very few will dare eat a bowl of sinigang by itself without rice. 

Sinigang

Foreign cuisines offer hefty stews that pass as thick soups but are often served as main course: chili, goulash, minestrone. Taken with bread, they are filling and nutritious.

CHINESE SOUPS  

Unlike Filipino meals, Chinese lunch and dinner are more structured, with soup served separately at the very beginning, before or right after the cold cuts. The most popular among Pinoys are hototay (sea cucumber), nido (bird’s nest), corn and crab, spinach, and hot-and-sour.

In panciterias, the gooey pork gawgaw is often ordered with fried rice, and hardly ever consumed alone.

The Chinese noodle soup we call mami is not meant to be a meal. Hard times have forced millions to serve it as a viand poured over rice. Similar to mami but more substantial with fat noodles and thick gravy is lomi, laden with egg and meat.

La Paz Batchoy

In Iloilo, the Chinese wanton dumpling stars in a bowl of batchoy with pork organs and fried garlic. Also well-loved in Visayas and Mindanao is balbacoa, a collagen-rich stew of tenderized cow’s feet and head, sometimes seasoned with Chinese herbs. 

WELCOME RAMEN AND UDON

Before ramen restaurants became popular here, we knew ramen as the cheap instant noodle distributed during calamities. In normal times, instant ramen provides sustenance to students, dorm dwellers, travelers, campers, and street people. 

Ramen

High-end ramen shops have changed that image; air conditioned and classy spaces in popular malls now sell ramen bowls for the equivalent of $8 and long lines greet every opening.

Udon

Another Japanese noodle soup dish has entered the picture. Born in Osaka, the udon has fat white noodles made right in the premises. The noodles float in a light broth that is not cloyingly thick. Two of Japan’s most famous udon chains now have shops in Metro Manila. I love Tsurumaru at Robinson Ermita. Amazingly inexpensive!

From kuhol to escargot

 ‘You are what you eat’ is no more true than with snails

BY SOL VANZI

  

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AT A GLANCE

• There was just enough time to wine-purge the kuhol and boil them in wine-spiked water with bay leaves and onions—a merciful death. They were drunk and felt no pain.

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One of the most expensive meal starters is escargot, French snails cooked in garlic butter and served in their shells. The snails, raised in grape farms, spend their lives munching on grape leaves, which give them a distinct flavor and tenderness. Kept alive while being fed organically grown vegetables and milk until it is time to cook them, French escargot is very pricy and rare. Away from these farms, escargot meat is sold in cans with their shells in separate packs.

During trips overseas early in our marriage, Vic kept ordering escargot whenever we dined at a European-themed restaurant, inspiring me to serve him the dish in our home. The problem was where to get French snails. I researched and learned how escargot are raised.
Months of experimentation with thousands of native kuhol finally rewarded me with snails that are indistinguishable in taste and texture from the ones raised in France. 

Over several decades, I have served escargot-style snails to hundreds of dinner guests who were delightfully surprised to learn that the snails were raised in my kitchen.

What kuhol eat

I loved eating ginataang kuhol just about anywhere until I joined my cousins gathering kuhol from the ricefields one rainy day when I was 10.
The fields were flooded, rousing the hibernating kuhol from slumber and sending them creeping and crawling all over. They climbed stubs of newly harvested rice, crossed rice paddies, clung to stalks which they left leafless. They were eating everything!

Snails voraciously gobble up all plant matter along their path, leaving black thread-like waste matter as they move on. A snail is like a tube: Food comes in, goes through its body, gets digested, and is expelled as waste. The body absorbs the flavor of whatever food it ingests. When one buys kuhol, one never knows where they come from and what they ate.

“You are what you eat” came flashing through my mind as I decided to raise my own clean kuhol, dissatisfied with Grandma’s simple system of leaving snails overnight in a covered basin with a little water. 

Observing that Lola’s snails still bore traces of mud and scum after an evening soak, I experimented. I threw out the water they were soaking in, rinsed the snails twice and poured in fresh water. Then they were fed freshly chopped kangkong leaves.

The next day, their water was clearer, although still dotted with dark threads of waste matter. I rinsed them again and sprinkled stale bread crumbs that they readily grabbed. A few hours later their waste secretions were lighter colored and no longer slimy.

I went one step further and rinsed them one more time, scattering more bread crumbs as their last overnight meal. The next morning, there was not a single speck of dirt in their pale beige secretions. Over the family lunch that day, Grandpa noted that my ginataang kuhol tasted very fresh and the gravy was without sand, soil, and foreign matter, unlike the stuff they had gotten used to. My kuhol diskarte became a family secret.

Seventy years later, the wife of my grandson served an excellent bowl of adobong kuhol at the baptism of my first great-grandchild. When guests asked where she got the clean-tasting, grit-free snails, she looked at me, smiled and said, “Secret!”

 

Deliciously drunk

Our first wedding anniversary dinner with friends at our tiny Hong Kong flat was my first chance to impress our colleagues, all foreign correspondents like Vic and I were at the time. When I found escargot plates and special snail tongs with tiny forks to match, I decided to serve French-style escargot. 
It was February 1978 and the nation was preparing to elect delegates to the first Batasang Pambansa  or National Assembly.  Ninoy Aquino, campaigning behind bars, was heading the opposition ticket. International news agencies sent crews to cover all the press conferences and anti-government rallies. I was commuting between Hong Kong and Manila weekly. On one such trip I brought to Hong Kong a box of snails all purged and ready to be cooked.
They had spent four days purging on veggies and bread and were ready for their last meal—bread soaked in wine. 

My early morning flight was perfect. There was just enough time to wine-purge the kuhol and boil them in wine-spiked water with bay leaves and onions—a merciful death. They were drunk and felt no pain. After 15 minutes, they were tender enough to be drained, removed from their shells, and tossed in a garlic-parsley-butter bath.
 

The last step was to return them to their shells, arrange the shells on the snail plates, fill the shells with more butter mixture, and bake them for five to 10 minutes or until bubbly. They were perfect with crusty bread.
 

At the end of the meal, a couple of our guests wanted to try their hands at snail farming. I gave them dozens of snails in bamboo baskets lined with lettuce leaves. It was one of the most memorable meals Vic and I hosted.

Shortages and surpluses in Pinoy produce

How to stop throwing tomatoes and mangoes away

BY SOL VANZI

  

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AT A GLANCE

• While everyone is complaining endlessly about food items we have to import, very little attention is focused on local produce that are flooding the market, literally being given away.

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Newspapers, TV, and radio carry daily news about the spiraling prices of agricultural produce, such as rice, sugar, garlic and onions. The situation is no different for sources of protein—pork, chicken, and fish.

Supply shortage has been pinpointed as the root cause of the price situation; importation was decided to be the immediate solution. To improve distribution and cut out the middle man, hundreds of Kadiwa stores have been set up nationwide, selling rice for ₱25 per kilo. Housewives patronize Kadiwa stores to stock up on government-subsidized food items.

Local produce aplenty
While everyone is complaining endlessly about food items we have to import, very little attention is focused on local produce that are flooding the market, literally being given away. At the top of this list are tomatoes and mangoes, which command very high prices when not in season. In summer, tomato farms harvest at the same time, causing prices to drop.

Highways in Ilocos are lined with mango trees under whose verdant trunks are yellow carpets of ripe mangoes ignored by local residents. Meanwhile, in many provinces, trucks of freshly harvested tomatoes are being thrown down cliffs and abandoned on farm roads. It costs more to plant, harvest, pack, ship, and sell the tomatoes to middlemen or at retail markets.

As mangoes and tomatoes have a short shelf life, it is important to know how to take full advantage of the glut.

Purchase tomatoes wholesale by the kilo and mangoes by the hundreds. Classify them according to degree of ripeness. Wash the fruits well in basins of water with soap or detergent. Rinse well with tap water and dry with clean towels.

At this point, the tomatoes can be packed in bags and stored in the freezer. Frozen tomatoes, given a quick rinse, are easy to peel, perfect for stews, soups, and sauces. My aunt used to cook gallons of sauces, which she froze in half-liter microwavable containers. The sauces, perfect for pasta or pizza, made life easier for the mother of five.

Another family breakfast and snack favorite is tomato jam, so easy to make from frozen tomatoes. Scoop seeds from one kilo frozen tomatoes, simmer with 450 grams sugar and juice of one lemon. Cook over low heat, stirring often, until thick.

Mango salads and spreads
The public market in Laoag, Ilocos Norte is my favorite stop in the north for one delicacy peculiar to the town—pickled green mango in all stages of ripeness, spiciness, and sweetness. Huge glass jars hold the pickles. Customers range from schoolchildren to senior citizens, all hooked on the addictive local specialty, which we buy a lot of to nibble on during the long drive back to the city.

Some of the ripened mangoes become jam or preserves to serve for breakfast with pancakes, toast, or waffles. Simply slice or scoop out ripe mango flesh and cook in a simple syrup of white sugar and pure mango juice. This goes well with cheese.

Instant sinigang
Sauté a little sliced onion with quartered frozen tomatoes. Add boiled mashed green mangoes to taste. Store in freezer until needed.

Many home cooks, and even professional chefs, are so hooked on store-bought mixes, which they have made a huge commercial success. A tip from some of them: frozen tomatoes improve sinigang made with commercial instant mixes.

For sinigang sa miso, frozen sauteed tomatoes, miso, and mashed green mangoes are stirred into sinigang made with or without store-bought mix.

Pinoy sawsawan
When the Thai food craze invaded the Philippines several decades ago, one of the major hits with Filipino diners was Green Mango Salad with Crispy Fried Catfish. Food reviewers were overwhelmed by the five-star setting at the Makati hotel that hosted the dinner. I guess that clouded our judgment.

It all came back to me last week when our labandera made Crispy Fried Tilapia on a sawsawan (dip or salad) of shredded green mango, chopped tomatoes, sliced salted eggs, topped with sautéed bagoong alamang. That Filipino sawsawan was much better than the imported Thai salad we all gushed about.