What's in your soup?

We have a friend who can be satisfied with just a meal of salad and a regular bowl of soup. There are those who cannot start eating until soup is served. What is in a soup, really?

There is soup made of a combination of vegetables, fish or meat, cooked in liquid. It is either thick, thin, smooth or chunky. We are all familiar with macaroni and meatball soup, asparagus, chicken soup, and many others. In our kitchens most of these are done by first sautéing ingredients in garlic and onions. Different techniques are applied by the Chinese, the French, etc.

There is broth – to this we can classify our sinigang and nilaga, plus Singapore’s Hainanese chicken rice. The flavorful liquid evolves from the heavier mixture of meat and seafood with some vegetables, after allowing the ingredients to simmer until the tougher ones are softened.

Then there is the stock, the strained liquid that results from cooking various ingredients. We can also consider part of this “hugas bigas” (rice washing), which we normally use for our tinola and other Filipino dishes. Stock is prepared with the purpose of enhancing the flavors of the dish being cooked.

Professional and traditional chefs prepare stock from scratch, producing it in bulk. They have the facilities and the time to have a very slow simmering liquid. Busy housewives and some home cooks often use cubes. We, too, have added them to a few dishes on occasion.

A brand that for years has been popular for their broth cubes is Knorr, which has a selection of variants – pork, beef, chicken, shrimps, fish. Recently, they launched new meatier cubes with more intense and defined flavors.

So much of Southern Tagalog cuisine has caught our attention as we leafed through some of the dailies.

It made us a bit sad – maybe we are being sentimental or biased – that one town, Biñan, our hometown, was missing from the tour itinerary. So near and yet so far from the minds of the tour organizers.

It is in Biñan that the unsurpassed pospas (arroz caldo) is found. It is here where authentic kula-o is still prepared from tenderized, boiled pig’s ears, face and tongue, in vinegar, salt, pepper and sliced onions.

It is here where the adobong manok sa gata is done to perfection, giving it a creamy consistency. It is in Biñan where a variation of nilagang karne, la oya, is given a different twist – an accompanying side dish made of boiled eggplants, sweet potato and saba banana mixed with garlic, sugar, salt and pepper, with the broth of the meat. It is in this town that kilawing baboy is not sour but has the flavor and texture of paksiw na lechon as it is cooked with pounded pork liver.

The kakanin selection is rich – bibingkang galapong, calamay itim (purple glutinous rice), atole made of peanuts with meat and egg filling, kutsinta. There are more, but who can contest the fact that puto Biñan is a culinary treasure?    

Every other Monday, a group of ladies meet in search of a place to have lunch and share the burning issues of the day. Our most recent foray was at the new Alabang Town Center (ATC) extension. The crowd was heavy, practically every restaurant had some diners, but the busiest of all, with an unending flow of customers, was a chicken outlet. The main attraction was the Korean chicken called Bon Chon (also the name of the restaurant) which is sweetish, with its crispy skin and flavor making it different from the usual coated fried chicken. Its unique marinade is – here is the secret – barley sauce. Each serving is cooked to order, so there was a brief waiting time.

With it we ordered chapche, but found it lacking in flavor. It’s a good place to lunch, mainly because one can have a satisfying meal at very low cost.

If you are missing authentic Filipino food and are not up to making it yourself, hop over to one of the Via Mare branches where you can enjoy real kare-kare, adobong pusit, lumpiang prito, crispy pata, puto bumbong at bibingka, and delightful halo-halo.

Give yourself a break. Eat out today!

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