Food innovations

In this season of feasting, it’s noteworthy that the government has announced that it would be rolling out a noodle that is OK for diabetics.

I’m interested to find out what the noodle is made of. Aside from being a cooking enthusiast, I also have to plan the meals that will suit the health condition of members of my household. One is borderline diabetic; another suffers from gout; still another has had a mild stroke and must avoid cholesterol-laden food.

I’ve taught them to shift to low-glycemic brown rice, so now they don’t feel deprived of the country’s staple. For arroz caldo, we use millet or “yellow rice,” whose consistency when cooked is similar to broken rice.

After a lot of trial and error, I also managed to produce a 100-percent whole wheat bread with zero added sugar in any form (no honey or molasses), which doesn’t taste like darak or rice bran for animal feed and doesn’t harden like a rock after only a few hours. The borderline diabetic and I genuinely like the bread.

I also managed to come up with a 100 percent whole wheat homemade fresh pasta that was actually edible. I was tweaking the preparation process when I came across a new product in a Korean grocery: glass noodles made of 100 percent sweet potato flour.

Hallelujah! I’ve since set aside my handheld pasta shaper. The diabetic tried the noodle and was ecstatic to learn, after a lab test, that her now much lowered blood sugar level remained stable.

Glass noodles in the market are made of one or a combination of starches made of pea, mung bean and potato. The one with gout reacts to pea starch, and the glycemic index of potato is similar to that of refined wheat. So the compromise noodle for all in the household is the one made of low-glycemic sweet potato.

Hurray for the Koreans. I wondered why, with the Philippines producing a lot of sweet potato or camote, we didn’t come up with the 100 percent sweet potato glass noodle. An insipid local camote variety – the cheapest in the market – can be used to produce sweet potato flour, for use in baking, as a thickener and yes, for pasta making.

Our agriculture and food industry needs a lot of R&D support (provided free to small-scale farmers) plus shepherding in packaging and marketing. The Department of Science and Technology’s Food and Nutrition Research Institute is doing this – it has developed squash noodles, for example, although the product contains wheat flour – but the scale of its work is limited by resources.

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Bicol’s pili nut, for example, could have the global popularity of almonds. The taste is hands down superior to almond. It’s oily, but the oil can be extracted and refined into a pricey specialty oil, like walnut oil. What’s left can be processed into pili meal, to compete with expensive almond meal, which is used for making fondant and macarons.

I’ve used raw pili for baking meringue cakes, and I’ve processed small amounts of raw pili into meal at home, with excellent results. But it’s hard to get hold of good quality raw shelled pili even online, and supply is seasonal. Off-season, it’s so expensive.

This can be solved by cold storage, which the country acutely lacks. Most nuts are oily and go rancid quickly, but the shelf life is considerably extended if stored frozen; walnuts can last up to a year without acquiring an off taste.

Bicolanos also cite the difficulty of shelling freshly harvested pili. But walnuts also have a hard shell and are quite oily. If humans can go on excursions to the moon, surely someone can invent a top-quality pili shelling machine, both industrial grade and portable. If pili grew in Korea or Taiwan, their innovators would have invented that machine decades ago.

If our native water buffalo or carabao thrived in Hokkaido, the Japanese would have propagated the breed extensively to make it produce more milk. The breed produces one of the best quality milk in the world, which can be processed into top-grade mozzarella and luscious burrata.

It took us a long time to can and export coconut cream, milk and juice; we did so only after we saw how the Thais had cornered the global market for these products. The Thais have also been exporting canned mangosteen for many years now.

In our case, our farmers plant, hope for good weather, harvest the crops, sell these by the roadside or transport them on a kuliglig or improvised hand tractor to the public market. If there’s a glut, they can’t keep the crops in cold storage. When prices fall, they are forced to simply dump the crops.

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When tomato prices fall, why don’t we make ketchup? Why can’t our farmers be taught how to make (and effectively market) candied ginger or powdered ginger tea when there’s a glut?

Cold storage can help stabilize supply and prices during lean seasons for particular products. But lacking the facilities, we depend on imports, which often continue to flood the market even during harvest season, to the detriment of local producers.

We depend on imports even for our most basic needs, including salt and milk – a necessity for child nutrition. A 1.2-kilo baby or pre-school formula from a mid-priced reliable brand costs around P750. Many mothers dilute the milk to make it last two weeks. You can see why millions of Filipinos are physically and mentally stunted from undernourishment.

Timely importation is fine for supply and price stabilization, but this must be complemented by efforts to boost domestic production if the crop is suitable for local propagation.

Our farmers did this for Chinese sweet potato, succeeding in propagating the variety that is so sweet and bringing the steep price down. Even sweeter (and more expensive, but worth it) is the Japanese variety, currently available mainly in the Mitsukoshi supermarket, in Manila’s Chinatown and occasionally in Korean-Japanese grocery stores.

Maybe our farmers will manage to propagate the Japanese variety. But we don’t need to wait for this to happen before producing 100 percent sweet potato flour noodles. Our local varieties are good enough.

What’s needed is the know-how and machines to process the noodles. We shouldn’t need foreigners to do this for us.