cook like a local Philippines

Explore the deep, punchy flavours of this Pacific nation, from coconut-enriched adobo to buttery garlic rice

-  ANGELA DIMAYUGA and LIGAYA MISHAN

Filipino food is built for a crowd. Everyone brings food - potluck is our way of life - the dining table as the stage for a great patchwork of baking dishes and foil bins, packed edge to edge.

Every Filipino meal is a collaboration between cook and diner. Dishes are finished not in the kitchen but at the table, where the sawsawan (dipping sauce) and condiments await.

Adobo is probably the Filipino dish best known and least understood by Westerners. In 1613 a Franciscian friar compiling a Tagalog dictionary, reached for the Spanish verb adobar to describe the dousing of ingredients with vinegar, to season and pickle. But that technique of preservation, essential in a tropical climate, long pre-dated his arrival.

Merienda is what you eat in between meals, mid-morning or mid-afternoon, and anywhere, in the street or at home. To know a culture is to know its snacks, and Filipinos are serious about these tiny and not-so-tiny bites - so much so that it can be hard to tell where snacking ends and a meal begins.

Silog, a portmanteau of sinangag (garlic fried rice) and itlog (egg), is an entire genre of breakfast. Almost any cured meat can be included, from tapa, jerky-like beef, and tocino, somewhere between bacon and Chinese char siu, to corned beef and homemade Spam-always matched with pickles and vegetable sides, to temper the richness.

Tocino (sweet cured fried pork)