Getting to the roots of UBE
The Filipino purple yam has become a popular dessert flavour in Toronto, but there’s more to the tuber than just its colour
Fibrous with a slight crunch like shaved carrot. A bit woody with a mild sweet potato flavour, but less sweet. That’s what came to mind when I tasted raw ube for the first time.
Well, the grated frozen stuff anyway, as I was unable to find ube in its tuber form in Toronto’s grocers.
Ube, the purple yam synonymous with Filipino sweets, is becoming a staple flavour in the city’s dessert scene. This is thanks to the influx of Filipino bakeries opening, as well as social-media-savvy Filipino bakers selling their cakes and cookies online throughout the pandemic.
The tuber has long existed in Filipino culinary circles, but its popularity for giving desserts a pretty purple hue has skyrocketed in the age of Instagram. I’ve had ube in the form of ice cream, cake frosting and pastry fillings, but to truly understand it is to learn about its roots. Pun intended.
Odds are if you’ve had ube for the first time in Toronto, it’s in the form of ube halaya, a dessert made from cooking down grated ube with coconut milk and then adding condensed milk and butter until it becomes a paste or jam. The flavour of ube halaya is the one most people associate ube with: a faint pistachio flavour with strong, floral sweet notes of pandan and vanilla.
Ube halaya can be eaten on its own, or used as a spread or pastry filling. You can buy it at grocers such as FV Foods.
“When you add coconut milk, it really enhances the ube. They’re soulmates,” said chef Diona Joyce, who remembers the labour-intensive task of peeling and grating fresh ube while growing up in Oroquieta City in the southern Philippines.
At her restaurant Kanto by Tita Flips, Joyce uses a combination of frozen and powdered ube her sister ships from the Philippines to make ube halaya to top off her halo-halo, a shaved ice dessert layered with toppings such as coconut jelly, leche flan (another staple Filipino dessert), sweet beans, palm nuts, evaporated and condensed milk, and saba (a banana from the Philippines).
Despite ube’s superstar status, further propelled by two years of the pandemic, which saw a rise in staring at phones and home baking, fresh ube is a rarity in Canada and odds are most people have never seen one.
A call to the trade office at the Philippine consulate in Toronto confirmed this is because of the local and global demand outpacing production in the Philippines.
Often, the more common American purple sweet
‘‘ When you add coconut milk, it really enhances the ube. They’re soulmates.
DIONA JOYCE CHEF AT KANTO BY TITA FLIPS
potato gets mislabelled as ube in stores. I did, in fact, mistakenly buy sweet potatoes thinking they were ube.
Ube (look up its scientific name dioscorea alata for more accurate photo results) is believed to originate in the tropics of Southeast Asia. It’s also grown in Vietnam where it’s used for sweet and savoury dishes.
The vine-grown tuber has a thick, fibrous and barklike skin similar to taro root or cassava, which is the easiest way to distinguish it from a sweet potato. Underneath, the flesh can range from creamy white to lilac and deep purple, depending on the variety.
Most cooks buy ube shipped from overseas. It is usually frozen and shredded, powdered or bottled in extract form. Ube is often processed for desserts rather than roasted and eaten plain like sweet potato.
“When I grew up, we’d eat sweet potatoes or cassavas with salt and sugar, but no one ate ube on its own,”Joyce said, adding that coming across frozen packs of it grated when she came to Canada was a big time saver. “I remember when you get an ube, you start grating it right away for halaya and the process would take hours.”
Nastasha Alli, research and engagement co-ordinator for food tourism organization Culinary Tourism Alliance and host of the Exploring Filipino Kitchens podcast, spent her teenage years in the Philippines. Even there, she said, ube wasn’t something typically found in the produce sections of the supermarkets in big cities.
But, she said, she hopes ube’s global popularity will lead to the raw tuber being shipped to Canada one day so that people can grow more familiar with the crop. Until then, she’s enjoying the creative ways ube is being used.
“The way Filipinos have adjusted and transformed ube into all these permeations, maybe that’s a reflection of the people’s capacity to make the most of what they have and see where that can go,” Alli said.
At midtown Toronto’s Mineral, chef Daniel Cancino uses ube extract to flavour (and colour) his delicate and jiggly leche flan, which is finished with pops of caramelized white chocolate and miso crumble, crispy rice, compressed fruit and dots of hibiscus and passion fruit gel.
“It’s the colour that first gets you if you’re a non-Filipino, like the charcoal trend a few years ago when people were lining up for that ice cream,” Cancino said. “But if you’re Filipino, it brings the nostalgia.”
Pastry chef Caroline Marquez of Asukal Desserts started her bakery around the start of the pandemic and her treats can be found in Kensington Market’s 6x8 Market and through her Instagram account, @Asukal_TO. She said ube pairs well with the sweeter flavours of white chocolate and coconut in baking applications.
“I’ve met a few of the other Filipino bakers (in the city), and I’m getting so excited that we’re all trying to do the same thing,” Marquez said. “Most of us are taking those flavours we knew as treats growing up and putting our take on it.”
In addition to ube white hot chocolate, ice cream sandwiches and macarons, she makes a white chocolate ube sans rival cake, a riff on the layered cashew, buttercream and meringue cake by using ubeflavoured sponge cake, buttercream, fudge and streusel. Her signature: an ube chiffon cake topped with a layer of leche flan.
But for those who are seeing ube for the first time on their phones, there’s a responsibility of not reducing the crop to a trendy colour like millennial pink, the pale pink colour that dominated decor and trickled down to food trends in the last decade.
Jessica Hernandez, whose newsletter Meryenda looks at Filipino food through a second-generation Filipino-American lens, grew up in Carson, a city in California with a large Filipino population. She currently resides in the Philippines and it wasn’t until a month ago, when she visited her cousin in the province of Nueva Vizcaya, that she saw fresh ube for the first time.
Interested in finding out more about ube’s origins, she learned about its significance to the people in the central province of Bohol, the country’s largest ube producer.
Historically, the tuber sustained Boholanos during periods of famine and war, and local folklore talked about kissing an ube whenever it fell to the ground as a sign of respect.
Hernandez hopes the global popularity of ube will lead to more attention to the challenges of meeting the rising demand. The Philippine Statistics Authority, which tracks annual crop production, showed that ube production is on a decline.
In 2007, it was at just over 29 tonnes, dropping in 2011 to 17.8 tonnes and in 2019 to just over 14 tonnes. The latest numbers show that in 2020 13.96 tonnes were produced.
In 2019, a local ube halaya brand announced it was using white ube instead of the purple variety, citing climate change as the reason. As of now, more research needs to be done to see whether rising temperatures and shifts in rainy season are having a direct effect on ube production.
“Historically and culturally, we should see it not being taken for granted because it sustained the Filipino people. The reliance on ube for nourishment really made me appreciate it more than a commodity,” Hernandez said on a video call from Manilla. “It’s important to look at the journey ube has taken, its source and the sacrifices made to get it to the markets.”