Filipino food the next big thing – again

With influences from Chinese and Spanish cooking, Filipino food loves sour flavours, salty meat and creamy coconut. Try Miki Garcia’s classic recipes from soy pork to sweet banana and jackfruit rolls

Have you heard that Filipino food is a big trend this year? Undoubtedly, you have. I’ve said it. Likewise, it made trend lists last year. And the year before. If you compared specific Asian cuisines with stocks, Korean food might be Google, a solid, upward ticking buy. Filipino food would be more like an oil stock – a bumpy ride.

Yet, 2017 seems poised to be the year you can bet on Filipino food.

Google searches for “Filipino food” have doubled since 2012, while queries for “lumpia near me” (referring to the crunchy Filipino-style spring rolls) have sky-rocketed 3 350%.

The time for Filipino food to take centre stage is finally here, all my food trend instincts tell me.

Compared with Korean food, which has identifiable hallmarks like kimchee, now a national obsession, and roast pork bo ssam, which is popular whether or not you’ve been drinking all night.

Meanwhile, Filipino food is best known for balut, a fertilised duck egg that sounds freaky to most Americans.

Tastier-sounding dishes such as pork adobo (stewed with soy, garlic, and bay leaf) and those deep-fried lumpia are not yet ubiquitous, even if they should be. It uses lots of vinegar, lots of frying, and lots of funky flavours – all in sync with our expanding palate.

For one thing, Filipino is the original fusion food, a mix of Malaysian, Chinese, and Spanish, with some Indian and American influences. It all makes Filipino food hard to pin down. If a cuisine is so far-ranging and reminds you of other foods, it’s harder to get passionate enough to seek it out.

And even among Filipinos, there are variations in the approach, with Chinese Filipino, Spanish Filipino, and so on. There isn’t necessarily a definitive recipe for a classic, as for such a dish as Italy’s cacio e pepe.

In an excellent article on forecasting food trends, the New York Times’s Kim Severson noted that while you were making your frosé and red wine hot chocolate, you might consider that real food trends tend to move at a glacial pace. So it seems to be with Filipino food. Slowly and steadily, it’s here. And if you want to bet on it in 2017, here are a few recipes to try out. – Bloomberg

The Filipino Cookbook: 85 Homestyle Recipes to Delight Your Family and Friends by Miki Garcia is available from Loot. co.a for R213. Scan the QR Code to purchase the book