Comfort Food: Sinigang na Baboy
Let's look at one of my favorite Filipino dishes.
Comfort Food follows the most practical part of my magic practice—recipes. Here’s what keeps my household healthy.
Making Sinigang is easy! You can buy everything you need for it at your local palengke: a Sinigang seasoning mix (Pamana’s here in the U.S.—but the best-tasting one is Knorr’s), vegetables, and meat. In the U.S., you can go to an Asian supermarket like Seafood City or Island Pacific for the ingredients—or you can buy Sinigang, ready-made, from their cafeterias.
Different Types of Sinigang
Like many Filipino dishes—like Inasal in the Visayas or Pinakbet in Ilokano—the name of Sinigang tells you exactly how it’s made. Sinigang in Tagalog means “stewed”—sigang means “to stew”—and while there are many versions of this dish around the Philippines, it’s often culturally claimed by the Tagalogs. Other sour stews include the Cansi from Western Visayas and Pinangat from Southern Luzon.
Tamarind is the most common souring agent for Sinigang—it’s what most commercial seasoning mixes use. But other native ingredients are also used, depending on availability. You can use the following:
Binukaw fruits or batuan
Butterfly tree leaves or alibangbang
Citrus fruits like biasong or calamansi
Common hog plums or libas
Gooseberry tree fruits or karmay
Green mangoes
Guava—this is not a fruit native to the Philippines, though.
Kamias
Santol
Any meat can be used—fish, pork, beef, shrimp, or chicken. When using the latter, the dish is usually called Sinampalukan instead of Sinigang. When using salmon, some may add locally produced miso. Along with the souring agent, the meat is stewed with the typical Filipino trio—tomatoes, garlic, and onions. Although I personally don’t use garlic! You can add several vegetables to Sinigang:
Banana peppers
Eggplant or talóng
Okra
Taro or gabi
White radish or labanós
Water spinach or kangkóng
Yardlong beans or sitaw
Fish sauce or patis is usually added to the stew, but is sometimes used as a condiment—along with calamansi.
My Version of Sinigang
I find beef sinigang too rich for my taste—the fat always sticks to my lips when I try to sip the soup—and I’m too lazy to deal with preparing shrimp or fish. So my sinigang has always been pork. I don’t add a lot of vegetables to Sinigang, either—and, sadly, my favorite Sinigang vegetable is not readily available in America.
Here’s What You’ll Need
1.5 lbs pork belly or pork liempo. This gives the Sinigang the meat you’ll eat and the fat that flavors the stew. Cut into manageable pieces.
0.5 lbs sinigang-cut pork or buto-buto. This adds the pork flavor to the soup because these pieces have the pork bones intact—neck bones, spare ribs, and baby back ribs, and more.
1 bunch spinach or bokchoi or kangkóng. Just get whichever is available.
12 pieces of yardlong beans or string beans or sitaw. Cut these in 2-inch pieces.
3 banana peppers. Don’t slice or open these up.
2 tomatoes. You can add more if you want. I usually quarter them.
1 onion. I use a yellow onion, sliced.
1 tbsp cooking oil. If you have bacon fat on hand, use that.
1+ tbsp fish sauce or patis. I add one tbsp at a time because seasoning mixes have different ingredients. Sometimes they’re saltier than what I’m used to, so the stew doesn’t need more than 1 tbsp of fish sauce.
2 liters of water. You can add more if you accidentally put in too much fish sauce.
1 pack of Sinigang seasoning mix. I prefer Knorr, but Pamana and Mama Sita are what’s usually available in America. Buy more than one pack so you can adjust the taste to your liking.
Salt and pepper. No set amount, just to taste. If you want the soup spicier, you may also want to use whole black peppercorns during the simmer.
Here’s How You Cook It
In a large pot, add the cooking oil or bacon fat. Put this pot over medium-high heat and add the sliced onions and tomatoes along with a little bit of salt and pepper. Sauté until the tomatoes soften, and the onion slices separate from each other and turn translucent.
Add the pork pieces, browning all sides quickly. If you don’t do this part, the soup won’t come out clear—admittedly, it’s an aesthetics thing and doesn’t really affect the flavor at all. Pay close attention to the fat and skin parts, too, because these will turn an unattractive grey when stewed.
Add the fish sauce and sinigang seasoning mix. Turn down the heat and sauté everything so all the pork pieces are coated with fish sauce and seasoning.
Add the water and turn up the heat. When it boils, turn down the heat and add the banana peppers. Then simmer with the pot covered for 40 minutes or until the pork is tender.
Add the sitaw and simmer for 5 more minutes. You should add any other vegetables you’d like at this point, too. Check the flavor of the soup—you can adjust this using more salt, pepper, fish sauce, or seasoning mix—and if the pork is thoroughly cooked. Simmer for 10 minutes instead of 5 if you think the meat needs more cooking.
Add the kangkóng. Make sure the leaves are submerged, turn off the heat, and then cover the pot. The leaves will cook due to the heat of the stew.
Serve hot and with rice. You can also serve this with fish sauce and calamansi on the side as condiments. Usually, banana peppers are served to people who request them because not all people like Sinigang spicy. Make sure that when you store the leftovers, you keep the banana peppers in a separate container, too—if they burst, the entire batch will be spicy when reheated.
If you have leftover sinigang seasoning mix and don’t know what to do with it, try making Sinigang fried rice or making a simple Sinigang onion and garlic soup. The latter is one of my favorite quick comfort food hacks!
Let Me Know If You Enjoyed This!
My sinigang is probably a great choice if you’re introducing the dish to someone who’s not Filipino. There’s not a lot that’s “native” about my recipe, but it’s what I enjoy. How do you make your Sinigang?
Photo by ??? ??? from San Francisco, California, USA, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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