Authentic Kulawo at Sulyap Gallery Cafe

I have to say it straight away. Nobody cooks Kulawo better than my aunts and uncles back in Sta Catalina (Sandig), here in San Pablo. Their kulawo has a very earthy, very countryside flavor that can't be replicated here at home or found at restaurants.

That said, the next best thing is Sulyap Gallery Cafe's version at Brg. Del Remedio, Cocoland Compound, San Pablo City.

There are two types of kulawo that's made here. One is made from eggplant and the other is made from banana hearts, the latter being my favorite.

We ordered Sulyap's version of the banana hearts kulawo, which comes with a generous helping of awesome, awesome grilled pork belly. We had also ordered their eggplant version previously which is also very good, but I just really love the banana hearts one.

If you haven't tasted kulawo yet, it's basically the aforementioned main ingredients cooked with vinegar, onion and coconut milk squeezed from toasted coconut meat shavings. The authentic way is to put the shavings into a metal pot, throw in some live coconut coals and just let it burn the shavings. After that's done, remove the remaining coals, let it cool and then squeeze the milk from it. It is quite unlike anything you've tasted before.

Another thing we ordered was their Ginatang Sugpo, or large shrimp cooked in coconut milk. It's pretty common to have so much food cooked with coconut milk here in San Pablo due to the abundance of coconut. Sulyap's version is very very good. It's just like how your mom would make it.

Any visitors to San Pablo wishing to taste authentic Southern Tagalog dishes ought to head to Sulyap Gallery Cafe, not only for the food, but for the incredible ambiance. Their dining rooms are spread out among restored Spanish style houses nestled in beautiful gardens. None of the dining areas are air conditioned but it's so pretty and so oozing with history and culture that you wouldn't mind.

Sulyap is not only a place you can eat, but they also have rooms available if you want to stay overnight. They have a pool, and they have a museum! This is truly one of the must visit places whenever you go to San Pablo City.

Sulyap Gallery Cafe's website:
http://www.sulyap.net/

Excellent Ribs at Samuel's Plate Gastropub, San Pablo City

As promised, here's a write-up of our first ever visit to Samuel's Plate Gastropub, which opened April 8 here in San Pablo City. It's actually not that hard to find. It's at San Roque near Teacher's village.

I've got a lot more good things to say about our visit than bad.

First thing that caught my eye was of course, their newly constructed building. They didn't rent a space. They actually built an entire new building just for this new restaurant. That may seem usual for a franchise like say McDonald's or Jollibee, but Samuel's is not a franchise. It's a completely local establishment. To me that means they're willing to invest a lot and to me that means they believe in their business.

That's reflected right away in the placemat set up (photo above). They had specially made placemats and napkins. And the napkins themselves aren't cheap one ply tissues. Those were good quality napkins! What other local business does that? Hardly anyone else, I'm sure!

The ground floor is more of a receiving area than a dining area, much of the space being taken up by the kitchen. Their main dining area is located on the second floor. When we arrived, we had to wait for some 10 minutes or so in this receiving area because the dining area upstairs was full. That was OK because it allowed me to study their menu quite closely.

Later upstairs, I ordered their smoked house ribs with a side of chili beans and potato mash. Ilyn ordered the Laguna Sampler and Puttanesca.

First, the Laguna Sampler. It's hot pandesal with three types of palaman. Kesong puti, tuyo confit and some kind of tomato salsa. Each palaman was excellent in their own way. The kesong puti wasn't salty, the tuyo was crunchy and the tomato was nicely flavored. I personally liked the tuyo because previous gourmet tuyo I've had wasn't as nicely crunchy as this.

Ilyn says she really liked their Puttanesca. Puttanesca is one of Ilyn's favorite dishes so her standards here are pretty high. Her one big issue with dishes like this is that the flavor of fish (usually anchovy) is oftentimes not that noticeable, which is an essential component of puttanesca. She seems pretty satisfied with it overall.

Now for my dish!

The smoked house ribs arrived with my preferred sides Chili Beans and Potato mash. It usually comes with rice, but I didn't want rice so they gladly replaced with it with their house mashed potato. I was just moving the ribs to the side to get a taste of the potato when the meat just fell off the bone. I thought holy cow, that meat's tender! I tasted a bit of the ribs with the potato and it's like smoky heaven in my mouth. I'm not really that much of a ribs eater, but this was just amazing. I had ribs at another place before and I didn't like it because it was too salty. This was marinated and seasoned just right. I just absolutely LOVED it!

Having looked at the menu earlier, I was already thinking of what to order the next time. I'll probably try their bolognese. Or maybe their labuyo wings to see if it's really that spicy. Ilyn wants to try their soups, which were not available when we were there.

The staff was incredibly friendly, courteous and accommodating. The food and check came at a reasonable time, so I have no complaints about that.

Do I really have anything bad to say about Samuel's Plate? Nothing about the food, of course. But more about the building itself. Having developed mobility issues in recent years, I've become more aware of accessibility for handicapped people at establishments I go to. Although Samuel's does provide a ramp for people entering the building into their ground floor, There is, unfortunately, no access for the disabled from the the ground floor to their second floor, which is the main dining area. I've had no choice but to use the stairs, which was kind of hard.

Now if they are going to have the second floor as a main dining area, the stairs have to be appealing to climb and have a good design. Being an Architect myself, I noticed this right away. Their stairs may conform to the minimum in the building code, but I found it too narrow and too steep and not that appealing to climb.

A quick and inexpensive solution to their problem would be to open the ground floor as a dining area to PWD and older people. They already have tables and chairs there so that wouldn't be a problem. A much better solution would be a more expensive one, which is to install either an escalator or an elevator. Since that wasn't part of the original design, that would be difficult, but not impossible to do.

This next bit is more of a suggestion. I was secretly hoping that Samuel's would be offering steak in their menu. To be honest, there's no really good steak places here in San Pablo. The only place I know that offers steak is Simple Treats (April 15 edit: Si Christina now also offers steak: Angus Porterhouse: P1,100), but it's just OK. The price of those steaks are around 350 pesos, so that should give you an idea of the kind of meat and the quality of it. I was hoping Samuel's would be the first to offer inch thick rib eyes. I wouldn't mind paying P1K and upwards for steak like that as long as its good. And steak seems like a perfect fit for the kind of menu they have. Since they don't offer it, of course, that's not a point against them. They have good food and I'm happy with what they offer!

Apart from that, Samuel's is an excellent place to eat, and probably one of the best restaurants in San Pablo City. We do plan on coming back. The quality of their food and service is worth the pain of climbing the stairs. :)

Food Hopping Disaster

The one reason why I really haven't posted here is because my enthusiasm and my appetite for food aren't as healthy lately. I think it came with me being sick a lot the past year. But I'm slowly getting my appetite back up again and I think it's about time I started writing here again.

Sorry, no photos this time, but OMG, I just wanted to talk about the experience we had food hopping tonight. There are lots of new places opening up here in San Pablo City. I, for one, really love that there are a lot of new local businesses opening up. Can't have foreign franchises cornering the entire food market now can we?

With that in mind, I will NOT be mentioning the restaurants we visited tonight because I don't want them to lose any business. Any local business is a precious business. Just because I didn't like their food doesn't mean other people don't as well.

This first resto is quite a popular one, with a large hip following on Facebook. I ordered one of their beef dishes and Ilyn ordered a pork mince dish. It looks nice online, and it looks well, OK, in front of me. With the first bite I'm like... uh, oh. This isn't good. It tastes old. Weird. Not spoiled, just strange. Like it had been cooked days ago. As much as I wanted to finish it, I couldn't. Ilyn had a similar opinion about her pork mince dish. She didn't finish it either. We asked to take the leftovers home. Probably the dogs would like it. No, they didn't. Well, there you go.

Not feeling really satisfied, we wandered to a coffee shop a couple of doors down. Ilyn wanted to have either Americano or drip coffee. I wanted the same, maybe a tea or something. I didn't see any hot tea. So I asked for black gulaman. Not available. Ilyn looked somewhat horrified at the menu as she saw they didn't have either Americano or drip/brewed coffee listed, even though they had things like Espresso, Cappuccino... things like that. Which is just damned weird. Americano is nothing more than Espresso with additional hot water. No, they couldn't do it. We left.

On the way home I bought a dozen Lucban Longganisa along Mabini. At least this won't fail me.

More posts soon!

Feijoada

Feijoada is a dish I've learned of only recently through a long time online pal of mine from Brazil, Bira Dantas. I finally met Bira in person early in October during a comics festival in Algeria. Like many cartoonists I met at the festival, Bira was extremely proud of his culture and he wasted no time sharing all the great things he loved about Brazil. Food was of course, one of those things.

He invited me to visit him in Brazil and if ever I found myself there, he would cook Feijoada for me. He described it to me and the bean and meat lover in me immediately stood at attention. I love beans and I love meat, although they really don't love me back. These things are full of uric acid you see, and uric acid is something I'm trying avoid. It's the cause of gout and other arthritis-related ailments. And I've had a problem with gout for quite a while.

Nevertheless I wanted to try this out. Feijoada is composed mostly of beans and assortment of meats from bacon, to smoked ham, to sausages, etc. So yeah, in this house this is alternately called "Uric Acid Surprise".

I don't have access to a few authentic ingredients so I decided to just replace them with what's available here in the Philippines. These is is the set of ingredients I decided upon:

150 grams black beans
1/4 kilo bacon
300 grams kielbasa sausage
5 pieces San Pablo longganisa
1/4 kilo smoked ham
1 piece chopped T-bone
1 big white onion chopped
5 cloves garlic minced
chopped parsley for garnishing

I had difficulty finding black beans locally. What's available mostly are red kidney beans and pinto beans. I've had to go to Healthy Options to find a bag of black beans which were organic (which is I suppose, a good thing) and kind of expensive (oh well). Of course I could have just as easily replaced the black beans with some other kind of bean, but if I can get black beans then I would rather go with that since that is what is specified traditionally.

To add a Filipino touch, I used locally available sausages like the native longganisa. I also had a frozen T-bone steak lying around so I thought I'd just throw that in.

OK, here's how I did it (with some tips from Chef John of Food Wishes):

I first submerged the black beans in water overnight. The following day, I drained the beans, placed them on a deep pot with 4 cups of water. I chopped up the T-bone and threw that in (including the bones) and boiled it for 2 hours. I brought the pot to a boil in high heat then brought down the heat to low as soon as it started boiling. In the first few minutes of boiling, scum rose to the top so I removed all of that.

Around 15 minutes before the 2 hours are up, I chopped the garlic and onion. I sauteed that in some oil (you can fry up some bacon and sautee the garlic and onion in that if you like). I chopped the meat into bite size pieces. I cooked the longganiza in oil until it was browned and chopped that. If you are using uncooked meat at this point, you better cook it first before throwing it in.

At the 2 hour mark, I placed the sauteed onion and garlic into the pot of boiling water and beans, threw in all the meat, added one and a half cups of water. I turned the heat to high once again, and once it starts boiling, I brought the heat back to low. I continued simmering for another hour, with occasional stirring.

Before the hour is up, I mashed up some of the beans in the pot with a potato masher. This will help make the liquid a bit thicker.

I served my Feijoada topped with chopped parsley with rice. (Traditionally topped with orange peels so you can go with that if you like.)

Home Made Pork and Beans

Who else is frustrated when they crack open a can of pork and beans and see only a small sliver of pork fat amidst all the beans? Ridiculous right?

I wanted to finally set things right by making my own home made pork and beans, and jam it with a ton load of pork, with a big dose of smoked bacon. REVENGE.

Here are my ingredients:

Two 400 gram cans of cooked beans (I used pinto beans)
1/2 kilo pork liempo, sliced into bite size pieces
200 grams smoked bacon, cut into 1 inch strips
1/3 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon molasses
1 cup tomato ketchup
1 tsp mustard
3 cups water
1 tsp ground black pepper

The first thing to do is put the bacon in a deep pot on high heat and let it sweat out its oil. If the oil isn't enough, add just a little bit more and fry until the bacon for a couple of minutes. Add the pork and stir for another few minutes.

Add the sugar, ketchup, molasses, mustard, black pepper, beans and water. Stir until everything is properly mixed and then bring to a boil. Once it's boiling, bring the heat down to as low as it goes until it's just barely bubbling. Cover, and let simmer this way for the next 3 hours. Longer if you like.

I cook it that long because I want everything to be almost falling apart. It will probably already be fine after 2 and a half hours, but no, I want the pork to be incredibly soft.

Notice I no longer added salt. That's because the bacon already brought in a lot of sodium, but if your taste buds call for more salt after tasting it, then by all means.

I also used canned cooked beans because raw beans are really so difficult to soften up. It takes overnight dunking in water and a few more hours of boiling... I thought the cooked can beans would do the job just fine.

It turned out great! Everyone loved it! Me too!

My Favorite San Pablo City Longganisa

I'm a hardcore longganisa fan. Whenever I go to Manila, I try to get some of the more exotic local sausages from all over the Philippines. And by this time I've tasted a lot. My all time favorite may still be Lucban Longganisa, but this one I found right here in San Pablo comes really close.

The meat sellers at the local palengke have their own versions of longganisa, with slightly varying recipes and tastes. The general characteristic of San Pablo longganisa is that it's "hamonado" or that it's generally sweet.

The one I like most is the one from the stall of Vivien Laurel. They have two kinds of longganisa, Regular and Smoked. I like them both a lot, but I think their "Regular" longganisa (the whiter one), has a distinctive edge because it has a more subtle taste, and it seems more garlicky than the other. Yes, I'm a garlic fan. That's probably why Lucban Longganisa is my all time favorite.

The person at the stall said that the Regular Longganisa needs to be stewed in a bit of water first, while the Smoked one can be fried directly. I stewed both in water first because it's really only the proper thing to do with longganisa. The purpose of this is to soft cook the sausages, allowing some of the fat in them to melt and come out. By the time the water evaporates, the sausages will be fying in their own oil. If the melted oil isn't enough, you can always add a little bit more.

Also, the stewing in water allows the sausages to be cooked so that you don't have to fry them for too long. The problem with frying anything with sugar content is that sugar tends to burn quickly and you will soon end up with a pan with lots of burned and caramelized sugar.

There you go! Longganisa comes best with fried rice and sunny side up egg. If you buy from Vivien Laurel, them them the Internet sent ya!