AVANT GARDENER
Filipino cuisine may be gaining popularity in the global food scene, but there’s still a lot of myths to dispel about what, to many people, is still a new way of dining.
“A lot of the foreigners still think that Filipinos still eat with their hands. There is nothing wrong (with it). It is very traditional, although I explained that Filipinos, especially in the city centers, do not eat with their hands,” says Chef Gene Gonzalez, who is co-hosting a Filipino culinary course on British educational platform Rassa.
“I had to explain what makes eating with the hands so different from eating with utensils. Eating with your hands grounds you to the ingredient. It puts your foot down right on the ingredient because there’s also the sensory and the tactile angle that one cannot have when one does spoon and fork or knife and fork.”
The multi-awarded chef, restaurateur, culinary educator, and cookbook author teamed up with UK-based chefs Budgie Montoya, Rex de Guzman, and Mark Corbyn in “The Filipino Kitchen: East Meets West,” an intermediate online cooking course that offers a deep dive into Philippine cuisine. While the course will cater to non-Filipinos and persons of Filipino descent living overseas, that such a course has been developed shows that there’s a calmor to learn about Filipino cooking.
A huge part of Filipino cuisine’s international presence is driven by young people – chefs, hospitality industry insiders, food writers, and eaters – of Filipino descent seeking to understand their roots. “I want Filipinos to be aware that there are fellow Filipinos abroad that are promoting Philippine cuisine that are very good exponents of Philippine cuisine in their own areas.”
Gonzalez will be teaching food lovers the basic ingredients and techniques behind different Philippine cuisines, as well as Filipino eating culture. For example, there is the idea of each person customizing their eating experience through mixing their own sawsawan, or sauce, something that would be an insult to a French chef but is highly encouraged in Southeast Asian cuisine. “It does not insult the chef. In fact, it assures the chef that the person will be satisfied by participating with the person who cooks the meal, because Filipino food is really participative. It’s not only participative between chef and diner, it’s also participative among diners based on eating together, based on fiestas, based on kamayan.”
The course will also take learners on virtual tours of a Philippine wet market, a natural vinegar distiller’s workshop, and of Manila’s Chinatown, the oldest Chinatown in the world. Gonzalez also explains how much effort it really takes to produce and harvest rice, a staple grain in many Asian countries including the Philippines. “People should know (what farmers go through). You have something like rice and everybody knows it’s a grain, but people don’t know how difficult it is.”
One of the tidbits Gonzalez drops in the course is that it was Filipinos who taught Mexicans the distillation process used to make tequila. “Lambanog is considered a cheap alcohol but the process itself already lends itself to a very expensive and very aged-old slow method of distillation. People don’t know this, and lambanog is associated with something cheap. And yet we taught the Mexicans how to make tequila,” he says. “It was the Filipinos that were brought to Mexico and they were taught distillation to the Mexicans. If you look at any tequila museum, take a look at the old distillation units. The name is ‘destilador Filipino.’”
This was during a time when the pot still, which is still used to distill whiskey, was the most popular distillation method. “You know how ancient Filipinos used to distill? They will hollow out a whole tree trunk right on the ground, nectar, cover it, and through precipitation and condensation, collect the droplets by burning the tree trunk. So the vapors collect and drop. It’s kind of primitive but if you take a look at the science it, distillation.”
It’s little nuggets of trivia like this that are a delight to learn. Not only does it allow us to better appreciate what we tend to take for granted, it also gives us an idea of how we’ve been shaping other cultures without even realizing it.
Gonzalez hopes that the course will encourage the international community, whether or not they are of Filipino descent, to take part in and support Filipino culinary culture, traditions, and flavors. “There is so much that we should do about our cuisine, that we should protect and maintain (it) because a lot of the traditions are dying and it is only (through) consciousness and appreciation, probably of a global community, that will spur us to maintain this and not to just neglect or drop it.”