Fiipino Pinakbet With Chinese X.O. Sauce

September 30, 2022

Hello Foodies!

Here I am again, craving Filipino food. And ignoring the stomach isn't healthy, lol. The last time I craved Filipino puto or rice cakes, I immediately went to the market to buy ingredients. You can check my food blog about Filipino puto here. This time, I craved a Filipino dish after reading a post where the author mentioned it. The ingredients are just available at home, so why not cook them?

It is called Pinakbet which originated from the Northern regions of our country and the people living there are called Ilokano, one of the largest ethnolinguistic groups. In their term, they call the dish "pinakebbet" which means "shrunk" in English.

This is one of the popular vegetable dishes and one of my favorites as well. It's a dish perfect for vegans and vegetable lovers. It mainly consists of different kinds of vegetables. You can either cook it plainly with vegetables or mix it with some meat and other seasonings for a better taste.

The vegetables usually used here are ampalaya (bitter melon), okra (lady fingers), kalabasa (pumpkin), talong (eggplant), sitaw (string beans), and other leafy vegetables like malunggay leaves (moringa leaves).

Originally, pinakbet is cooked with bagoong or fermented fish, while some are adding shrimp paste, depending on their preferences. As years pass by, different styles of cooking pinakbet have come out where pork, shrimp, and other kinds of meat are added. For those who love spicy food, they are also adding spicy ingredients to this dish. Some are adding chicken or pork cubes for a better taste so that kids would eat it.

Since I am in Hong Kong, I found it difficult to find fermented fish that tastes similar to the ones in our country. There are shrimp pastes here though, but since the processing is different from in our country, the taste is different too.

Among all the fermented condiments here used in cooking, there is one I like that is perfect for pinakbet, and it is one of the most popular fermented seafood condiments here. They call it, XO sauce.

XO sauce originated here in Hong Kong and is also used in some places in China. They serve this as a condiment and usually add it to different dishes that give food an umami flavor.

This sauce mainly consists of chili peppers, garlic, dried scallop, Jinhua ham, dried shrimp, and canola oil. This is quite pricey. A small bottle of it costs more than fifty HK dollars.

Today's recipe is a Filipino pinakbet with Chinese x.o. sauce. Let's start the cooking.

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Ingredients:

• Pumpkin
• Bittermelon
• Eggplant
• Okra

(I forgot to add string beans here)

I added a leafy Chinese vegetable which they call longapak or napa cabbage in English. You can add other kinds of leafy vegetables of your preference.

For aromatics, I only used garlic and shallot, then added tomatoes and chili (uncut). You can cut the chili if you want to make the dish spicy. You can also add ginger, but I forgot about it.

For the sauce, the amount depends on your taste preferences.
Sauce:

• XO sauce
• Oyster sauce
• Light soy sauce
• Salt and pepper (optional)

Then I added diluted cornstarch to make it slurry.

This set of sauces is just my preference. For those using shrimp paste or fermented fish, you can omit the oyster sauce and light soy sauce, and just season it with salt instead.

You can also add pork or other kinds of meat to make the dish tastier.

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Procedures

It is worth nothing that different ingredients have different textures. The pumpkin for instance is sturdier than other ingredients so it takes longer to cook. The leafy vegetables, eggplant, and okra are softer and easier to cook.

To cook them evenly and retain the tenderness of the vegetables, I opted to change the procedure of cooking, and blanch the sturdy vegetables instead.

I blanched the pumpkin chunks first until they are 70% cooked, then took them out from the pot. Then followed by bitter melon, eggplant, and okra. Lastly, I sauteed the leafy vegetable.

When everything was cooked, I sauteed the aromatics, chili, and tomatoes until they are fragrant in a big wok.

Add the XO sauce.

(That's how XO sauce looks like)

Then add the remaining sauce.

The tomatoes release water, so you don't need to add more water here. Unless you want more sauce. The diluted cornflour in a small amount of water makes the sauce slurry or thicker.

Lastly, put all vegetables and mix them until evenly coated with the sauce. Since the vegetables are pre-cooked, you can turn off the fire while doing this last procedure to avoid overcooking the vegetables. You can add salt and pepper if you want a tastier one.

I opted not to add pork or any meat here because I just really want to eat this Filipino vegetable dish.

Here it is, Filipino pinakbet with Chinese XO sauce.

The little bit spicy, salty, and sweet flavors of the XO sauce are truly suitable for the pinakbet dish, and a perfect alternative to fermented fish and shrimp paste.

The XO sauce isn't actually too spicy as I thought. Meanwhile, the pumpkin added some sweetness to this recipe. All combinations of vegetables and sauces are just perfect. Kids would love this too. Since bitter melon was blanched, the bitterness was removed, and kids wouldn't hesitate to eat it along with other vegetables in pinakbet.

You would definitely love this simple, yet healthy Filipino recipe. The secret to getting the tastier dish is in the freshness of the ingredients, and the sauces.

That's all. I hope you like it. And see you in my next food blog.

Happy cooking! 😊

(All photos are mine)