Pinoy Pandesal Recipe—The Corner Bakery Edition

The Pinoy Pandesal is the most ubiquitous bread in the Philippines. From Batanes to Sulu, this small, fluffy, soft and somewhat sweet breakfast roll is as much a staple as the white rice is.

Eaten plain; dunked in hot coffee or chocolate; used as sandwich bun for hotdogs, corned beef, cheese, and scrambled eggs; or slathered with jelly, jam, marmalade and mayonnaise, the Pinoy Pandesal is the all-around combo for any snack or meal.

I’m told that the current price for a 2x2(inch)-sized pandesal is 2 pesos and 50 cents, about 6 pennies. That floored me a bit, because the last time I was in Manila, the regular pandesal was just a peso a piece.

But in the Sunshine State, that’s a small price to pay for an honest-to-goodness freshly-baked pandesal. The ones we used to buy from a Pinoy store in Jacksonville costs about $4 for 10 pieces.

I didn’t like how the commercial pandesal tasted—bland, yeasty and ‘old stock’. I preferred the corner bakery taste so I decided to bake my own.

The Best Pork Sinigang Recipe

Pork Sinigang is one of my family’s comfort foods. When the windshields are frosted and the cold’s biting our hineys, expect hubby to request it for dinner.

My brother-in-law Z shared his wife’s pork sinigang recipe with me, but because I’m never happy when I don’t tweak anything—including precious family recipes handed down from generation to generation—I twiddled with it a bit and came up with a truly signature dish. ;)

What’s Pork Sinigang?

For those who want to surprise their Filipino friends and loved ones, sinigang is a meat stew (pork or chicken) with a sour flavor, usually with tamarind, guava, calamansi (calamundi), young mango or any sour tropical fruit as flavor base.

The meat is stewed over low fire, with enough water to cover it, until it’s tender and the fat has been rendered. And you don’t use plain water but the water from rice washings, so part of my routine when cooking pork sinigang is cooking the rice as well.

IMHO, the perfect pork sinigang is a confluence of many things—a thick, starchy soup with the fat from the meat coating the top; crunchy but cooked vegetables; just the right balance of sour and spicy flavors; and juicy, tender meat with its fibers still attached to the bone.