Kapeng Barako - Proudly Our Own

Ever since the opening of a new road going to Tagaytay from Sta. Rosa, Silang Road has literally been the road less taken by motorists on the way to this cool and breezy city south of Manila. Back in the days, it was on Silang Road where most of the good stops have been for pasalubong and for lunch or dinner going back to Manila.

While there are fewer passersby and motorists, some of these local stores have remained standing as Tagaytay’s testament to fresh and good quality food. One of them is a small coffee shop, Nature’s Original Kapeng Barako, which continues to make coffee that is truly Filipino and undoubtedly, the best.

My family and I have always dropped by the quaint store owned by Mr. and Mrs. Jun Dimapilis. We were first lured by its “vintage” look from the outside and the huge words “Kapeng Barako” and “vegetarian” written on the store’s frontage. We’ve never seen those two words used in a single sentence or on the façade of just one store.

The doorbell chimes loudly as one enters the tiny store where upon setting foot, one is amazed at the number of lovely knick-knacks, saucers, cups, coffee makers that are on display. One’s eyes wanders at the shelves where you can check out a Star Wars’ Darth Vader telephone, a plastic panic button that customers can actually press, dessert plates that bear Monopoly signs and so much more. All these capture your attention and you suddenly forget what you came in the store for: coffee.

The store is run full-time by the Dimapilis family who regale customers with information on how to brew your coffee, where they get the beans and how they have been in the coffee business for a long time in this part of Cavite. It turns out that the family once supplied coffee to Rustans but that bigger competition with snazzier packaging had gotten most of their business from the company.

Small as the business may seem, Nature’s Original has their mission and vision – just like big corporations – to which they remain true to this very day. All the coffee they harvest are processed by the family to maintain the quality. And over the years, they have begun to offer not just the Kapeng Barako which is widely-known in Amadeo and Batangas, but nowadays, Kapeng Alamid or the coffee beans from civet cats which foreign coffee connosieurs buy at steep prices.

They also have several variants now including hazelnut coffee, rice coffee and other blends of Arabica, robusta and more. What draws us to Nature’s Original is also their ginger tea or “salabat” which comes in powder form and is already flavored with muscovado sugar. One teaspoon in a cup of hot water is enough to give you the calming soothness of ginger with a sweet taste that goes down well in the stomach.

Everything that the store sells is natural or pure in essence. They use our own ingredients and products that are harvested within the area or in their own small farm or from suppliers of natural and vegetarian food.

While waiting for your beans to be ground and re-packed or while getting your orders set, Mrs. Dimapilis is quick to offer customers some coffee or tea – for FREE. In a small corner of the tiny store, you can enjoy a sip of our very own Kapeng Barako which leaves you wondering why you even go to Starbucks at all. For here in this road less taken in Cavite lies a store that enlivens the spirit and gives you a new sense of wonder as it also sticks to a path that it has vowed to take for over 20 years – to bring Filipino coffee closer to the hearts of our own people and to awaken our souls to the many wonders that nature offers. 

Batchoy: The Soup that Lives up to its Name

This article that I wrote last year placed third in the 2008 DOREEN FERNANDEZ Food Writing Awards. An extra bonus that came after my experience in Bacolod last year. It was definitely one of the highlights of my life. Hopefully, more blessings to come in 2009!

What kind of people would name a dish after “FAT?” Yes, only the Filipino can! We have named a best-loved comfort food after the very thing that would clog the arteries of U.S. FDA authorities in a heartbeat. Its very name is enough to send your cholesterol level soaring to new heights.

“Batchoy” is the vernacular for fat and to some, slang for “fatso.” No one would want to be called “batchoy” or “tabachoy.” It  has same ring as “baboy” or swine. The Wikipedia says that the dish traces its name to the Hokkien term “ba-chui” or “pieces of meat. But to us, “batchoy” stands for food indulgence of the highest order. And no Branding Guru will ever get us to change its name to sound less threatening.

The popularity of the “batchoy” dates back to the 1940s in Iloilo’s La Paz Public Market where an enterprising butcher decided to create a dish out of the nasty bits left over from main cuts of meat. The dish has since evolved and with the array of added ingredients, it has reached a level of perfection that sends you straight to heaven once you finish an order of the “Special” – a really big bowl with the works: a fresh egg, three heaping spoonfuls of chicharon bits plus snippets of chicken liver and pig’s brains, and a killer dose of MSG.

However, to our family, the “batchoy” has a different meaning. We owe our life of comfort to this humble noodle dish. In the 1970s, my father-in-law set up a “batchoy house” in Bacolod after several failed businesses. He opened a hole-in-the-wall eatery in Burgos Market. Soon, his “batchoy” enabled him to set up a small dine-in in a more populated area along Smith St. and the rest, as they say, is history.

The brisk sales of “batchoy” in that small diner sent my husband to the Ateneo. I was waxing sentimental about this when I made a trip this year to Bacolod to witness how “batchoy” was made in my father-in-law’s eatery, Super Batchoy, one of the last few bastions of batchoydom in Bacolod. It stands quietly on a busy street where at 3:00 p.m., students and workers fill up the place for a jolt of steaming hot “batchoy.” It is their daily ritual. It not only quiets the rumblings of one’s stomach on a rainy afternoon. Interestingly, its rich mix of ingredients leaves one with a sense of yes, wellness.

Making “batchoy” is never easy nor cheap as I discovered. The cooking starts in the wee hours of the morning. You need to clean the pork innards very well under running water for an hour or so while you boil chunks of beef bone marrow and pork bones in a vatful of water and let it simmer for several hours to extract their fullest flavor for the broth or the caldo.

Generations of Ilonggo cooks have many well-kept secrets to make the broth burst with flavor. Super Batchoy’s very own Roger, who has been with us for over three decades, has his own take on the dish, ranging from what type of oil to use to sauté the garlic and onions (not to mention what kind of onions to use), how much ginger and sugar to put, plus the blending of a special type of shrimp paste known as “guinamos” to the mix of meat strands and innards.

To the uninitiated, “batchoy” is just a bunch of thin yellowish noodles served with hot broth. But to true-blue Ilonggos, there is no substitute for a very special type of pancit miki bought only in Bacolod. The variety sold in Manila is way too salty. Roger swears that the miki can keep for days in the chiller after it is blanched.

For a perfect order of “batchoy,” ladle some steaming caldo on strands of miki at the bottom of a large bowl topped with slices of pork and liver. Garnish with chopped spring onions and then the kicker: a generous sprinkling of crunchy chicharon. But to make the dish really “special,” a whole egg is cracked at the side of the bowl. The egg is cooked by the boiling broth and mixed with the rest of the ingredients for a truly sumptuous meal.

In Super Batchoy, the “batchoy” comes with pan de siosa, a soft, sweet bun that blends well with the saltiness of the broth. A bite of the pan de siosa followed by the warmth of the caldo in your mouth will make you want to go down on your knees to thank the kitchen God up above who led us lowly mortals to the discovery of such a spectacular pairing of food.

My father-in-law beams with pride whenever a customer finishes the soup first, leaves noodles at the bottom of the bowl, and then asks for more soup for the noodles. To him, that is the ultimate testament to the goodness of his caldo. He then gladly obliges the satisfied customer with more hot caldo PLUS a sprinkling of more chicharon! On a rainy day, Super Batchoy can serve up to three hundred bowls of the super hot soup!

BATCHOY – even in a plain styro cup, its aroma arouses the hungry beast in you. In an office, it makes you drop whatever you are doing and drift to where the seductive smell of goodness is coming from. Yet to those who find comfort in a steaming bowl of soup, there’s no better way to treat life like there’s no tomorrow than with a bowl of “batchoy.” For despite its last name, LA PAZ BATCHOY, with all its killer richness, does live up to its first name – LA PAZ. It is wellness in an instant, aptly bringing to our restless stomachs a sense of calm and peace or “paz,” the town after which it is named. A way to celebrate life through simple indulgence. 

The Twelve Days of Christmas

The past holiday season was special for Filipinos as there were exactly eleven straight days of no work and partying! It was, indeed, the Twelve Days of Christmas, if you count Dec. 24th or Christmas eve when most Filipinos take the half-day off or get out of work early to start their holiday celebration. 

Check out the Facebook pages of most Filipinos over the holidays and you will see that they have been partying almost everyday on those Twelve Days of Christmas. It was a time for much family bonding as most members of the household got the days off or went to their hometowns. It was a time for reunions and gatherings of entire clans and those who were once affiliated with a certain organization, company or what-have-you. There were office parties and weddings to go to and parties, parties, parties. And everywhere and anywhere you go, there was a common denominator: FOOD.

Last Christmas, I hosted several parties at home for family and friends - I lost count - including showers, high school reunions, ex-officemate reunions, and several family parties, plus the office party for our staff. And all the time, I had to put out the best food on the table, owing to my claim of being a big quote-unquote "home chef." Thinking up menus for these parties was usually a difficult task and there were times I could not even go beyond menu planning and we would end up just buying food. But this time around, the menu planning went smoothly and I managed to learn and actually, cook the food for each occasion. 

My party fare included Pastel de Lengua, Paella Negra, Ginataang Sugpo, Chicken Relleno, Baked Fish Fillet with Kesong Puti, Adobo Carbonara, Chicken ala King and so much more! What made the task easier was the presence of so many reliable cookbooks around like the quintessential "The JOY of Cooking" and recently, for Filipino fare, "KULINARYA" which was a collaboration of the best chefs in the country. Having had the habit of working on a dish with three recipes of the same dish on hand, I had to convince myself that the authors of "Kulinarya" knew what they were doing. 

For the chicken relleno or stuffed chicken, I actually began with three recipes culled from the internet and cookbooks. But at the last moment, I decided I was going to road-test the recipe from "Kulinarya." This was not the first time I did chicken relleno. I managed to do one, albeit a steamed version, two years ago. Stuffing a chicken has the semblance of doing a science experiment and that thrilled me a bit in a strange sort of way. 

For the chicken, I bought a deboned one from the market - freshly dressed chicken and deboned right in front of you by the experts. I dare not do this myself -- YET. For the stuffing, there's ground chicken breast (instead of ground pork), minced chorizo bilbao and vienna sausages, grated edam cheese, sweet pimientos, some olives, salt and pepper and three hard-boiled eggs. Instead of steaming the chicken, I baked it after brushing with olive oil and melted butter. For a small chicken, I only baked it for 1 hour 10 minutes as I didn't want to end up with a chicken that was tough and chewy. Mine turned out brown and crispy and at the same time, juicy. Just right and the inside came out perfect! I also covered the chicken in foil to bake for the first 30 minutes and then took out the foil for the chicken to brown evenly in the oven for the next 40 minutes.

I did "Kulinarya's" recipe twice just to check if everything would still be perfect the next time around. The only change on my second chicken was the use of a different brand of sausages that turned out to be saltier. Also it was edam cheese during the first time and then quickmelt cheese on the second try. Generally, the first chicken was so much better and tastier!

Our holiday feast during Christmas day was served with nary a hitch! The chicken relleno wowed my brother who came in from the U.S. and served alongside fiesta favorites like beef/chicken pochero, pastel de lengua, beer-battered fish fillet and yes, the ever-present spaghetti, it was a Christmas that we will remember for a long, long time.