Asian cooking

• Miso soup
• Speedy’s winter melon soup
• Pork and mushrooms noodle soup
• Crispy chicken strips with sweet and sour sauce
• Kikiam (Que-kiam)
• Oriental noodles with peanut sauce
• Beef con tokwa
• Kangkong (water or swamp spinach) in oyster sauce
• Ikan Moolie (fish in coconut gravy)
• Fish tempura

How to cook

• A few kitchen tips
• Fried tokwa (firm tofu)
• Meals in a flash
• How to make crepe-like lumpia (spring roll) wrapper
• Stuffing a duck with aromatics
• A more flavorful pancit canton (chow mein)
• If you want your chilis mildly hot instead of very hot
• Herb-infused olive oil: make your own
• Tips for cooking Chinese-style fried rice
• Rib-eye steak

Recent Comments

• leah
  on 'Colette’s buko (coconut) pie'
• leah
  on 'Colette’s buko (coconut) pie'
• vir
  on 'Chili garlic prawns'
• todo
  on 'Paksiw na lechon manok'
• Elai Atendido
  on '“Bibingka” and “puto bumbong”'
• Mayen
  on 'Special puto'
• Mayen
  on 'Special puto'
• Mc
  on 'Lo mein in less than 15 minutes'
• miera montero
  on 'Maja Maiz'
• mayums
  on 'Lord Stow’s egg tarts and wheat-bread siopao'

Ernest’s pancit canton with bacon-cut pork

For a history of the name of this dish, click here.

The secret to this very inexpensive noodle dish is bacon-cut pork belly. In most supermarkets, these are sold pre-cut in trays. If they’re not available in your local supermarket, ask the butcher to machine cut semi-frozen pork belly (liempo) in slices as thin as bacon.

That large platter of pancit canton in the photo (and that was only about 3/4 of the entire batch) contained only 300 grams of pork but, with the thin slices, there were more pork pieces than there would have been ordinarily had the meat been cut in bigger pieces. It’s a trick I learned from Stephen Yan. When there’s little meat, you stretch it — literally — by cutting into thin slices and then into small pieces. And to make the dish even more inexpensive, I did away with too many vegetables because even the price of veggies shoot up during the Christmas season.

This recipe serves 6 to 8 people.

Ingredients :

300 grams of dried pancit miki (I used the kind from the Quezon province that is used for making pancit habhab)
1 head of garlic
1 large onion
1 large carrot
a bunch of onion leaves
300 grams of bacon-cut pork belly
1/2 c. of oyster sauce
1/2 c. of hoisin sauce
salt
pepper
6 tbsps. of cooking oil

Cooking procedure :

Cut the pork belly into small pieces (how small depends on how much you want to extend it).

Peel and finely slice the onion. Peel and finely mince the garlic. Peel and cut the carrot into matchsticks. Trim the onion leaves and cut into 2-inch lengths.

Heat the cooking oil in a large shallow pan (a wok is best). Add the pork and cook over high heat for about five minutes. Add the garlic, carrot and onion and cook for another minute. Add the rest of the ingredients, season with salt and pepper, and pour in about 2 cups of water. Press the noodles lightly into the liquid. As soon as the noodles start to soften, stir. Cover the pan and cook the noodles, meat and vegetables over medium-low heat until most of the liquid has been absorbed.

You might want to try these too!

1. Pork ears barbecue
2. Lo mein in less than 15 minutes
3. Adobo, quail eggs and rice
4. Rice pudding with custard topping
5. Chicken menudo
6. Chicken embutido
7. Chicken in sour cream
8. Home grilled pork barbecue
9. Pork tongue asado