Seadfood City Supermarket

Every Filipino has eaten a vegan Filipino dish. It’s a bold claim but it also happens to be true. RG Enriquez-Diez, the Astig Vegan, enumerates commonly-found and widely-loved Filipino classics that are free of animal products: suman, adobong kangkong, ginisang munggo… She keeps going but we’re convinced. She had us at suman.

RG challenges any misperceptions of vegan Filipino cuisine with her YouTube channel’s catchphrase: “Filipino food can be vegan, healthy, and delicious without losing its soul.” She proves this with her approach to recipe development – working with the original recipe first, taking time to understand it’s soul and how to best preserve it. Next, she’ll eliminate the animal products and brainstorm ways to appropriately substitute them. “What people cling onto isn’t the animal product,” RG says. “It’s the experience you had from eating it.”

This approach underpins her Vegan Dinuguan recipe which you can find on this page. It was based on her uncle Daddy Noynoy’s specialty dinuguan which she describes as less tangy and more sweet. In her research, RG found existing vegan dinuguan recipes that recommended black beans to recreate the dark sauce usually achieved with pig’s blood. While the recipes were delicious, RG noticed that the beans created more of a grey color than black. She explored other vegan-friendly blackening ingredients used in the Southern Philippines like black sesame or charred coconut. She settled on activated charcoal, which she stresses is optional. “It’s optional,” she reassures. “I don’t want to make it inaccessible. Organic black beans can also work.”

There’s a recipe video on Lalaine’s YouTube channel that begins with a stop-motion animation of the ingredients. Shrimps appear whole in the first shot then neatly chopped in the next; chunks of chicharon are intact in one shot then crumbled to bits in another. In the background plays a quirky piano tune from a charmingly comedic silent film. The finished dish is a fusion of traditional vegetable dishes from Filipino and French cuisine. Pinakbet a la Ratatouille.

This video represents the playful creativity of Lala’s Kitchen. “I’m inspired by other cultures, by different methods of cooking,” Lalaine says of her creative approach. “I want to present Filipino food in a different way, a change in the cooking method. That’s what I’m always thinking of – what can I do that’s different but still have Filipino flavor as the main star?”

Her Kimchi Pancit recipe is featured on this page. Pancit is a Filipino noodle dish with chopped vegetables and meat. Kimchi, a staple of Korean cuisine, is fermented vegetables.

“Pancit is a very good base to add flavor to,” Lalaine explains. “I wanted pancit to be the main star, kimchi just the sidekick. When you’re eating it, you taste the pancit flavors then you get that hint of sour and spice from the kimchi.” When asked where she got the idea she laughs, “Maybe I was watching too many K Dramas and Korean cooking shows but I was like – why not add kimchi!?”

The Korean cooking shows Lalaine refers to are those of YouTubers Maangchi and Seongyoung Longest, who have 6 million subscribers between them. When asked if she aims for the same level of fame, she says she simply wants to keep her channel going because she enjoys it. “But at the same time,” she admits. “I’d love for it to grow!” With her fresh take on Filipino food and fun video production style, it could very well happen.

Families pass their recipes on from one generation to the next in familiar ways: a box containing index cards with handwritten instructions, a plastic folder holding photocopies of cookbook recipes, or the lola whose specialties are stored in her mind and muscle memory.

YouTubers Nic and Rei represent an emerging way: filming the cooking process and posting it online. “Nowadays the best way to preserve your family’s recipes is to create it in video format,” Rei says. Their eponymous channel, Nic & Rei, is dedicated to sharing video how-tos for Filipino dishes and Kapampangan specialties. “That way, the recipes will still live beyond us,” Rei adds. Afterall, photocopies may fade but the internet is forever.

While the initial purpose of their channel was to document their parents’ recipes, Nic and Rei – now parents themselves – are also starting to develop their own originals. One such original, for Sous Vide Bistek with Rib Eye, is shared on this page.

“One of our friends a while back introduced us to sous vide, how you can make the perfect kind of steak with it,” says Rei about the recipe’s origin story. “I was constantly thinking about sous viding and something just clicked in my head – we should try making bistek with rib eye steak.”

And so they tried it. “We made a video on bistek [previously],” says Nic, usually in-charge of recipe development for the duo. “The measurements are pretty similar so we just applied it to a sous vide steak and it worked!” It’s a modern take on a well-loved dish that the next generation of Nic and Rei’s family can someday claim as another of their heirloom recipes.