Filipino-American cuisine facts for kids

Filipino American cuisine has been present in America ever since Filipinos moved there, but only recently have they come down from underneath and people started enjoying the meat-based, flavorful, and fried food that is known as Filipino food. Filipino food has gone through its evolution of adapting other cultures' food practices into their own, or borrowing the food concept into their own.

Filipinos took their food and debut it as they came to the America by presenting it in catering and opening up the Philippines' most popular food chain, Jollibee. There is also a long list of different Filipino types of dishes that represent Filipino Americans.

Cultural influences

Due to the history of colonization and occupation in the Philippines by the Spanish, Japanese, and Americans, Filipino cuisine in the Philippines was influenced by elements found in these other cultures' dishes. Many currently popular Filipino foods contain these elements. Doreen Fernandez cites the predominant flavors in Philippine cuisine as salty, bitter, sour, and sweet.

Chinese and Japanese influence

Filipinos created their own dish called pancit; this idea continued into creating a vast variety of different types of pancit. They made it into soup dishes such as miki or sotanghon. They took the pancit dish and made different versions of it based on the ingredients. There was a seafood version of it, a cheaper version of it. China also aided in helping with the creation of the dishes called kekiam, siopao, and siomai.

Spanish influence

Another way that they are presented of taking idea from other peoples culture was when the Spanish came they brought different ingredients that Filipinos later included in their dishes. Once these ingredients were introduced, Filipinos took the garlic ingredient and became an essential ingredients to use when anything is being fried.

American influence

American influence on Filipino food is how some authentic meal was turned into a frozen, defrost, cook it however one pleases, and enjoy. This technique was used on Filipino dishes when Marigold Commodities Corporation teamed up with Ditta Meat Food Service Company to create these frozen Filipino meals. They started in Austin, Texas, and released only a few dishes that would present incorporate the meat of America with the flavors of the Philippines to create Filipino American food.

Types of food

There were four of these Americanized Filipino dishes released into Texas under the work of Marigold Commodities and Ditta Meat Food Service. One was beef tapa, created by using Texas meat, ingredients such as garlic, citrus flavors, and soy sauce to marinate it, and finish it off by putting it on the grill or to fry it in a pan. Another dish is the pork longaniza and to sum it up as a whole, imagine sausage links, but Filipino style. Then the last 2 are called tocino, but the difference is chicken and pork meat.

Restaurants

Catering

Catering has always been a big thing for Filipino restaurants to have, and they are continuing to continue this trend in many restaurants such as Sunda in Chicago and Purple Yam in Brooklyn. This has been such a big idea for Filipino restaurants because this could be the debut of their restaurant in trying to start up, or it could just be another way of spreading and finding new consumers. They have also continued to sell typical Filipino dishes in bulk such as lechon. After a restaurant gets big with catering, and getting their name out there, they continue on to actually becoming a sit in restaurant and bringing in their usual customers to just get a dish versus the bulk amount.

Types of Filipino American Dishes

There are many different Filipino dishes and they can be categorized by soups, meat dishes, beverages, and desserts. Things that would naturally describe any typical Filipino American dish can be a soup, ulam (any food), kanin (rice), type of meat, fruits, and dipping sauces. Of course any culture will have a huge variety of food, but these foods can be categorized into their individual sections. The first section to talk about is the soup section.

This section can include many different soups, but some may include things such as Munnggo gisado masabaw. This soup starts off with the base which is Mung beans. Then the rest is basically picking a protein which can be pork or shrimp. One other soup dish would include pancit molo. This is basically a Filipino style of the Chinese wonton soup. The next section would be the meat dishes. Of course like soup, there are many different types of meat dishes. One dish is called Adobo. This dish can be made in two ways, one with pork or with chicken. After choosing a meat, you take the dish and cook it with the use of vinegar, soy sauce, and garlic.

Of course any dish has its variation down to every ingredient possible when making the dish, and adobo is a dish that can have many different possible variations. Suman banana leaves that contain sticky rice that can be dipped in sugar to make it sweeter if necessary. Taho is a dessert that uses a syrup and boba inside of a jello like soybean material. There are numerous different Filipino dishes, and these are only a couple of them.

Staples in Filipino Food

Rice

Rice is such an important part of Filipino dishes, whether it be food in the Philippines or Filipino American Food. Rice is a staple to Filipinos more than how cereal is known to be a basic breakfast food. It is used to help intensify some flavors, but it is not just limited to this. The rice can be used to create other Filipino dishes like puto and bibingka. Puto can be described as being meat filled, ube filled, turned into cakes, or even eaten with other Filipino dishes, and it is made by taking rice and making it into flour just as bibingka is.

These are the equivalent to how "breads mark Christmas for the German, and puddings for the Englishmen." Rice is also created into a dessert called suman. Suman is a sweet rice that is wrapped in a leaf from a coconut or banana. There are so many uses to how rice can be used in the Filipino culture besides it being the typical side for a meat dish.

Coconut

Coconut just like rice, is another staple in Filipino dishes. It is known as, buko, in the Philippine language and can be used in drinks, main dishes, or desserts. There are dishes that are native to a specific region such as how in Quezon they make a dish using a leaf wrapped shrimp, buko strips, and cook it in buko water. There is another region that uses buko in a different way and that is to mix it with chicken and ginger and cooking it inside of the buko, and they also make a noodle dish where the noodles are made of coconut. Then the white insides of the coconut are used to make milk, ginataang, halo-halo, etc. The use of a coconut is also very prominent in Filipino dishes.

Filipino American health

Food and health

A 2012 study across Asian American subgroups in Southern California (Chinese, Filipino, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese Americans) found that Filipino Americans self-reported the highest body mass indexes (BMIs). This is because after the migration of Filipinos to the U.S. their diets changed and showed to have increase in energy-dense food, processed food, decrease in fruits, vegetables, etc.

This seems to have has a negative effect on the body leading to increase body weight and other health-related problems. Specifically in Filipino American diets, there was an increase in milk, meat consumption, less starchy food and snacks. This increase in eating by Filipinos has led to an increase in the calorie intake. This increase was almost doubled and along with it was a double in protein consumption and triple consumption of fat.

U.S. and Canada

There was a study done in Canada on the average Filipino woman's health focusing mainly on the idea of body size, eating, and health. Western culture has spread an idea that there is a concept of "healthy" and this concept in terms of woman would be that there is an association with being thin is attractive and vice versa for being fatter. The study was then analyzed and what was found is that there was a risk of being "fat" associated with eating rice and an association of being thinner when watching fat and rice.