Filipino cuisine is built on a bold balance of sour, salty, and sweet — vinegar, soy sauce, fermented shrimp paste, and coconut milk are its backbone. Centuries of Malay, Chinese, Spanish, and American influence produced dishes like adobo, sinigang, and lechon that are unmistakably their own.
Play today's Filipino puzzle →Each day a mystery Filipino dish is chosen. Guess any Filipinodish and you'll receive color-coded feedback on five attributes:
You have 8 guesses. Use the clues to narrow down the answer.
Chicken braised in soy sauce, vinegar, garlic, bay leaves, and black peppercorns until the sauce reduces to a glossy glaze.
The vinegar-braising technique predates Spanish contact — colonizers simply named it after their word 'adobar' (to marinate). A 1613 Spanish dictionary recorded it as 'adobo de los naturales,' the adobo of the natives.
A sour tamarind broth simmered with pork, tomatoes, radish, water spinach, and long green peppers.
In 2021 TasteAtlas ranked sinigang the best soup in the world. The souring agent varies by region — tamarind is standard, but guava, calamansi, kamias, and green mango are all used.
A whole pig stuffed with lemongrass, garlic, and onions, slowly spit-roasted over charcoal until the skin shatters.
Anthony Bourdain called Cebu lechon 'the best pig ever' after tasting it in 2009. Cebu-style lechon is so aromatic from its stuffing that it is traditionally eaten without the liver sauce used elsewhere in the country.
Oxtail and tripe simmered in a thick peanut sauce tinted with annatto, served with eggplant, banana blossom, and string beans.
The stew itself is deliberately unsalted — it is always served with a side of bagoong (fermented shrimp paste), and each diner seasons their own plate to taste.
Egg noodles stir-fried with pork, shrimp, cabbage, carrots, and snap peas in a soy and oyster sauce.
Pancit is served at nearly every Filipino birthday because long noodles symbolize a long life — a custom inherited from Chinese traders, who also gave the dish its name, from the Hokkien 'pian i sit' (convenient food).
Slender spring rolls filled with seasoned ground pork and minced vegetables, deep-fried until golden and served with sweet chili sauce.
Despite the name, lumpia Shanghai is a Filipino creation. The word 'lumpia' comes from the Hokkien 'lun pia,' brought by Fujianese immigrants — the 'Shanghai' label was added to sound sophisticated.
Chopped pig's face and ears, boiled, grilled, then seared on a sizzling plate with onions, chili, calamansi, and often a raw egg on top.
Lucia 'Aling Lucing' Cunanan of Angeles City is credited with inventing sizzling sisig in the 1970s. The word originally meant a sour salad — a 1732 Kapampangan dictionary defined 'sisig' as green fruit eaten with salt and vinegar.
Shaved ice layered with sweetened beans, jellies, fruits, and leche flan, drenched in evaporated milk and crowned with ube ice cream.
'Halo-halo' means 'mix-mix' in Tagalog — the dessert is meant to be stirred together before eating. It traces back to the Japanese shaved-ice dessert kakigori, introduced by Japanese migrants in the early 1900s.
Pork belly simmered in coconut milk with shrimp paste and a heavy handful of long green and bird's-eye chilies.
The dish was named after the passenger train that ran from Manila to the Bicol region. It was popularized in the 1960s by restaurateur Cely Kalaw in Manila, inspired by the fiery coconut-and-chili cooking of Bicol.
Dried taro leaves slowly simmered in coconut milk with chilies, ginger, garlic, and shrimp paste until meltingly soft.
Bicolano cooks insist that laing must never be stirred until the leaves are fully cooked. Raw taro leaves contain calcium oxalate crystals that irritate the throat, so long, undisturbed cooking is essential.
Chicken marinated in calamansi, vinegar, lemongrass, and ginger, grilled over charcoal while basted with annatto oil.
Inasal's signature orange color comes from atsuete (annatto) oil, not from chili. Bacolod's 'Manokan Country,' a strip of open-air grills, is considered the dish's spiritual home.
Raw fish cured in coconut or cane vinegar with ginger, onion, chili, and calamansi — the Philippine counterpart to ceviche.
Kinilaw is one of the oldest documented Filipino dishes. Excavations in Butuan uncovered tabon-tabon fruit seeds, a traditional kinilaw ingredient, dated to the 10th–13th centuries — long before Spanish arrival.
Beef shank and marrow bones simmered for hours into a clear, rich broth with corn on the cob, cabbage, and pechay.
The prize of bulalo is the marrow, scooped from the bone and eaten with rice. Tagaytay, a cool highland town near Batangas cattle country, is famous for restaurants serving nothing else.
Cured beef tapa pan-fried and served with garlic fried rice and a sunny-side-up egg, usually with spiced vinegar on the side.
The name is a portmanteau: TAPa + SInangag (garlic fried rice) + itLOG (egg). The '-silog' suffix spawned an entire family of breakfasts — tocilog, longsilog, bangsilog, and dozens more.
Short, plump pork sausages, either garlicky-sour or sweet, pan-fried and eaten with garlic rice and egg.
Nearly every province has its own longganisa. Vigan's is garlicky and sour, Lucban's is packed with oregano, and Pampanga's is sweet — locals classify them all as either 'hamonado' (sweet) or 'recado' (savory).
A dense, vivid purple jam made by cooking mashed ube with condensed milk, coconut milk, and butter until thick.
Ube is a true yam (Dioscorea alata), botanically unrelated to taro or purple sweet potato, both of which are frequently mislabeled as ube abroad. Its color is entirely natural.
A dense caramel custard made almost entirely from egg yolks and condensed milk, steamed in an oval tin called a llanera.
Filipino leche flan uses far more yolks than Spanish flan, giving it a richer, firmer texture. A popular explanation is that colonial-era builders used egg whites as mortar binder for churches, leaving cooks with a surplus of yolks.
A soft rice-flour cake baked in a clay pot lined with banana leaves, topped with salted egg, cheese, and grated coconut.
Bibingka is inseparable from Christmas. It is sold outside churches during Simbang Gabi, the nine dawn Masses leading up to Christmas Day, usually alongside its purple partner, puto bumbong.
A whole pork knuckle boiled until tender, dried, then deep-fried so the skin blisters and crackles, served with a soy-vinegar dip.
The secret to the blistered skin is a two-stage process: the pata is simmered, then thoroughly air-dried or refrigerated overnight before frying, so the skin puffs rather than turning leathery.
Bitter melon, eggplant, okra, squash, and string beans simmered with fermented fish or shrimp paste and bits of pork.
The name comes from the Ilocano 'pinakebbet,' meaning shrunken or shriveled — the vegetables are cooked until they wilt and collapse. Ilocano purists use bagoong isda (fermented fish), never shrimp paste.
A clear ginger-scented chicken soup with wedges of green papaya and chili leaves or moringa.
Tinola appears in José Rizal's 1887 novel Noli Me Tángere: at Capitán Tiago's dinner, the friar Padre Dámaso is insulted at being served the neck and wing while others get the choicer pieces.
