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How To Make The Best Homemade Lugaw

Lugaw is a traditional Filipino dish that's very similar to rice porridge. It's nice to eat during the cold and rainy months in the morning, and also feels good to eat after a night out with friends drinking. Recently I've been trying out how to make lugaw on my own, and I think I figured out a way to make this great dish even better.

Most Filipinos know lugaw normally peddled on bikes along streets by the neighborhood food vendor or carinderias. A bowl of lugaw would usually be around 10-15 pesos for the regular ones, while those with add-ons like ox tripe (AKA twalya), pig intestines (isaw), or pig heart (puso) cost a bit more but make eating the plain dish feel a little bit more special. Most would also serve their lugaw with condiments and here is how each person could personaliaze their lugaw to their own liking. Most vendors would also offer calamansi, fried garlic, soy sauce, fish sauce, vinegar, hot sauce, chili oil and spring onions for free and people can just mix it with their lugaw and be happy campers.

There's also some variations of the local rice porridge. I consider them to just variations of one dish. In general, yellow 'lugaw' is contains pork and pig organs, 'arroz caldo' has pieces of pulled chicken meat, while the white 'goto' comes with beef.

Today my recipe will be focusing on lugaw. I choose lugaw over the other two since pork is very fatty and will produce the tastiest rice porridge.

The first step would be to prepare ingredients and tools that we will need:

Deep cooking pot or casserole

Blender

Glutinous/sticky rice, 250g

2.5L water

One medium white onion, chopped

One medium carrot, diced

One stalk of celery or celery powder, 1 tsp

4 cloves of garlic, crushed and roughly chopped

Small nub of peeled ginger, sliced

Pork lomo/kasim, skin removed

2 chicken buillons

Fish sauce, 2tbsp

Okay, so you might be wondering why there's carrots, celery and onions in my recipe. It's definitely not traditional. Some would just use turmeric or atsuete seeds for coloring. We would be using the vegetables in this case to provide both color and flavor to our final dish. Trust me that this will be the best lugaw you've ever made yourself.

First off, put a little bit of oil in the bottom of a cooking pot, put it on medium heat, and add the pork. We want the pork to brown on all sides and sweat, releasing its own fat to become flavor for the rest of the ingredients. It should take around 4-5 minutes. Remove the pork once it's browned and the fat is slightly translucent, meaning its already cooked to the inside.

(NOTE: Although most street vendors would cook their organs with the lugaw, I would not do that if I would be claiming to make the best homemade lugaw. If not cleaned properly, the earthiness of the organs will make its way into the dish and may make some people think they're eating unclean food. I don't like that, that's why we're cooking our meat separately. Also, if you would instead prefer to have the skin on the pork, that would be fine. It's just that it usually takes a lot more time and oil to cook it, and if there's too much oil in the pot we would need to remove the excess, which would also mean removing the rendered pork fat. Not ideal.)

After properly browning the meat, add in our carrots, celery and white onion. There should be brown bits from the meat that's sticking to the bottom of your pan. This is called fond, and fond is flavor! Don't remove the fond and oil we've extracted from the pork because we will cook the vegetables in these. They should come off easily as these vegetables cook because they will release a bit of water as they sweat. The vegetables should be done by 5 minutes. We wont add in the garlic until the carrots have turned a bit soft and the onions translucent. Garlic burns easily and would turn bitter if we added them too early. Cook for another 2-3 minutes until the room is fragrant. And I mean FRAGRANT. The carrots, celery and onion is called mirepoix in classic french cuisine and serves as the base for many sauces and soups.

(NOTE: Celery is a bit hard to find in the Philippines and is usually expensive. Just use celery powder if you want, a little goes a long way.)

Once our vegetables are cooked, we add 500mL of our water to the vegetables. This step is called deglazing. We actually deglazed the fond from the pork using our vegetables, and we will once again be deglazing fond produced by our vegetables using our water. White onions and carrots have a lot of sugar in them and cooking then until tender is a great way to release those flavors and incorporate them to our final dish. After we've added the water, we will then scratch off the bottom of our pan until we've removed all of the fond.

We then put everything inside our blender. Blend everything until really smooth. You shouldnt see any chunks big or small of our vegetables because it might be offputting for some since they're not used to seeing vegetables with their lugaw. You will see that once the carrot is finely blended that it our mixture will become yellowish orange, and that is exactly what we want. Most street vendors just add food coloring to their lugaw and we won't be doing that because that method doesnt add any flavor to our dish. All that aroma and fragrance we got from cooking the vegetables over the stove? That's what separates THE BEST LUGAW FROM ALL THE REST.

Once blended, return everything to our cooking pot. Add in our glutinous rice and the rest of our water together with our 2 chicken buillons and fish sauce. Add in the amount ginger to your liking, as some people do not like the taste of ginger especially when you accidentally bite down in it.

(NOTE: Sometimes what I would do is cook the ginger together with the vegetables and then remove it. It's also optional to just crush the ginger and add in the ginger juice.)

My recipe uses a 1:10 ratio between our rice and liquid, 250 grams of rice to 2.5L of water. The glutinous rice actually expands and gobbles up most of our liquid, and thickens our lugaw as if we're reducing our broth through simmering. As the starch from our sticky rice mixes with the pork fat we cooked earlier, it's going to thicken up our lugaw even more through emulsification. Who doesn't like thick lugaw? Bring to a boil then simmer for around 25-30 minutes or until the rice grains are translucent and continue leaving it on very low heat so that it stays warm and continuously stirring so that the rice doesnt end up sticking to the bottom and burning.

(NOTE: You might also be thinking, why not use chicken stock? Well, chicken stock is a bit expensive in the Philippines, and buillons/broth cubes are much more accessible. Also, chicken stock, I believe, will be a bit too overpowering for our dish since we already added mirepoix. We want the dish to not taste too hearty because we still want to be able to add other flavors to our bowl of lugaw later on.)

Once you have the consistency you want of your lugaw, grab a bowl and scoop some. I believe it's best practice to taste the lugaw first on its own to know it's own flavor so take a spoonful first and only then add condiments to your liking. Personally though, I will only add my own chili oil (more on this on a later post), freshly ground black pepper, freshly squeezed calamansi, a little bit of garlic-infused red cane vinegar (a different kind of sour from calamansi and from the regular white vinegar) and that is all.

Cut up some of the pork we've fried earlier and place it in top of your lugaw. The crunchy pieces of fatty pork goes well with the thick, soupy consistency of the lugaw.

(Note: You can use any piece of meat or organ that you like. I simply do not like the laziness of not cleaning internal organs enough most street vendors and carinderias practice. That is understandable that they need to work fast to earn money, but they should boil their innards with some ginger to get rid of the foul taste and smell. If you're using organs, you can still use the same method I did with the meat so you'll still have fond. The common internal organs used for lugaw are usually fatty and will lend a lot of flavor to your lugaw except for the heart which is really muscular. The only exception would probably be ox tripe. Ox tripe is very gummy and chewy and should not be fried. You can boil it separately with some ginger and add it together to your lugaw as you're cooking it. You can even use chicken neck, as chicken skin releases a lot of fat and it crisps up really good which goes well with lugaw. You can also grill your meats and organs instead which will still go well with lugaw.)

I've put a lot of heart into making this recipe. I made a conscious decision to use the cheapest ingredients that make the most impact because I believe that good food doesnt have to be expensive. If you've tried out my recipe or have any other variations you think I missed and would like to share it here as well, I'd like to hear from you!