Common Techniques for Cooking Native Cuisines

Philippine native and local cuisines are always special dishes worth serving on elegant dinner tables. They will never let us down even in dinner banquets. Here are some basic culinary techniques for cooking some local dishes.

Baking. When food is cooked in dry heat in an oven, modern or stone ovens, the cuisine is baked. With modern ovens, it is important to keep track of the oven heat with the use of thermometers. Most ovens, though, have built in varying heat degrees. Baked local dishes are baked spaghetti, lasagna, creamed lapu-lapu, and other delicacies.

Braising local cuisines is when the meat or veggies are cooked to a brown in some amount of fried fat. Then it is followed with simmering with some water, slow cooked for a long period of time. The lid is kept tightly closed over the food. Braising is done especially with dishes that have tough meat cuts to tenderize. Braising, with its slow cooking, also allows the full flavors of cuisines come out and mix thoroughly with other flavors from the spices.

Sautéing is a popular Philippine cooking procedure for cooking native cuisines. It often involves minced garlic and chopped onions and sliced tomatoes sautéed in an amount of cooking oil. When light brown, other ingredients—meat, fish, vegetables and other spices—-are poured in and mixed with the sautéed ingredients. Sautéing brings out the savory flavors of dishes and blends different food flavors into a subtle mix. Butter is also a favorite for sautéing dishes and other classy cuisines.

Simmering takes a longer time to cure and cook some cuisines. It is slowly cooking local dishes with the use of water that later turns into s savory stew. It is cooked on low fire. Simmering meat often takes long hours, while fish and veggies often take some minutes. The longer simmering takes, the better the local cuisines are bound to come out.

Boiling is another popular cooking technique. Boiling tenderizes and blends cuisine flavors with a shorter time span. Boiling is often just a matter of 3 to 5 minutes. Longer than this, it means simmering the local dish is what’s needed. Long hours of boiling may spoil food flavors—or even burn the food—not to mention the enormous and impractical electric consumption.

The techniques for cooking local cuisines are varied, and one cooking technique is often specified for cooking a particular local dish. It is a culinary wisdom to learn them all.