How This Young Chef Forages with Local Filipino Tribes

One of my philosophies is if somebody's growing something, most likely they're the best at cooking at it because they've been handling it for a long, long time. So my duty for me to keep on coming back to them and trying to learn from them. I'm Don Baldassano. I'm the chef owner of Linam Nam Manila. Basically what we do at Linam Nam is it's a Filipino restaurant that serves a tasting menu that offers different produce from different parts of the Philippines. We devote at least two days of our week going to different provinces trying to learn from the locals their whatever their dishes are whatever produce they have right now and try to see whatever Filipino food that we can make from it and trying to learn from their own culture and their own dishes as well. Whenever people eat here I want them to feel like this is something new but at the same time it's very nostalgic. So I started cooking when I was 10 years old then it kind of grew larger when I joined Junior MasterChef when I was 12 but unfortunately I wasn't able to win that. During Junior MasterChef I hated cooking Filipino food. I think it was me being an arrogant kid wherein I thought the French food and Italian food was the big thing and it was the only thing that I could cook to be the best but trying to think about what our cuisine and culture is it changed my mind especially talking to one of my friends. So he told me that I will never be the best unless I know my own culture and cook my own food. There's so much to discover here in the Philippines. Our dishes are so varied that every day if you eat Filipino food you're gonna have something new each time. So I learned Pindang na Baboy through my travels in Subic. So I first traveled there going to Pamulak Lakin forest trail and trying out whatever Aita food was and talking to the people there, their elders they were talking about preserving meat. So I kept on going back there and asking them how it was done as apparently each person would do it very differently. Basically Pindang is just pork that they've salt and smoked as a way of preservation because they didn't have any fridges at that time but it was now becoming more of a flavor thing rather than a preservation thing which they still continue to do till this day. That's why whenever I make the Pindang dish I don't want to stay away from the traditional methods because what they were doing is actually really good already. So we wanted to make sure now we're keeping the tradition but at the same time innovating whatever the Pindang is. Doing the pig first. So this is one of the pigs that we grow in our backyard. So this pig has only had rice and corn as its diet for its entire life. So we're trying to control the diets of the black pigs just to give them a different flavor. Now we're just gonna be salting it with dul-dul. So it's a salt that we get from Gimaras. All right so once you have this nice color similar to lechon kawali, this is done. So once we have the meat like this we're just gonna set it aside and use it later on once we plate the dish. Then we cook it with a broth from the kakayat snails that we get in Subic as well. So this is something that the Aytas forage for themselves as well. So we just saute it very briefly. Then we just cover it with water. So this would be the butter. So this is going to be the base of the sauce. We'll add a bit of soy sauce in the pan just so we can lower down the temperature. This is the honey that we gather in Subic. So this is the honey by the Aytas. It's a bit more smoky as they smoke the hives quite intensely more than the usual ones before they get it because the stings of the bees there are quite stronger. So they take extra precaution which is kind of nicer because it gives your honey a bit of a smoky flavor. So this rice is from Sagdanga in Mountain Province. So they call it enuma rice. So it's called rare rice as it only grows at the sides of the mountain. So it's a pink rice. So this broth would give the rice this earthier flavor. So it would be nice to have this chocolatey and earthy flavor. Then we serve it with some takipan. These are the hearts of fishtail palm. So basically we get the trunk of the tree and just get the hearts. Then we pickle it for two months before we use it for the dish. So it's cutting them across so you can see the layers of the takipan ubod. What we do here is we're just getting the outside layer. Usually the middle part we use them as a farce on a different dish. So this would provide a nice acidity for the dish. With us sourcing ingredients, we didn't want to just buy produce from different people. We wanted, I wanted to have a connection with the food that I make. So that's why our goal was to forage and talk to these farmers themselves. Because one of my philosophies is if somebody's growing something, most likely they're the best at cooking at it because they've been handling it for a long, long time. So my duty for me to keep on coming back to them and trying to learn from them so that if I bring their dishes here in Lunamnam, I can represent them properly and not just copy whatever they're teaching me. Gathering your own produce makes you understand that gathering produce isn't as easy as we think that it's getting in the market or in the palenque. It's you have to go to the forest and dig for things. You have to get on your knees and cut some plants and sometimes you even get sick and get lost as well. So for me, it's part of the process of creating good food is to understand where everything comes from. There's so much food that they've been doing pre-colonial times that I've yet to discover. I could see that our food culture is so diverse, especially our produce. It's just us needing to discover more of these things.