Sinigang is one of my favorite Filipino dishes. If I could have one dish for the rest of my life this could be it.
Before modern food scientists figured out how to create packets of tamarind soup mix, Sinigang was made with fresh tamarind pods. By the time I was growing up, soup mix or cubes was the way Sinigang was made in my house, even if we had a tamarind tree in our backyard. Sinigang soup mix just made it so much easier to have a consistent well balanced, properly seasoned soup. Whenever it’s cold or rainy outside, a big bowl of sinigang and rice definitely hits the spot.
I usually make Sinigang like this:
- Sear pork ribs in a large pot with some vegetable oil.
- Add onions, garlic, tomatoes and radish.
- Fill pot with water, add soup mix and add a long chili or two
- Bring to a boil and simmer until meat starts falling off the bone.
- Steam baby bok choy and okra separately.
- Place steamed vegetables in a bowl, ladle hot soup and meat over it.
- Serve with rice.
You can see the mix’s ingredients list- it has shrimp, not too surprising, but milk and wheat flour too? I wanted to find a way to make sinigang without the mix, if I ever wanted to make vegan, gluten free sinigang. Vegan sinigang almost sounds oxymoronic, but sinigang is too awesome not to be shared with everyone.
I decide whether I’m vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, paleo, slow carb, whatever, on a meal by meal basis. It really depends on how I feel, who I’m with, where I am and what I’m doing. For now I still eat meat and dairy once in a while, and try to eat as much plants and as little white carbs and sugar as I can. Chocolate croissants are one of the exceptions, but those are for another entry.
Back to cooking: I was surprised to find tamarind pulp with seeds at the grocery store nearby, and decided to try to make sinigang using both methods side by side for a fair comparison.
For the batch using the tamarind pulp, there is the extra tedious step of soaking the pulp in hot water and mashing it up with my hand to separate the pulp from the seeds. I poured that seedy pulpy mixture over a sieve into the pot and repeated that step until all that was left were the seeds. I also added patis (fish sauce), salt, ground pepper, onion and garlic powder.
My husband and I tried the tamarind pulp batch first, and both felt that it was delicious. It doesn’t taste exactly like the powdered mix version but it was flavorful, and had I not told him which batch we were tasting, he wouldn’t have assumed that it wasn’t the usual.
I took photos of just the soup side by side and tasted it the next day. Can you guess which one is which?
The one to the left is made with soup mix and the one on the right is from tamarind pulp.
I found that the tamarind pulp batch was thicker and cloudier because of the pulp. After checking the mix ingredients list, I also added some sugar to the pulp batch, and that made the soup more similar to the other batch.
Making sinigang from scratch is not too complicated, and for a first attempt I’m happy with the results. Eventually I’ll create my own perfect mix that I can use instead of adjusting the seasoning a dozen times before I was happy with the taste.
On a side note, this is the first time I used up all four burners in my kitchen since we moved in recently, and I’m glad it was for sinigang dinner!
Update: Since I had so much soup, I invited my former roommate Kimmie and our friend Lia to have dinner the next day. I added more pork to the soup and simmered it longer so it actually tasted better than when we ate it the first night. When I served it, Kimmie thought it was made from the soup mix, but Lia’s bowl had a tamarind pod that escaped the sieve, so she knew that it was the one made with real tamarind.
I insisted that they both went home with a quart container of Sinigang each, to help me finish all the sinigang that was cooked for this experiment.
TLDR: Sinigang made with tamarind pods instead of mix tastes just as good, maybe even better. It’s definitely MSG free.