Ep. 141: The Typical Filipino Breakfast

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at working with OFS online Filipino specialists. This is episode 141, the typical Filipino breakfast. I struggle with food. Now that I struggle with, like, eating food or I struggle with weight or something like that, I can eat. I eat ridiculous amounts of food, and I can eat basically whatever I want as long as it's within my diet. And the reason is because I struggle with dairy, I don't do well with it at all. And. And then I have struggled with, like, early onset dementia, and I found that not eating any sugar at all and makes it significantly better. And then eating grains makes my brain kind of go crazy. And so I don't. I eat a very restricted diet, and it's gotten really easy for me over the years to do this. Most people would imagine, like, you don't eat any grains, no bread, no oats, no quinoa, no rice, and you don't eat any dairy, no milk, no cream, no cheese. What do you eat? Right, Well, I eat. I eat a lot of vegetables. I eat fruit, I eat some meat. Try and keep that low. But. So here was. This was really interesting breakfast or food. In Europe, while I was there with my family for a month, there was no option to not eat grains or dairy. That just. It wasn't possible. And so I had to eat them. And you know what I found? I had zero effect. Zero effect from it, where, like, if I eat dairy pretty quickly, it causes my eyes to go crazy. And then if I eat it consistently over time, I get a sore in my nose, then it starts to kill my. My digestive system. I get so much pain, and I had it every single meal for a month, and I had zero consequences from it. Same thing with grains. I ate bread every meal and I had no effect from it. The food in Europe is just different. I don't understand why. I have some ideas, but, man, that was really an amazing experience to be able to eat that. I had pizza, like, four times a week because I love it and I was able to eat it and have no consequences like here in the U.S. so let's talk about food in the Philippines, at least breakfast. So the typical Filipino breakfast. Here's what Julia, one of my ofs, wrote about it. When people talk about the typical Filipino breakfast, two things usually come to mind. The pandesal and the sailog. I don't actually know if I'm pronouncing those things correctly, but I'm trying. So what is a pain de Sal, the pandesal salt bread, is a small piece of bread around the size of a dinner roll, heavily loaded with breadcrumbs. It's toasted, slightly salty and crispy on the outside and soft and sweet on the inside. Here's a picture of it so that you get an idea of what it is. To me, it looks pretty much like a normal dinner roll, Julia continues. Every bakery in the Philippines makes and sells pandesal. This type of bread is such a big part of our culture that people would wake up early and line up for a bag of warm, freshly baked pen de sal for breakfast. Even the Philippine government goes out of its way to protect the pandesal. Whenever the price of wheat or sugar fluctuates, the government would be on it right away because nobody wants to lose their beloved morning pan de sal. And if you're the type of person who sleeps in, well, tough luck. Bakeries always run out by mid morning. But but if you're willing to wait, you can try early in the afternoon when bakeries make another batch for snacks. You can eat pain de sales on its own, or use it as a sandwich bread and fill it up with whatever you like. My favorite is scrambled eggs. My husband likes liver spread or Spanish sardines. Dunking your pendesal in coffee is also a common practice, Julia continues. The small size of pen de sal makes it ideal for an afternoon snack, hence the afternoon batch. You know it's afternoon pendesal when people dunk their bread in Coke instead of coffee. I promise it's a thing here in the Philippines, but I don't get it either. That's what Julia says if you want a heavy breakfast. Another Filipino breakfast classic is the sailog. It's not just one dish, it's more like a family of dishes. The sai in sailog stands for sinangag, fried rice in Filipino, and the log stands for itlog or egg in Filipino. When a dish has protein, usually fried garlic fried rice and an egg, usually sunny side up, that dish becomes a sailog. So when you have a fried hot dog, garlic fried rice and egg, you get a hot silag. My favorite is the spam silag, which to me is pretty funny. Julia says her favorite is the spam salag. Hopefully you get a picture of it here in this video. If you're watching this on YouTube. If you're on the podcast. Sorry. If you want a classic syllog, go for tap silag. Tap is short for tapa, or cured beef jerky. Unlike American jerky, though, tapa is not preserved and needs to be kept in the freezer and thaw before cooking. If you want to sell breakfast in the Philippines, you've got to have the silag and the pain de Sal. Even McDonald's has them here. Julia says when we're at McDonald's, my husband usually orders the longasilog Longas longanisa Philippine sausage that comes in many variations in. McDonald's is a skinless sweet sausage. And yes, our McDonald's makes fried rice. My favorite one is pictured below. It's a pain de sal with a cheese omelette. We do have McMuffins, but I prefer their pain de sal meals because they're lighter and less greasy. Like the rest of the world, McDonald's here refuses to serve these breakfast items after 11:00am so, so good. So good. I remember being in Brazil when I was on a mission for my church. I spent two years in Brazil and I remember going to McDonald's the first time and finding, whoa, McDonald's is different. Like, they serve. They serve rice and beans here. That's. I had no idea that McDonald's would ever serve anything other than a Big Mac or a double cheeseburger. And yet they do. So thank you to Julia so much for helping with this episode. What she wrote is so good. I love the breakfast variations. So talk to you later.