24 Nov 2025 · 5 min
John Jonas and Julia discuss why silog, the Filipino rice-and-egg breakfast, exists: it fuels long workdays and commutes on a budget. They explain how it differs from lighter Western breakfasts, and how home cooks use yesterday's rice, leftovers, and market vegetables like bitter gourd and malungay to make it stretch.
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 159, follow up on the traditional Filipino breakfast. A few weeks ago, I had a podcast episode about traditional Filipino breakfast. I also sent a newsletter about it and I got a lot of responses about it, which was really interesting. I did not expect a bunch of responses about breakfast. And not just responses, but like passionate responses from people like, you left this out, you didn't cover this or well, but I'm not super passionate about food. For me, food is fuel. It's like, I mean, I eat to keep myself healthy. I eat to fuel my body so I can ride my bike and climb mountains. My wife says I don't have a relationship with food, it's just something that's necessary for me. But some people apparently have really strong feelings about it. So thank you for your responses. I talked with Julia about this and some of the responses I want to share and her response I want to share because it was really interesting. She says the typical breakfast that I presented, which was like the silog, which is like bread and egg, typical Filipino breakfast. She said this was for the working class Filipino, someone who needs a really heavy meal because they have to get to work right away or they work hard and they have a two hour commute to work. And this is traditional because the Philippines for a really long time was very, very agricultural. There's still a lot of agriculture there. And so someone traditionally would work from sunrise to noon because those are the coolest hours. And if you're going to work from 4:30am until noon, you know, got seven, eight, six hours of work. You need something heavy to sustain you during that time. Today where so many people commute to work and traffic is so bad in the Philippines, you don't want to stop along your way. You don't want to stop and pick up breakfast. You want something that's going to sustain you not only for the hour or two hour commute to work, but also then while you get to work. And that's why the heavy breakfast at home, the silog is a good thing. So it's a traditional food. It's not something they, it's not what they eat every single day. At least most people, Julia says that she doesn't eat that most days. Most days she has toasted coffee for breakfast. But it's also, it's a comfort food that they really like. Someone else in their response to me talked about that Julia didn't talk about all the fruits and vegetables that we have here in the Philippines. This is an expat living in the Philippines who's on my mailing list, hires people in the Phil, obviously, he hires people in the Philippines to work on his business. He talked about all the fruits and vegetables, and Julia said so, yeah, we do have a lot of fruits and vegetables, but not everybody eats it, and it's not really a filling thing. So, like, the preparation of fruits and vegetables for breakfast is different in different parts of the country. And when she thinks of breakfast vegetables, she thinks of, I'm not even gonna try it. It's eggplant omelette. Omelette. Her husband prefers sauteed eggplant with egg. So you're getting the idea of, like, what. What fruit and vegetables are for breakfast in the Philippines. She's another popular choice is sauteed bitter gourd. And the easiest way for me to have veggies for breakfast is to add malungay, drumstick, tree leaves to my eggs. Hopefully we can get a picture of that in this video. Fried fish is also a healthier breakfast option, which, if you ask me, fried fish, not super healthy. But that's what Julia says is a healthier breakfast option in the Philippines. Now, she says I have these options because I'm lucky. I have access to fresh vegetables, fruit, and fish every day because we have traveling vendors that go to our subdivision. We live close to a wet market. I also have the time to make breakfast. Not everybody has that access. What most Filipinos have access to is a bakery for pan de sal or a sailag food places that serve silog meals all day. So that's an interesting consideration. Here in the US I think we kind of all consider ourselves we have the same access to the same things as everybody else. Nobody here goes to the grocery store every day. At least where I live, nobody goes to the grocery store every day. So you're gonna make stuff at home. So the last thing that I wanted to add to this Julia talked about with me was how the she says she knows the silog isn't the healthiest option, but it's really comforting and it's used to help to help eat yesterday's leftovers. So here's what she says. It's a breakfast meal consisting mostly of leftovers. You often use the Yesterday's rice would be included in it. You would use yesterday's protein. Whatever you, you know, fried protein you had from yesterday in it. And then the egg is added to make it more breakfast. Y is what she said. So it reduces food waste, is cheap, it's easy, it's a good thing, and it's definitely a part of the Filipino culture.
