Bulalo is a popular comfort food from Southern Luzon: an amazingly tasty stew that warms the body and sooths the soul.
Some days are long. Other days are longer. And then there are days that feel like they've been spent running a marathon while blindfolded and solving quadratic equations using a broken calculator and pencillette (a pencillette is what our family calls the tiny 2-inch stick of wood and lead that remains after a pencil has been sharpened too many times).
There's only one way to recover from such a mind-numbing, exhausting, and hand-cramping day: bulalo.
Filipinos love stews, from the deliciously sour sinigang (which literally means "something stewed" or "stew dish" in Filipino) to super yummy tinola (which refers to a soup cooked in a ginger and onion base). However, one of our family favorites and one of the most recognizable stews in the Philippines is without a doubt bulalo or beef shank stew.
PRESSURE COOKER?
Bulalo is super simple but typically takes a ton of time to prepare. It's a clear stew that uses few ingredients; so few in fact that its ingredients are almost the same as another stew called nilaga. What sets bulalo apart is the beef shank. While other stews like nilaga are basically cubes of meat cooked in their ingredients (an hour or less to prepare), bulalo requires that you take the time to boil down the beef shank, infusing the stew with the savory flavor of the bone marrow. As the collagen, fat, and marrow melt into the liquid, the clear soup starts to smell the way it feels to hug your favorite teddy bear.
This process should take 4-5 hours, but with the wonders of modern technology you can use a pressure cooker to cut that time down to about an hour and a half. Purists may call this sacrilege; I call it a gift (after all, who has 4-5 hours to cook a stew!). Of course, it would be faster to go a local restaurant and buy bulalo, but for those of you who don't have the pleasure and privilege of living near heaven, here is a recipe!
As the collagen, fat, and marrow melt into the liquid, the clear soup starts to smell the way it feels to hug your favorite teddy bear.
HISTORY
Bulalo is native to Southern Luzon and is said to have originated in Batangas or Tagaytay (Cavite). Variations of this dish exist all over the Philippines, such as the Waray dish pakdol and the Cebuano dish pochero. There is a pocherohan (a place that cooks pochero) very close to the Children's Shelter of Cebu; the aptly named Pocherohan Sa Banawa. But every now and then we get a craving for bulalo like they make it in Roberto's home town of Taal.
Pressure Cooker Bulalo
Preparation Time: 10 minutes or less
Cook Time: ~1.5 hours
Total Time: Less than 2 hours
Ingredients:
As mentioned above, the ingredients are super simple and easy to find. The only thing you may have a hard time finding if you're in North America is the pechay. You can read about pechay and its potential substitutes in our ginisang pechay recipe.
For basic bulalo which feeds 6-8 people, you'll need the following:
1 kg beef shank
1 large onion, quartered
½ head of cabbage, quartered
1 bunch of pechay cut into 2" strips
2-4 ears of corn cut into four pieces
1 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
2 tbsp patis (fish sauce)
Salt to taste
Instructions:
First, you'll use a pressure cooker to make the beef tender and the broth flavorful.
Add beef shank, salt, pepper, and patis into a standard pressure cooker.
Fill the pressure cooker with water to the max-fill line.
Use the manual setting to cook the meat for 40 minutes.
Then, you'll take the contents of the pressure cooker and pour them into a large pot. At this point, the meat should be tender and you should have a ton of broth that smells amazing.
Take your pot of ingredients and start heating it on your stove on high.
Add corn.
Boil the corn for 15 minutes or until cooked.
Finally, you'll add the rest.
Add all of the greens.
Cook for about five minutes more.
Serve and enjoy!
And there you have it! If you do give this a try, please drop us a line and tell us how it went. Thank you again for all of your prayers, love, and support. God bless!
PRAYER REQUESTS
Please continue praying with us for everyone's safety, strength, patience, and provision as the coronavirus pandemic continues in the Philippines. Just yesterday (February 16th), Cebu City and a few other locales were brought down to Alert Level 2 from the more strict Alert Level 3. This means that children are once again allowed into indoor public places (while accompanied by a fully vaccinated adult) as well as public transportation. It also means that movie theaters are allowed to operate again. YAY! Kids are not, however, allowed into grocery stores in the city, at least not yet. Please continue praying with us.
Our typhoon relief efforts continue with more Shelter Kit distributions to far flung mountain communities. This Saturday, our family will be joining others in delivering Shelter Kits to Tabunan and Tagbao, two communities off of Cebu's Transcentral Highway. Please pray with us that all will go well and that God's love will be shared through these efforts. Then, on Sunday, our friends from the Rotary Club of Cebu will be delivering over 1500 relief packs to the City of Carcar, each including 5kg of rice. We won't be able to join, but please pray for their journey south of Cebu City.
Thursday and Friday this week, the kids at CSC will be having their mid-term school exams! Please pray for the kids and the teachers.
Learn more about the Children's Shelter of Cebu here.
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