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© Copyright 1995-2023, Clay Irving <clay@panix.com>, Manhattan Beach, CA USA
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Recipe from: SAVEUR, No. 87
Filipinos are big on condiments — particularly fish sauce, soy sauce, and vinegar — and like to mix and match them to create hybrid sauces called sawsawans ("kamatis" means "tomato" in Tagalog; Thus the name of the recipe). These are eaten with almost everything: meats, fish, vegetables, and even just rice. One ubiquitous condiment is bagoong, the deliciously pungent Philippine shrimp paste. By itself, it's a good accompaniment to the Philippine national dish, adobo. But you can add it to a chunky, tomato-based sawsawan (above), the kind that is sometimes served as a refreshing condiment for adobo. The shrimp paste gives the salsa-like concoction a pleasing saltiness and wonderfully unexpected fishy note.
The recipe for this bright, flavorful condiment is based on one in Bruce Cost's Asian Ingredients (William Morrow, 1998).
½ red onion, peeled and finely chopped
2 tomatoes, medium coarsely chopped
10 sprigs fresh cilantro, coarsely chopped
2 teaspoons bagoong
2 ¼ teaspoons palm vinegar
½ teaspoon sugar
Put the onion into a medium bowl. Add the tomatoes then mix well with the other ingredients.
Note:
Palm vinegar (Sukang Paombong) available from Kalystyan's
Shrimp paste (Kamayan) is also available from Kalystyan's