Filipino spaghetti
A deliberately sweet meat sauce built on banana ketchup, with the sweetness balanced not hidden.
Pork. Not vegetarian — contains cheddar whose rennet the source does not name, hot dog, whose meat the source does not name, pork.
Ingredients
- 500 g spaghetti
- 500 g minced pork
- 300 g hot dogs, in diagonal slices
- 300 ml banana ketchup
- 400 g tinned chopped tomatoes
- 2 tablespoons tomato paste
- 60 g caster sugar
- 1 onion, chopped
- 6 garlic cloves, chopped
- 200 ml water
- 2 tablespoons oil
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 0.5 teaspoon black pepper
- 150 g cheddar, grated
Method
- SWEET ON PURPOSE, AND THE JOB IS TO BALANCE IT RATHER THAN HIDE IT. Banana ketchup and added sugar are the point of this dish and a version made with less of either is simply a weak bolognese. What stops it cloying is salt and acid: taste at the end and reach for salt and a squeeze of calamansi before you reach for less sugar.
- FRY THE HOT DOGS SEPARATELY FIRST, 4 minutes, until the cut faces have browned and curled, then lift them out. Simmered in the sauce from raw they go pale and rubbery and leach water into it.
- Brown the pork hard in the oil, 8 minutes, breaking it up, until some of it has actually caught. Mince merely greyed gives a sauce with no backbone under all that sugar.
- Garlic and onion in, 4 minutes.
- Tomato paste in on its own for 2 minutes, until it darkens from red to brick.
- Tinned tomatoes, banana ketchup, sugar, water, salt and pepper in. Simmer uncovered 30 minutes, stirring now and then -- it is sugary and it catches.
- Hot dogs back in for the last 5 minutes.
- Boil the spaghetti 1 minute short of the packet time and drain it. It will sit in a sweet sauce and go on softening.
- DO NOT MIX THE PASTA INTO THE SAUCE in the pan. Plate the spaghetti and ladle the sauce over it, which is how it is served and also how it keeps -- mixed, the leftovers are a solid block by morning.
- A thick layer of grated cheddar over the top while it is hot enough to soften it.
Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.
Filed under Philippines · All recipes