Bagnet and Pinakbet Pizza

Marita and I are always on the lookout for new and usual dishes, so during a recent trip to Ilocos, we kept an eye out for out-of-the-ordinary Ilokano fare. We were lucky to have a tour guide named Lizette, a transplant from Davao who showed enormous pride in the sights and tastes of her adopted province. Early on, she had recommended that we try bagnet and pinakbet pizza. Now I’ve tried both these Ilocano classics before but not on pizzas.

We were driven to Cafe Herencia, a small establishment with a great view of Paoay Church. We were served two 12-inch pizzas; one was topped with bagnet, which is basically the Ilocano version of lechon kawali, and the other with pinakbet. We dipped the bagnet pizza in bagoong – another first for us. The pinakbet pizza did not have ampalaya which is an essential part of classic pinakbet, but it was still very good and marginally healthier than the bagnet pizza. Next to the truffle oil and mushroom pizza at Gnocco, our favorite Italian in New York City, these Ilocano pizzas are the best, and certainly the most unusual, we’ve ever had. They could call it pizza avec poitrine de porc bagnet , making sure to pronounce it bawhn-yay, and sell it for a lot more to food snobs in Makati.

We had some other unusual treats like malunggay muffins, which we bought in a small store along the highway. We were told that they were made by mashing the malunggay leaves and then baking them into the muffins. I’ve had malunggay leaves cooked with chicken but I never imagined using them in muffins.

Then there was tinubong, which is sticky rice and coconut strips baked in bamboo tubes, somewhat like bico or sinukmani. To serve, you heat the tubes then whack them on a hard surface to break the bamboo and expose the tinubong. You can eat it right out of the tube. It would have been nice accompanied with some latik and a dessert wine. The day before, we actually tried a surprisingly good duhat wine which looked and tasted like a light port. Filipino desserts can sometimes be overly sweet and I’ve often wished for a good dessert wine to balance the sweetness. The duhat wine would have fit the bill.

Now I’ve tried a couple of variations on sinangag; the Ilocano version which is cooked with bagoong and topped with slices of itlog na maalat is now one of my favorites. We had this fried rice version at lunch in Cafe Uno in Vigan. We had dinengdeng, which is somewhat similar to pinakbet, but a little lighter. Recipes for dinengdeng include ingredients like jute leaves, horseradish, bitter melon, calabaza squash, sweet potato, string beans, chayote , chili peppers, okra, cassava, yams, and wild potatoes. Of course we had Vigan longganiza dipped in sukang Iloko, my favorite next to Lucban longganiza.

But the most unusual dish, not necessarily from a culinary sense, was poqui-poqui .  You should hear how the Ilocanos pronounce it . No, it’s not poke, the raw fish appetizer of Hawaii. And while I’ve had bull’s testicles before, this dish is definitely not the female version, notwithstanding its name. Poqui-poqui is a simple dish of sauteed eggplant with onions and tomatoes. We also tried KBL (kamatis, bagoong and lasona) which is one of the more popular dipping sauces. Lasona is the famous garlic of the Ilocos region, which is a lot smaller than garlic in the USA, but a lot more flavorful.

It was unusually cool during our stay in Ilocos, particularly in Laoag. We actually had to wear jackets! It made our stay all the more enjoyable and the food more delectable. We could break our rule of not going to the same place or eating the same food twice when it comes to Ilocos. I miss it already.