Filipino cooking builds on a few core techniques and a handful of pantry staples that, once you understand them, unlock dozens of dishes. The cuisine centers on bold contrasts: sour against savory, salty against sweet, rich against tangy. If you can sauté garlic and onions, braise meat in vinegar, and balance a sour broth, you can cook Filipino food confidently at home.
Start With the Gisa
Nearly every Filipino dish begins the same way: with a sauté base called gisa (sometimes spelled guisá). Philippine culinary historian Felice Sta. Maria describes it as browning sliced onion, pounded garlic, and chopped tomato in a little oil that’s about to smoke. It’s the Filipino equivalent of a sofrito, and the goal is simple: soften the vegetables until they break down into a fragrant, slightly caramelized base.
The order matters. Start with garlic in hot oil, stirring it just until it turns golden (not dark brown). Add diced onion and cook until translucent. Then add chopped tomato, pressing it with your spoon to release its juices. Once the tomato collapses into a rough paste, you have your gisa, and you’re ready to add meat, vegetables, or liquid depending on the dish. This base shows up in adobo, sinigang, pancit, and countless vegetable stews. Master it once and you’ll use it several times a week.
Stock Your Filipino Pantry
Filipino cooking doesn’t demand an enormous ingredient list, but it does lean hard on a few things you’ll want to keep on hand at all times: soy sauce, vinegar, garlic, onions, tomatoes, black peppercorns, bay leaves, and fish sauce. With just these, you can already make adobo, paksiw, and several soups.
Vinegar
Vinegar is the backbone of the cuisine, and the Philippines produces several distinct types. White cane vinegar (sukang maasim) is the most versatile. Use it for pickling green papaya into atchara, for marinades, and as an all-purpose cooking vinegar. Sukang Iloco, from the Ilocos region, is made by fermenting a molasses-based drink called basi. It has a deeper, almost sherry-like flavor and works beautifully in adobo.
Coconut vinegar comes in two forms: sukang tuba, fermented from coconut tree sap, and suka ng niyog, from coconut water. Neither tastes like coconut. Both are more aggressively acidic than cane vinegar, making them ideal for kinilaw (a Filipino-style ceviche) and for infusing into sinamak, a spiced condiment made by steeping chiles, garlic, ginger, black pepper, and salt in vinegar for at least a week at room temperature.
Nipa palm vinegar (sukang Paombong) comes from Bulacan province and tastes slightly sweet and saline because nipa palms grow in brackish water. It’s a living vinegar that keeps fermenting and darkening over time. Its high acidity makes it perfect for lechon paksiw, where you need enough punch to cut through rich, fatty pork.
If you’re just starting out and can only buy one, grab white cane vinegar. It handles almost everything.
Fermented Seafood Pastes
Bagoong is the fermented paste that gives many Filipino dishes their deep, salty umami. The most common type is bagoong alamang, made from small shrimp or krill. When sautéed with garlic and a touch of sugar, it becomes bagoong guisado, with a sweet, caramelized flavor that pairs with green mangoes and is stirred into kare-kare (oxtail peanut stew). Bagoong isda, made from fish, varies by region. Bagoong balayan from Batangas uses anchovies fermented for six months to a year in clay jars, producing a fragrant, slightly pungent paste with an almost cheese-like quality. A small spoonful of either type adds a savory depth that salt alone can’t match.
Adobo: The First Dish to Learn
Adobo is the most forgiving and adaptable Filipino dish, which makes it the right place to start. At its simplest, it’s meat braised in vinegar and soy sauce with garlic, bay leaves, and black peppercorns. There’s no single “authentic” recipe because every family has its own ratio, but a reliable starting point for about two pounds of chicken is four tablespoons of soy sauce to six tablespoons of white vinegar. That roughly 2:3 ratio of soy to vinegar gives you a balanced sauce that’s savory without being too salty and tangy without being too sharp.
Combine the soy sauce, vinegar, crushed garlic cloves, whole peppercorns, and bay leaves in a pot. Add the chicken (bone-in, skin-on pieces work best), bring everything to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer, covered, for about 30 minutes. The key rule: don’t stir the pot during the first 10 minutes of simmering. Vinegar needs time to mellow through heat. Stirring too early can make the sauce taste harsh and overly acidic.
Once the chicken is tender, you can stop there for a saucy version, or remove the pieces and brown them in a hot pan for crispy edges before pouring the reduced sauce over top. Pork adobo follows the same method, using pork belly or shoulder cut into chunks, and some cooks combine both meats in the same pot. Try cane vinegar your first time, then experiment with sukang Iloco or coconut vinegar to see how the flavor shifts.
Sinigang: Building a Sour Soup
If adobo teaches you braising, sinigang teaches you how Filipinos use sourness as a central flavor. It’s a tamarind-based soup loaded with vegetables and pork, shrimp, or fish. Tamarind delivers a clean, fruity tang that brightens the broth without overpowering it, and tomatoes add a layer of mild acidity and depth underneath.
To make sinigang, start by boiling your protein (pork ribs are traditional) in water with quartered tomatoes and sliced onions until the meat is tender, about 45 minutes to an hour. Skim any foam that rises. Then add your souring agent. Fresh tamarind pods, simmered and strained, give the most complex flavor. Tamarind paste offers convenience and consistent sourness. Powdered sinigang mix, available at any Asian grocery store, gets you there in seconds and is what many Filipino households actually use on busy weeknights.
Once the broth is soured to your taste, add vegetables in stages based on how long they need to cook: radish and taro first, then string beans and eggplant, and leafy greens like water spinach (kangkong) last, just until wilted. Season with fish sauce rather than salt for a more rounded flavor.
The souring agent is where regional cooks get creative. Beyond tamarind, Filipino kitchens use guava for a sweeter, mellower sourness, bilimbi (kamias) for a sharp vinegar-like punch, green mango for bright tartness, pineapple for a fruity sweetness, and unripe santol (cotton fruit) for a subtle sour note. Each one creates a noticeably different soup from the same basic technique.
Making Sawsawan: The Dipping Sauces
Filipino meals almost always include a small dish of sawsawan, a dipping sauce mixed at the table to personal taste. The most common version combines soy sauce and vinegar: a quarter cup of soy sauce, two tablespoons of white vinegar, two tablespoons of water, a squeeze of calamansi juice (or lemon as a substitute), a pinch of sugar, and ground pepper. Into this you can stir diced tomato, diced red onion, and a few sliced bird’s eye chiles.
Toyomansi, the simplest sawsawan, is just soy sauce and calamansi juice, served alongside grilled fish or fried pork chops. Sukang may sili is plain vinegar with crushed chiles and garlic, the natural partner for fried dishes where you want acid and heat without extra saltiness. The point of sawsawan is customization. Every person at the table adjusts their own, and there’s no wrong combination.
Tips That Apply Across Dishes
Cook rice in a pot or rice cooker with a 1:1 ratio of rice to water (after rinsing the rice until the water runs mostly clear). Filipino meals are built around rice, and every saucy dish is meant to be spooned over it.
When a recipe calls for soy sauce, Filipino-brand soy sauce has a particular saltiness and sweetness that differs from Japanese or Chinese varieties. If you can find Silver Swan or Datu Puti at an Asian grocery store, grab them. Coconut aminos work as a substitute if you’re avoiding soy.
Don’t rush the browning. Whether it’s garlic in a gisa, pork belly in adobo, or shrimp paste for bagoong guisado, letting ingredients develop color in the pan is where much of Filipino food’s depth comes from. Low-and-slow braising and high-heat browning are the two techniques you’ll use most often.
Filipino cooking rewards tasting as you go. Sourness, saltiness, and sweetness are always in conversation with each other, and the right balance is the one that tastes right to you. Start with the ratios above, then adjust freely. That’s exactly how it’s done in Filipino kitchens.