Key Points
- Bulalo is a traditional Filipino dish made by simmering beef shanks and bone marrow.
- The secret to tender meat and a tasty broth is slow cooking.
- These days, Filipinos also prefer to add vegetable to their bulalo.
Listen to the podcast
Kuwentong Palayok: Nilalamig ka ba? Tara humigop tayo ng sabaw ng bulalo.
SBS Filipino
26/07/202418:50
Hearty and soul-warming, bulalo is a traditional Filipino dish made by simmering beef shanks and bone marrow. It takes its name from the Tagalog word 'bula', which means marrow in English.
The late Doreen Fernandez, writer, critic, and cultural historian, wrote about bulalo: “Certainly one of the most famous of the many nilaga of our culture is bulalo in which the skill consists of boiling the kneecap and all its cartilaginous succulences and little else but water, pepper and salt.”
The ideal result is golden broth into which one cuts some of the meat, scrapes off some of the cartilage and other soft parts, and drops some of the bone marrow dug out from the bone.From the writings of Doreen Fernandez, food critic and cultural historian
Where did bulalo come from? While its exact origins remain uncertain, one thing is clear: Batangas, the cattle trading capital of Luzon, is best recognised for its exceptional bulalo.
“The traditional Batangas bulalo has no vegetables,” shared Chef Miguel Vargas, one of the founders of Uling: The Charcoal Project.
The qualities of the dish take after the beef and letting all its deep flavours come out.
The secret to a great-tasting bulalo is the slow cooking. You boil it for three to four hours at least until the meat falls off the bone.Chef Miguel Vargas, Founder of 'Uling: The Charcoal Project'
“Slow cooking brings out the flavours of the buto-buto (bones) instead of pressure cooking. So it’s really in the slow method.”
Vargas also shared a secret that authentic and original Batangueno bulalo cooks shared with him– that of adding sibot to the broth. Sibot is a herbal combination of Chinese herbal spices that can be bought in small packets from the palengke (market).
These days, Filipinos also prefer to add vegetable to their bulalo, such as Baguio pechay or repolyo (cabbage.) In case this is not readily available in Australia, Vargas suggested using bok choy. You can also add spinach. Some Filipinos like to add corn and at times, even saging na saba, too.
Of course, the Filipino bulalo experience is not complete without some rice, and sawsawan (sauce) made from like patis (Filipino fish sauce), calamansi (Filipino citrus fruit), and siling labuyo (chilis), or toyo (soy sauce) and calamansi. The perfect bulalo bite consists of putting everything together in one bite, and of course, it’s crucial to partake in bulalo while it’s still very hot.
One can learn a lot from bulalo, which, coincidentally, is one of the oldest Filipino dishes, perhaps even pre-colonial. Filipinos first learned to boil and simmer food.
“Only much later did we learn how to saute (Spanish), fry (Chinese), [and] to bake (American),” Fernandez wrote in her book, Tikim: Essays on Filipino Food and Culture.
Bulalo is a testament, even in our fast-paced modern lives, to the importance of taking things slow. It reminds us to allow things simmer at their own pace, allowing time to savour the finest things in life—like a piping hot bowl of bulalo soup.
