photo courtesy of Young Can Cook

A typical Filipino breakfast consists of two fried eggs, garlic-fried rice and some kind of crispy-fried meat: bacon, tocino, longanisa, ham, corned beef, fried corned beef hash, Vienna sausage, kielbasa, Spam, hot dog, hell, even a slice of bologna if there isn’t anything else. But my favorite out of all these meats will have to be, hands down, TAPA.

Tapa, or in Tagalog, tapang baka,  is a very thin, fatty cut of beef that has been marinated in a pungent mix of vinegar, garlic, sugar and salt and pepper for 1-2 days, then fried until it’s practically burnt (well, that’s the way I like to eat it, at least). Then, you use the drippings and crispy bits from the pan to fry your rice. It’s heaven.

Tapsilog is a combo of the Tagalog words sinanag (fried rice), etlog (egg) and of course, tapa. It’s a pretty heavy breakfast, but that’s how Flips roll.

Recipe:

1/2 c vinegar
1 tsp sugar
dash of soy sauce
lots of black pepper
salt
2 lbs fatty sirloin, cut into strips
4 cloves garlic, minced

Pound out the sirloin until you can’t pound it anymore, mix the rest of the ingredients together, put it in an airtight bowl. Marinate for 1-2 days, then fry the living shit out of it, until there’s no more liquid/oil in the pan.

Now, alternatively, if you use fatty cuts of pork shoulder, you have something completely different: salmuera (a Spanish word for brine). Use the same recipe, adding 1 tbs salt and a bit more garlic to cure the meat and marinate for two days.  To cook, pat the meat dry of all the brine, dip in flour, and fry until crisp.