Pinakbet Ilocano — Vegetables in Fermented Fish Sauce

Name: Pinakbet Ilocano — Vegetables in Fermented Fish Sauce
Total time: 50 min
Yield: 4
Cuisine: Filipino
Ingredients: 4 Round eggplants, halved; 2 Small bitter melon (ampalaya), quartered; 0.5 bundle String beans, cut into 5 cm pieces; 1 Sweet potato (kamote), quartered; 8 Okra; 1 Tomato, cubed; 1 Onion, cubed; 360 ml (1.5 cups) Water; 450 g (1 lb) Bagnet (crispy pork belly); 60 ml (1/4 cup) Fermented anchovy sauce (bagoong isda)

A whole pot of vegetables cooked in almost nothing but fermented fish sauce and their own liquid — no oil, no stock, no browning. Layered hardest-first and left alone until everything shrinks down, which is exactly what the name describes.

Pinagmulan

Recipe ni Vanjo Merano · 📱 Influencer · Vanjo Merano — Filipino food writer behind Panlasang Pinoy, the largest Filipino recipe site

Ang pangalan ng mga nagluluto at creator ay nakalagay bilang pagkilala sa pinagmulan lamang. Malaya ang More Recipes Please at walang kaugnayan, pag-endorso o sponsorship mula sa kanila.

Panlasang Pinoy (Vanjo Merano) — Vanjo Merano's published Ilocano version. The name comes from Ilocano 'pinakebbet', from 'kebbet' meaning shrivelled — a literal description of what the vegetables do in the pot. Calories are omitted: the source's 58 kcal figure plainly does not account for the 450 g of pork in the same recipe.

Nagluto: Vanjo Merano

Panoorin habang niluluto · 3 na video

Vanjo Merano Cookbang Chronicles PH Romulo's Kitchen & Garden

⏱ 50 min🍽 4 na serving🇵🇭 Philippines

Walang glutenWalang gatas

Mga hakbang

Bring the water to a boil in a wide, heavy pan.
Stir in the bagoong and bring it back to a boil.
💡 Boiling the bagoong first mellows it considerably. Straight from the jar it is fiercely pungent; two minutes at a boil turns that into deep savouriness.
Layer the vegetables in, hardest first: sweet potato, then okra, bitter melon, eggplant, string beans, and finally the tomato and onion on top. Simmer for 15 minutes.
💡 Layer, do not stir. The vegetables at the bottom sit in the liquid and boil; the ones on top steam. That is the whole design, and stirring collapses it into a single mush.
Add the bagnet and simmer for 5 minutes more.
Give the pot one gentle turn to combine, and serve hot with steamed rice.
💡 One turn at the end, not throughout. By then the vegetables are tender enough that a single fold distributes the sauce without destroying their shape.

💡 Mga tip

The bitterness of the ampalaya is the point, not a flaw. If it is too much for you the first time, salt the cut pieces for 10 minutes and rinse them — but do not leave it out entirely, because the dish is built around that bitterness against the salty bagoong.
Bagoong is strong-smelling while it cooks. Open a window — it is a smell, not a warning, and the finished dish tastes nothing like it smells at the two-minute mark.
Without the pork this is a genuinely light, oil-free vegetable pot — but it stays non-vegetarian, because bagoong is fermented fish. There is no substitute that gives the same result.