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.

Fonte

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

I nomi di cuochi e creator compaiono solo come indicazione della fonte. More Recipes Please è indipendente e non è affiliata, approvata né sponsorizzata da loro.

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.

Cuoco: Vanjo Merano

Watch it being made · 3 videos

Vanjo Merano Cookbang Chronicles PH Romulo's Kitchen & Garden

⏱ 50 min🍽 4 porzioni🇵🇭 Filippine

Senza glutineSenza latticini

Passaggi

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.

💡 Consigli

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.