#tsampurado

[dailyrice]

Champorado or tsampurado (Filipino sweet chocolate rice porridge)

[cookingwithkuya]

Tsampurado at tapa

There was a lady that used to spend her mornings selling warm, comforting cups of arroz con leche right by our NQ subway stop in Astoria during the winter. I haven’t seen her yet this year and I’ve craving a nice cup of this rice pudding. This brings me to the subject of this post.

I’ve been on a Mexican food kick lately – probably homesick for Los Angeles – and I’ve started to explore overlaps between Filipino and Mexican food. You certainly have ingredients that made the trans-Pacific trek along the Spanish trading routes. A New World crop, tomatoes, sautéed with garlic and onion forms the base of many basic Filipino recipes. Avocado, chocolate, chayote – the list goes on. But generally speaking, entire dishes didn’t come over, the one exception that comes to mind being chicken pipian.

Anyway, what does this have to do with rice pudding? Well, rice was brought to the New World from Asia, and chocolate came the other way. So what do we see on both sides of the Pacific but a combination of these two ingredients? That’s right, chocolate rice pudding. In Mexico, it’s called arroz con chocolate but Filipinos use the word tsampurado, derived from and pronounced like the Mexican word for hot chocolate thickened with corn, champorrado

Tsampurado is a breakfast food that traces its roots back to Chinese congee (rice porridge) with the New World addition of chocolate to make it rich and sweet. So it’s sort of like Cocoa Pebbles crossed with rice pudding crossed with oatmeal. To make it, I cooked glutinous (sticky) white rice with sugar, water and milk. Then I added some melted tablea; I was fortunate to be able to add this extra layer of authenticity to my tsampurado. Tablea are raw “tablets” of dark chocolate, and I happened to get these as a pasalubong by friends returning from the Philippines.

The traditional accompaniment to tsampurado is tuyo, salted dried herring that have been fried. It’s that sweet and salty combination that really brings this together. It was rare for us to have this combination growing up, but whenever we did, I really loved it. Just one challenge. While it tastes great, tuyo stinks and the stench lingers. For a while. Everywhere. So I went with another salty alternative – tapa.

Tapa is not the same as or even similar to Spanish tapas. They have no connection to each other. The word tapa is derived from the Sanskrit tapas, which means “heat”. Tapa is a preservation method – it’s salted, sundried, cured meat. Traditionally, tapa is made with beef or venison. The key is that the meat has to be lean, which helps reduce the chances of the meat going rancid during the preservation process. In this way, it is a lot less like the cured or aged meats – which use cold air-drying – and more like beef jerky – which uses warm air-drying. Here I used top sirloin, thinly sliced by the butcher, with as much of the fat trimmed off as possible. Then I salted it and left it covered in the refrigerator overnight to start the drying process. The salt starts to pull out moisture from the beef. The next day, I put the meat on a wire rack in a very low oven (200 degrees Farenheit), until the meat dried out. Then I flash-fried them. The meat came out a bit crumbly, rather than the chewy I was going for. I think I dried them out a bit too much. There is a more adventurous and traditional alternative, which my mother-in-law used (on our New York balcony, no less). This involves seasoning the meat with soy sauce and garlic, then drying the meat out in the sun for a few hours. You’ll have to create a rig for this – a wire rack over a baking tray, all covered in a netting to keep bugs and flies, with the netting “tented” over the meat. Hard to describe, I should have taken a picture. Anyway, once the meat is dry, you can fry it right away or freeze it for later use. The result using this method is wonderful – chewy, a bit gamey, with some of the nuttiness you get from a great dry-aged steak. But for this dish, my flawed tapa was what I had.

(And I won't talk about that longganisa I tried to make during that same meat-curing weekend.)

Since I had people over for dinner, I served the tsampurado in bowls with the tapa on the side. But just for the picture below, I imagined the dish as a unique dessert or even as a starter course. Tsampurado in a single Chinese soup spoon, topped with a bit of coconut milk and a shard of tapa. As a cool little touch, I used another friend’s pasalubong, artisanal Filipino chocolates infused with chili (siling labuyo), which I grated over the top and onto the supporting plate to give it some visual interest.

[astigvegan]

Tsampurado Time!