Sisig (Chopped Pork on a Sizzling Plate)

Variations

• With mayonnaise: the Manila restaurant style, drizzled in a lattice. It is not in the Pampanga original, but it is now the commonest form, used instead of the egg or alongside it.
• Bangus, tofu or squid sisig: made with milkfish, tofu or squid. There is no collagen, so the boiling stage disappears and what is left is the chopping and the plate — which shows neatly that "sisig" names a format rather than an ingredient.
• Without a sizzling plate: a small cast-iron pan heated for ten minutes does it. A stainless pan holds no heat and cools the instant the food lands, and pressing it down will not crisp anything.
• If you cannot get head cuts: pork belly and pig's ears alone work. Drop the ears and there is not enough gelatine, and what you have is chopped fried pork belly.
• The name originally meant sourness: the 1732 Kapampangan dictionary of Diego Bergaño defines sisig as a salad of green papaya or guava dressed with salt, pepper, garlic and vinegar. The pig's-head version came out of Angeles, Pampanga, near Clark Air Base during the American period, where locals could buy cheaply the cuts the airmen would not eat. Serving it on a heated cast-iron plate was introduced by Lucia Cunanan, "Aling Lucing".

Tips

• The three applications of heat each do something the others cannot. Boil, grill, plate. Boiling converts collagen to gelatine (braising). Grilling does what boiling cannot: in water the surface temperature stalls at 100°C and no browning happens, and charcoal drives that surface water off and takes it past (browning and Maillard). Drop either one and you get meat that is tender and tastes of nothing, or meat that smells good and cannot be chewed.
• The plate is equipment, not crockery. Two other hot vessels appear on this site and both do a different job. Gyukatsu hands the diner a hot stone to sear a cut face for ten or twenty seconds and raise the doneness; the dolsot in bibimbap crisps rice against the bowl. Sisig's plate fries an already-cooked dish from below only, so one plate arrives with a crisp side and a soft side. That is why pressing it flat is a cooking step.
• The egg cooks on the plate's stored heat. Cast iron holds heat for a long time. What onsen tamago does with the heat capacity of water, this does with metal — the dish is designed to go on cooking after it leaves the stove.
• Chop it, do not mince it. Skin through a grinder binds into a paste; chopped, the gelatine scatters between the pieces of meat. About 5mm, and it does not need to be even (knife skills).
• Calamansi last. The acid is what cuts the fat, and left on a hot plate it simply goes (balancing flavour).
• It is a very rich dish. Skin, fat, butter and crackling stack up. That is why the Philippines eats it as pulutan, food for drinking, and why the acid and the heat are dialled in at the table by each person.