Kinilaw


Kinilaw, also referred to as Philippine ceviche, is a raw seafood dish and preparation method native to the Philippines, similar to the Latin American dish ceviche, carried from the islands by the Manila Galleon to Guam, Mexico, Peru, and Spain during the colonial period. It is more accurately a cooking process that relies on vinegar and/or acidic fruit juices to denature the ingredients, rather than a dish, as it can also be used to prepare meat and vegetables.
kilawin is a meat-based preparation method quite similar but not the same as kinilaw. It is more common in the northern Philippines and use blanched and lightly grilled meat. Kinilaw dishes are usually eaten as appetizers before a meal, or as finger food with alcoholic drinks.

Description

The most common kinilaw dish is kinilaw na isda prepared using raw cubed fish mixed with vinegar as the primary denaturing agent; along with a souring agent to enhance the tartness like calamansi, dayap, biasong, kamias, tamarind, green mangoes, balimbing, and green sineguelas. It is flavored with salt and spices like black pepper, ginger, onions, and chili peppers. An average serving of fish kinilaw contains just 147 calories.
To neutralize the fishy taste and the acidity before serving, juice extracts from the grated flesh of tabon-tabon fruits, dungon fruits, or immature small young coconuts are also commonly added. Extracts from the bark scrapings of sineguelas or bakawan trees are also used similarly. Some regional variants also add gatâ, sugar, or even soft drinks to reduce the sourness.
Popular kinds of fish used in kinilaw include tanigue or tangigue, malasugi, tambakol, bangus, and anchovies.

Kilawin

Variants predominantly from the northern Philippines use meat, including goat meat, beef, carabao, pork, and chicken. Unlike fish kinilaw, meat kilawin are not eaten raw but are cooked by boiling or grilling or both. They are usually done rare to medium rare, though in some cases the meat are fully cooked. Meat-based kilawin are also traditionally eaten with papaít, usually the bile extracted from the gall bladder or by squishing the chewed grass in an animal's stomach.
Seafood used in kinilaw must be fresh and properly cleaned, as there are health hazards involved with consuming raw seafood; in kilawin the partly cooked meat has to be fresh and properly cleaned as well.

Other seafood

Other ingredients that can be used to make kinilaw include shrimp, squid, clams, oysters, crabs, sea urchin roe, seaweed, jellyfish, shipworms or even beetle larvae, among others. They vary in terms of preparation, depending on the ingredients, from raw to fully cooked. For example, shrimp are prepared raw, while squid needs to be blanched first to tenderize the flesh.

Salads

Kinilaw also refers to dishes using raw fruits and vegetables marinated in vinegar and spices, in which case the dishes are sometimes referred to by the Spanish term ensalada. Examples include cucumbers, bitter melons, young sweet potato leaves, young papaya, vegetable ferns, and banana flowers.

History

Kinilaw is native to the Philippines. The Balangay archaeological excavation site in Butuan has uncovered remains of halved tabon-tabon fruits and fish bones cut in a manner suggesting that they were cubed, thus indicating that the cooking process is at least a thousand years old. It was also described by Spanish colonists and explorers to the Philippines, with the earliest mention being in the Vocabulario de la lengua tagala as cqinicqilao and cquilao, a Hispanicized spelling of the Visayan verb kilaw, and a cognate of the adjective hilaw. Other sources that mention it include the Vocabulario de la lengua Pampanga en romance as quilao; and in the 1754 edition of Vocabulario de la lengua tagala as quilauin.
Unlike Latin American ceviches, which exclusively use citrus juices, kinilaw instead primarily uses vinegar in addition to citrus, and other acidic fruit juices.

Regional names and variants

Some of the oldest surviving kinilaw variants are from the southern Visayas and Northern Mindanao, like Cagayan de Oro's kinilaw and Dumaguete's binakhaw. Both are direct descendants of ancient Visayan preparation methods as displayed in the Butuan archeological finds. These are the original versions that use tabon-tabon and dungon fruits respectively.
Several regions of the Philippines have local specialties or names of kinilaw dishes. In the northern Philippines, the Ivatan people of the Batanes islands refer to kinilaw as lataven. Ivatan fish kinilaw is known as lataven a among. In Ilocos, the Ilocano kilawin kalding or kilawen specifically refers to lightly grilled goat meat kinilaw. Among the Kapampangan people of Pampanga, quilain or quilain babi refers to kinilaw that use fully cooked pork, heart, liver, and tripe. A similar dish among the Caviteño Tagalogs uses fully boiled pork ears, and is known as kulao or kilawin na tainga ng baboy. When mixed with fried tokwa cubes, kulao becomes the more familiar dish tokwa't baboy. Modern variants of this dish use soy sauce in addition to the other ingredients.
In the southern Philippines, the Tausug people of the Sulu islands refer to fish kinilaw as lawal. Unlike other kinilaw dishes, lawal only uses vinegar to wash the fish, and primarily relies on citrus fruits and other souring agents to denature the fish meat. Among the Maranao people of southwestern Mindanao, biyaring is a type of kinilaw made with tiny shrimp. It is a regional favorite and is notable because it is ideally prepared while the shrimp are still alive. Among the Sama-Bajau people, it is known as kilau or kinilau and sometimes includes unripe mangoes as a souring agent.
A common way of serving kinilaw in the islands of Visayas and Mindanao is sinuglaw, which combines fish kinilaw and charcoal-grilled pork belly.