In the Philippines breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and if you travel there you’ll see there are breakfast offerings everywhere you go. While foods like pandesal or taho (soft tofu with tapioca pearls and brown sugar syrup) are popular, more often than not breakfast includes some sort of rice. Sometimes its sweet, like kakanin or champorado (chocolate glutinous rice porridge), and other times it’s savory, like lugaw, and my personal favorite, sinangag.
What Is Sinangag?
In Tagalog, sinangag translates to “garlic fried rice,” and it’s exactly as it sounds: rice fried with a generous amount of garlic, salt, and pepper. Sinangag is often combined with itlog, meaning “egg,” creating the popular Filipino breakfast silog.
In the Philippines, silog is often served with a protein, the name of which will precede the word itlog in the title of the recipe. For example, if you serve spam with sinangag and itlog, you’d call it “spamsilog.” Silog served with tocino (sweet and savory pork) is called “tocilog,” while silog served with longanisa (sweet and savory sausage) is called “longsilog.” Bangus (bang-oos), or milkfish, is a popular fish eaten in the Philippines, and when served with silog, it’s called “bangsilog.”
How to Make Sinangag
Because the heart of silog is the garlic fried rice, that’s what I’ll be teaching you how to make here. It’s incredibly simple, and if you have leftover rice, it only takes a few minutes to prepare.
You’ll start by prepping the garlic: Slice 4 cloves and mince 4 cloves. Then, season cold leftover jasmine rice with the minced garlic, kosher salt, and black pepper. (You can also use leftover sushi rice, but know the end result will have sticky clumps). I usually spread the rice onto a large baking sheet to evenly season it, but you can also accomplish this in a large mixing bowl. Seasoning the rice is necessary to let all those garlic flavors shine!
Next, sauté the garlic slices in a splash of canola oil until the edges begin to turn golden, stirring often to scent the oil. Add more oil and the seasoned rice to the skillet and toss until the rice is evenly coated in garlic oil. Spread the rice across the surface of the skillet and cook until a crust forms. Most of the garlic should be golden-brown to deep golden-brown, and the rice will have deep delicious garlic flavor. If you don’t like crispy rice bits in your fried rice you can skip this step, but in my opinion this is the very best part. Serve with your favorite protein and fried eggs.
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