Tocino

Everyone loves bacon, Tocino is a Filipino style of caramelized, sweet cured bacon. This dish is popular with +Silog breakfasts or brunch and typically served with garlic rice, salad and fried egg on the side. It’s a must have in our home!

What is Tocino

Tocino is a Spanish word for bacon. The Philippines love pork and tocino is one of the breakfast favourites eaten with fried eggs and garlic rice known as ‘Tocilog’ (toss-i-log). In the UK we also love pork and we eat bacon either as part of an English breakfast / fry up or in a sandwich / bacon butty. So similar concepts to +silog breakfast/brunch but with different types of meat or salted fish.

Tocino is normally cured for a few days but if you can’t wait that long like me you can marinate overnight too! But the longer you cure the pork the better and tender it will be.

The way tocino is cook, I think is pretty unique, you first boil it with some water then add oil to fry it until the sugar camarelised. (I’m literally drooling as I type this!)

Let’s talk ingredients

The meat – I used pork shoulder in this recipe but sometimes I use pork belly too. I like there’s a bit of fat with the meat. Of course you can use chicken too, I personally haven’t tried it with beef but I imagine that would be good too!

Tenderise it – pounding the meat for me was the quickest without using any additives to the meat.

Colour – to keep it natural I used annatto powder, you can use annatto oil too if you can’t find any powder. You can of course opt out with adding some colouring to your tocino. There may be other natural colouring products you can find but for me annatto is perfect.