Silog Breakfasts Are Great!

Filipino breakfasts are wonderful! They’re called “silog sets” or “silogs,” and they’re enough like American breakfasts they can slip right into Americans’ breakfast menus like a sunny-side-up egg off a greased rubber spatula.

Tapsilog: Filipino steak 'n eggs with garlic fried rice. Note the spicy-vinegar dipping sauce.

I’ve never eaten this stuff at a restaurant; I’ve only followed recipes and watched videos, but I think I’ve got the idea. In fact, I think it’s understood that everyone has her own way of making a silog breakfast, so there’s not any official way to do it . . . although for you there might be a perfect way of making it.

If you’ve never heard of a silog breakfast, or never seen it at a restaurant, then that’s only temporary. People in American coastal cities are catching on to this wave, big-time, so those of us here in the Midwest mid-sized cities will soon see it at our restaurants in the next decade or two! . . . But you don’t want to wait for a Pinoy food truck to come park on your Main Street.

My silog-set explorations come from a lovely, huge cookbook about breakfasts entitled Breakfast: The Cookbook, by Emily Elyse Miller. It’s one of those huge Phaidon cookbook compendiums: “the only book about _____ you’ll ever need.” In this case, it’s a huge collection of breakfast recipes from around the world. Like, almost everyone on Earth tends to have eggs for breakfast, but there’s a big difference between American sunny-side-up eggs, artfully folded, lightly sweetened Japanese tamago, Iranian scrambled eggs with dates and turmeric, and veggie-packed Korean omelet sandwiches. And guess what? They’re all delicious! . . . Same goes for porridge, toasts, sweet rolls, meats, and so on.

Back to the breakfast style in question. A “silog” is a Filipino combo-breakfast. You know how traditional American breakfasts have eggs (“how you want that cooked, sweetie?”), hashbrowns (or grits—a starch), and your choice of meat: bacon, ham, or sausage? And you can ask for a bottle of Tabasco to spice it up? Well, a “silog” is about the same thing, only it’s egg (usually sunny-side-up, but it’s your breakfast and your choice), a quick-cooking meat (thin-sliced, marinated, cooked steak; homemade longanisa sausage; fried sweet-cured pork; fried Spam; etc.), and garlic fried rice. To jazz it up, there’s a dipping sauce or garnish called sinamak, a spicy vinegar with ginger, garlic, onion, chilis, and black peppercorns (it varies with region and what you like; you can buy it at an international store, but it’s super easy to make on your own, and it lasts a long time).

(I love these kinds of cultural parallels. It’s like when I realized that both Korea and Germany have (a) a history as a divided nation, (b) powerful industrial economies, (c) a huge love of beer, of fatty meats, and of singing, and (d) fermented cabbage as a national dish.)

Anyway, the name of each version of the Filipino breakfast meal changes as the protein changes. The rice and egg are the constants, so the term “silog” is a contraction for sinangag (the garlic fried rice) and itlog (egg). Then, the first part of the meat-name is tacked to the front:

• Tapa (beef): Tapsilog
• Longganisa (sweet and/or garlicky pork sausage): Longsilog
• Tocino (sweet, meaty, fried cured pork): Tocilog
• Spam (yes, from the can): Spamsilog
• Bacon: Bacsilog

Why not also turksilog (turkey), chicksilog, hamsilog, and so on? Indeed, they really do stuff like this. There’s even a hotsilog (you guessed, it, with hotdog). I think “kielbasilog” would be good.

Here’s the fun part: it’s all easy to make from scratch, using ingredients readily available at any standard American grocery store. Ginger, soy sauce, and sesame oil are the most unusual ingredients, unless you also count good white rice as an unusual ingredient, too.

Here’s the part that makes it especially perfect for breakfast: you can do most of the work the day before. The meat is prepped and marinated well ahead of time (or if you make your own Filipino sausage, then you can do up a big batch, freeze it, and use it here and there as you wish). Or, just use whatever meat is leftover. And the fried rice, like fried rice everywhere, uses leftover rice—such as leftover rice from Chinese takeout.

Sinangag: Filipino garlic fried rice.

The only real prep work is peeling and mincing garlic right before you fry the rice, though I bet a lot of people will just use minced garlic from a jar.

Breakfast-making needs to be simple, you know? You’re staggering around, you’re in a hurry, you haven’t had your coffee yet . . . (Please, please read this essay about breakfast by my beloved John Thorne. This one, too.)

I’ve found that I can use the same nonstick wok for all of it: cooking the garlic fried rice first, putting it in the oven to stay warm beside the serving plates; then cooking the meat and putting it in the oven, too; then rinsing or wiping the pan and doing the fried eggs. Ta-da!

Cooking tapa.

It’s a really tasty breakfast. It seems less heavy and salty than the traditional American breakfast. The garlic makes the whole house smell delicious. The runny yolk of the fried egg is a creamy dressing for the rice and the meat, and the meat and its juices dress the rice and the egg. The spicy vinegar dresses and brightens everything with ginger-black-pepper-pickled-onion flavor.

Tapa is thin-sliced steak cooked in a delicious marinade.

It's a lot like teriyaki beef.

Oh, I forgot to garnish my plate with anything fresh, like sliced tomato or cucumber, but yeah, you can do that, too, if you can think to do it before the rest is done. Because once this food is ready, it’s definitely time for breakfast!

I’m not gonna give you any recipes here, since I’m still in the phase of tweaking the recipes like I want. (Like, my cookbook calls for “sugar” in the tapa marinade, but I’ve decided to use “brown sugar.”) There are plenty of places to find recipes online (here’s a good one that introduces basic techniques for the big three meat choices, though you can find much simpler and perfectly fine recipes elsewhere; and this one has good commentary on the garlic fried rice), plus, again, that highly recommended, highly entertaining breakfast cookbook I told you about; it has good basic recipes, enough to get you started.