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"How vinegar has given Filipino food a sour kick for centuries, from adobo to dipping sauce"
Cooks in the Philippines have used the ‘ingredient of 2026’ to bring out complexity in dishes long before the condiment started trending
Tribune News Service Published: 12:45pm, 6 Mar 2026
https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/food-drink/article/3345360/how-vinegar-has-given-filipino-food-sour-kick-centuries-adobo-dipping-sauce
Named the “ingredient of the year” for 2026 by The New York Times, vinegar can have many uses and personalities far beyond its generic role in a salad dressing or as a decorative balsamic reduction.
You can use a splash as a finish to lentil soup or chilli to add depth. Some bartenders throw it into mocktails. Some folks use raw vinegar for its supposed health benefits. It can even be lightly sprayed onto cookies.
Long before its current moment in the spotlight, Filipinos used vinegar as an integral element in their cooking.
Chef Rafael Vencio, who was born in Quezon City in the Philippines, points out that Filipinos use a variety of sources to achieve that acidic hit.
“Filipinos have a deep love for three main flavour profiles, particularly sweet, salty and sour,” says Vencio, who is slated to open his Filipino restaurant, AmBoy, in Pittsburgh, in late spring.
“Sour is just ingrained in our palate.”
Filipinos use not only vinegars from different sources but also underripe fruits, such as tamarind, to add acidity.
Some will make their own condiments to add to foods, Vencio says, usually using some type of vinegar.
Filipino vinegar can be made from cane, coconut or palm. The type employed depends largely on regional custom and personal taste.
Spanish colonisers expanded the Philippines’ indigenous sugar cane plantations, and sugar cane remains an economically significant crop in the country.
Cane vinegar is the most common type used.
For their condiment or dipping sauce – called sukang sawsawan – Filipinos up the acid ante by adding the native citrus fruit calamansi, also known as a Philippine lemon.
Fish sauce, soy sauce, garlic, peppercorns, onion and chillies are also common components.
“Essentially, what we do is we’re compounding acidity,” Vencio says. “That’s how we make the sour flavour profile more robust and more complex.”
Personal condiments are used to adapt all types of dishes, but especially seafood. They can be a dipping sauce for crab, for instance, or fried fish or pork.
Pittsburgh-based Kimberley Ashlee Haugh, of Kimberley Ashlee & Co catering, calls Filipino cooking “the original fusion cuisine” because it integrates influences from Chinese, Spanish, Indo-Malay and American cultures.
However, adobo, considered the unofficial Filipino national dish, is uniquely Filipino and has indigenous roots.
Although the name comes from the Spanish word adobar, meaning “to marinate”, the dish – chicken or pork braised in vinegar – predates the arrival of Spanish colonisers.
Vinegar is essential to adobo, Vencio says. “It’s not noticeable, but it’s there.”
With cooking, vinegar’s sharpness mellows. Vencio says vinegar’s role in the dish was partly to preserve the meat, especially back in times when refrigeration was not available. It also balances adobo’s saltiness.
Cane vinegar, which Haugh describes as “clean” and “bright”, is most commonly used for adobo, as well as for a dish called paksiw, fish or pork cooked in a sour-and-savoury broth containing vinegar.
Coconut vinegar – which can be made from fermented coconut juice, sap or blossoms – is “softer” and “rounder” than cane vinegar, Haugh says, and is traditionally used often in the southern Philippines.
Haugh recalls a vinegar drink her grandmother made, both to quench thirst and aid digestion. Haugh compares it to the apple cider vinegar craze in the US or to Filipino-style kombucha.
“I remember my grandmother, when she would have these vinegar drinks, you would put things in it like green mango, pineapple or guava,” Haugh says, “and you would mix it with a little bit of water and sugar.”
Cane or coconut vinegar is used to make a Filipino ceviche, called kinilaw; fish is “cooked” in vinegar rather than Latin-style citrus. It is often mixed with calamansi, ginger, chilli and coconut milk.
Haugh describes palm vinegar as “earthy”, adding that it has “a subtle sweetness”.
Calamansi is a citrus fruit native to the Philippines that often accompanies vinegar in Filipino dishes.
As someone who grew up in Toronto, Canada, slightly ashamed of bringing her aromatic Filipino lunches to school, Haugh finds it gratifying that Filipino cuisine is finding acceptance.
“If you were to tell the 10-year-old me that Filipino food would actually be something that people are interested in, I wouldn’t have believed it,” she says.
Her ultimate moment of sharing Filipino cuisine with an American audience came at a charity dinner for the O’Noir Foundation – which helps young homeless and displaced LGBTQ people – featuring chefs cooking black-coloured food.
She decided to make one of her favourite dishes, dinuguan, featuring various cuts of pork stewed in pig’s blood and vinegar, among other ingredients.
“I was like, ‘I’m going to do it. I’m going to go for it. I’m going to serve a bunch of non-Filipinos a stew made of pig, cooked in pig’s blood with a splash of vinegar,’” she says.
The 10-year-old Haugh would have been amazed.
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