Chef Tatung Sarthou’s ode to Philippine cuisine, Philippine Cookery: From Heart to Platter (ABS-CBN Publishing), was named “Best TV Chef Book Outside Europe” by the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards in Yantai, China.
“This is the first book, and certainly not the last of the celebrity chef. It is really good, interesting, useful and practical,” Edouard Cointreau, president of the jury for the Gourmand Awards, said of Chef Tatung’s book in a 2016 press release.
As one of the Philippines’ most sought after chefs, well known for his passion for Philippine cuisine and his many social and culinary advocacies, Chef Tatung also appears on the cooking segment of the ABS-CBN morning show Umagang Kay Ganda and was the host of the Lifestyle TV special The Food That We Are.
Chef Tatung delves into the heart of his native cuisine by showing how to cook Filipino through 10 fascinating chapters of the book. He teaches basic cooking methods—steaming, grilling, sautéing, frying, curing, among many techniques—as a way for readers to understand Philippine cuisine’s historical roots, and as a way to learn to cook it at home.
Featured are 71 recipes perfected from Chef Tatung’s many years of research around the country. These include basics like tinolang manok, kare-kare, adobong pusit, as well as more unusual fare like bulanglang, piyanggang, and pinaupong manok sa asin. Throughout, he explores important ingredients like vinegar, coconut, rice, as well as traditional kitchen tools like palayok or claypot, and bamboo tubes used for boiling. Chef Tatung frames his book with his own memories of cooking with his mother and grandmother, including a touching anecdote about how adobo saved his family during World War II.
Chef Tatung believes that in order to cook Filipino, one must cook out of love, honestly and simply, without pretension.
Philippine Cookery: From Heart to Platter is available at National Bookstore and FullyBooked branches for P595.
