35 Delicious Filipino Recipes You’ll Want to Make on Repeat

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. There’s no wrong way to “silog” — all you need is garlic fried rice and fried eggs.

These crispy Filipino egg rolls are filled with an aromatic pork filling, and served with your choice of dipping sauce. Try them with banana ketchup, sweet chili sauce, or vinegar and soy dipping sauce.

Kristina Razon's Mom-approved recipe will wow everyone at the table. Bonus: the skin is actually crispy! Because chicken adobo is simmered, you usually lose out on crispiness. Kristina solves this by broiling it quickly.

The words “halo-halo” translate to “mix-mix” because before you eat the treat, you mix everything up. This Filipino shaved ice dessert is layered with coconut, jackfruit, sweetened bananas, tapioca, nata de coco, and a scoop of coconut or ube ice cream.

Head-on prawns are cooked in an aromatic coconut broth infused with lemongrass, anchovies, ginger, and chiles. It includes two hallmarks of Bicolano cooking: The savory use of coconut milk and spicy heat.

This humble dish of ground beef and vegetables — also called giniling in the Philippines — comes together in a single skillet and is endlessly customizable. In the Philippines, like many dishes, this dish varies from family to family. Amelia Rampe shares the recipe her mom taught her.

A tamarind-based stew with shrimp, fish, and vegetables. This one ingredient makes it easy to have sinigang on a weeknight.

Boneless rib is marinated with citrusy calamansi and soy sauce and served with caramelized onions. As it cooks, the marinade and garlic simmer and thicken slightly, and the citrus, soy, and garlic sing brightly against the beef. It’s perfect with a bowl of rice.

No Filipino gathering is complete without our version of fruit salad — a creamy, luscious concoction that’s brimming with juicy fruit and drenched in sweetened condensed milk. When Kristina Razon was growing up, her mom brought this refreshing fruit salad to each and every birthday party, graduation, and holiday celebration.

Bola-bola can be served a number of ways. You can pile them onto a platter and serve them with an assortment of dipping sauces, like sweet chili sauce and spiced vinegar. Tuck them into pandesal (Filipino rolls) for lunch or in a rice bowl for dinner.

Pandesal (sometimes spelled pan de sal) is the most loved, most popular bread in the Philippines. This recipe is quite similar to Parker House rolls, but with a heartier crust on the bottom (similar to pan de suelo).

Homemade tocino is skewered, grilled, and served with a banana-peach BBQ glaze and shredded pickled vegetable condiment called atchara. The entire process — from the smells of the grilled skewers to the slight char on the tocino to finishing your bite with a tangy pinch of atchara — elicits all the emotions we hope you’ll always feel when you experience kamayan.

Palitaw is a sweet rice cake dish traditionally eaten as “merienda,” or a midday snack in the Philippines. These chewy rice cakes are showered with shredded coconut and filled with just the perfect amount of sweetness.

We love all types of lumpia, but this version is an all-time favorite. Shredded vegetables, shrimp, and Chinese sausage are wrapped in a crepe and topped with sweet soy sauce and peanuts.

Buko pandan is a refreshing fruit salad composed mainly of young coconut chunks, pandan-flavored jelly, and sweetened table cream. It's a true textural delight.

There are as many versions of adobo as there are the many regions and islands in the Philippine archipelago. Yana Gilbuena's version of chicken adobo is made with spiced vinegar, soy sauce, sugar, black peppercorns, and bay leaves.

There are few more perfect things than Filipino lechon kawali, or pork belly with a wonderfully crispy and browned skin. Sheldon Simeon serves it with a condiment of diced tomatoes, green onions, and white onions tossed with fish sauce and vinegar (he calls it “pinoy de gallo,” aka Filipino salsa), but a simple dipping sauce of chopped chiles and vinegar will also do the trick.

The ultimate Filipino comfort food. Although some places in the Philippines make lugaw with beef stock, tripe (Goto), or bouillon cubes, Amelia Rampe makes hers with chicken stock and bone-in chicken because the bones give off richer, more intense chicken flavor.

Dinamita, or dynamite lumpia, is a form of lumpia made with green chilies that are stuffed with an aromatic ground pork filling and cheese. The chile is wrapped in a lumpia wrapper, then fried until crispy. It’s reminiscent of a jalapeño popper, but with a light, crispy shell and a deeply savory filling.

A no-churn ice cream base rippled with fudgy, vibrant purple swirls made from white chocolate and fragrant ube extract. Kristina Razon loves to show off scoops of this eye-catching ice cream in glass bowls and shower it with toasted shredded coconut (a popular ube pairing) to serve to family and friends.

One of Amelia Rampe's favorite ways to have adobo that she didn’t grow up eating is adobo infused with coconut milk. There are coconuts all over the Philippines, and in this recipe coconut milk adds a luxurious texture to the broth.

An indigenous Filipino preparation of fish and seafood that involves "cooking" it in a mixture of calamansi and coconut vinegar and aromatics.

Every bite of these crispy fried shrimp and vegetable fritters features an eye-widening harmony of salty, tangy, crunchy flavors and textures. You can experiment with different types of vegetables, but Jen Phanomrat finds that root vegetables hold up best and stay crispier longer. She likes the combination of ube (purple yam), orange sweet potato, and carrots, along with red onion and scallion.

Gising-gising, which literally translates to “wake-up wake-up,” is packed with spice from chiles and deeply savory bagoong. It’s part of a family of dishes called ginataan, which translates to “food cooked in coconut milk.”

This Filipino sticky rice cake, which requires just four ingredients, is topped with a layer of homemade coconut caramel. The coconut caramel heavily relies on good-quality coconut milk, so use the richest one you can find.

This Filipino-Cajun po' boy consists of aromatic fork-tender lechon pork served on French rolls with lettuce, cucumber, and tomato salad. It’s easy to combine Filipino and Cajun flavors, considering the extensive history of Filipinos in Louisiana – Louisiana is the original settlement of Filipinos in America.

Bibingka — traditionally a cake made from glutinous rice flour, sugar, and coconut milk — is often known as a Christmas dish, but there’s no reason it shouldn’t be an everyday dish. These bite-sized ricotta bibingka are extra rich, thanks to evaporated milk, whole-milk ricotta cheese, cream cheese, and coconut milk.

This velvety bowl of slippery, creamy noodles — made with coconut milk, miso, and plenty of aromatics — satisfies my cravings for both cacio e pepe and pancit.

Ube, pronounced ooh-beh, has a natural, deep purple color and a flavor that's a mix between vanilla and pistachio. Here, it replaces chocolate in the classic crinkle cookie.

French toast made from lightly sweet pandesal is the star of this Filipino breakfast plate with longanisa and garlic fried rice.

Pandesal (or pan de sal), translates to “salt bread,” but it leans more sweet than salty with a soft texture and a golden, gently-crisped top.

A plant-based and gluten-free spin on ensaymada, the Filipino sweet bread typically enjoyed for breakfast.

Some of Molly Olis Krost's favorite childhood memories revolve around breakfast. Whenever she would visit her grandparents in the summer, one of the dishes she loved the most was her grandpa’s garlic fried rice. This recipe is a combination of two classic breakfasts: Filipino Tapsilog and Jewish Matzo Brei. The savory strips of beef with the oniony scrambled eggs is a winning combination.

Bibingka is a sweet, chewy Filipino dessert made with sweet rice flour and coconut. It has a rich, buttery, coconut flavor with the addictive textural combination of a crackly crust and eggy, chewy center.

The Instant Pot can get this chicken adobo dinner to the table in well under an hour.