Sidcor Sunday Market

I finally got to visit the Sidcor Sunday Market last week. The Sidcor market is arguably one of the biggest in Metro Manila. Oddly enough, it was previously located at the vast grounds of a hospital, the Philippine Lung Center, until it moved to its new and more appropriate home at the Eton Centris in Quezon City. The Eton Centris is a complex that houses a mammoth business process outsourcing center, rows of restaurants and a strip mall. It's conveniently located right next to a metro railway station that assures it of brisk business. Behind the buildings is a huge paved lot where the Sidcor market sets up every Sunday. It's best if I share my story in pictures. Warning, for Filipino readers who live abroad, some of the pictures could make you crave for food which may be unavailable to you! :) (You can click on the photos to enlarge.)



At the Eton Centris complex. Those are not satellite dishes at the background but "space-age" pergolas. 



Very clean and green restrooms.



The market had a good selection of stalls. Here's one that sold bath and body products.

Several stalls offered prepared food that you could eat at the dining area or that you could order to go.

All sorts of neatly wrapped native rice cakes.

 Bibingka rice cakes were baking away inside these charcoal-heated clay pots. Bibingka batter is a mixture of rice flour, sugar, eggs and milk. It's quite similar to pancakes except that the rice flour (of the galapong variety) makes for slightly springy and chewy cakes. The bibingka batter is then mixed with sliced salted duck eggs and kesong puti (white cheese made from carabao's milk which is very similar in texture and taste to ricotta) and then poured onto clay bowls lined with banana leaves. The clay bowls are then heated underneath and on top with charcoal as you can see above.  It cannot get any more old school than that! :)

My delicious bibingka served with freshly grated coconut! Not contented with the slivers of egg and kesong puti in the cake, I purchased one whole salted organic duck egg and more kesong puti which I topped my bibingka with. It tasted DIVINE! Salty and sweet binge, all in one cake. Sigh :)

Bibingka is almost always sold alongside another Filipino favorite, the puto bumbong. Puto bumbong is a dessert made of ground sticky rice, water and muscovado sugar.  The purple color is derived from food coloring and not from purple yams as I originally thought.  In this photo, the rice mixture is being loaded onto bamboo tubes for steaming.

Here's a photo of the bamboo tubes steaming away.

After steaming, the pleasantly chewy  puto bumbong were extracted from the tubes, laid onto banana leaves and then slathered with butter. It was sold with freshly grated coconut and muscovado sugar on the side. Simple but delicious!

Roasted calf was also being sold. It was too early in the day for this but I was sorely tempted to buy a sizzling plate-full of the roasted calf. 

Stuffed crabs, freshwater snails and noodles. Check out the tablecloth. It may look like newspaper but it was actually oilcloth! I love it! Anybody know where I can get these? I should've asked the stall owner.

The famous Ilocos empanada! This is a regional specialty of the Ilocos province which is 400 km north of Metro Manila. The shell is made of rice flour, water and oil. The yellow-orange color is from achuete or annatto seed. There were only three ingredients inside the empanada - raw grated papaya, garlicky Vigan longganisa (a sausage from Vigan City in the Ilocos province) and a raw egg. I'm not sure if the empanadas actually made in Ilocos have other ingredients in them.

The shell was then folded up and deep fried.

After deep frying, the empanada was left to drain and cool down a bit. This was a key step to ensure crispness of the shell.

The empanada was then ready to be eaten with dashes of native palm vinegar. Here's a photo of the cross-section of my empanada. See how creamy the egg turned out! This was really THE BEST! I want one now :-(

Native chicken eggs, organic salted duck eggs, bottled vinegar and packs of greaseless roasted peanuts.

It's avocado season! :)

There were so many other stalls at the market which I didn't get to take photos of - seafood, meat, garden plants, clothes, shoes, ceramics, toys and so many others! I also discovered a wonderful purveyor of local goat cheese!!! More on that in my next post. I definitely have to go back to Sidcor.