Maritime Southeast Asia · Volume 51, The Black Broth, the Sultanate and a Cuisine the Rest of the Philippines Forgot

Piaparan

Name: Piaparan
Total time: 1 h 25 min
Yield: Serves 4 to 6
Cuisine: The Moro South, Mindanao and Sulu
Ingredients: 4 stalks spring onion, finely chopped; 30 g ginger, pounded to a paste; 2 bird's eye chillies, finely chopped; 1.5 kg chicken legs; 6 cloves garlic, minced; 2 red onions, thinly sliced; 240 ml coconut milk; 1.4 litres water; 1 chayote, sliced; 3 stalks spring onion, chopped; to taste oil, salt; 180 g shredded coconut; 4 g turmeric; ½ green capsicum, sliced; ½ red capsicum, sliced

Lake Lanao, Lanao del Sur

Piaparan, Maranao chicken in coconut milk finished in toasted turmeric coconut: pieces of chicken thickly coated in golden-brown toasted turmeric-yellow coconut flecked with small pieces of red and green capsicum.

An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.

Time: 1 hour 25

Researched: 6 sources cited
Reviewed: Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
Cooked: Not yet cooked and reported

Lake Lanao, Lanao del Sur. Maranao. The genuinely Maranao member of the coconut-chicken family, built on toasted rather than charred coconut, distinct from the Tausug pair above.

by Lake Lanao, Lanao del Sur

Why does Moro food barely register in how "Filipino food" is understood, in Manila as much as in Britain? This is partly documented, not only inferred. Datu Shariff Pendatun III, an essayist-chef tracing his ancestry to the pre-Islamic rulers of Buayan, has said directly that he wants "to disabuse people of the idea that Moros are just about war, guns, and strife," arguing "the food of Muslim Mindanao has the power to connect, and not divide." Chef Miguel Cabel Moreno, on receiving the Philippines' first Michelin Bib Gourmand recognition for a Tausug restaurant, framed it explicitly as overdue honour for "Tausug hands, time, and faith," implying a prior pattern of this group's culinary labour going unrecognised. The more structural explanation offered here is this chapter's own synthesis, not a sourced assertion, though a reasonable one: "Filipino food," as codified for both domestic and export consumption, restaurants, cookbooks, diaspora identity, was built overwhelmingly around Luzon and Visayas, Hispanicised, pork-centred cooking, and halal Mindanao food sits outside that frame almost definitionally, since it refuses the pork and the colonial-Catholic reference points that dominate the national-cuisine narrative. Consistent with this: Moro food reaches mainstream Manila mostly through one cheap, portable dish, pastil, and even the most food-literate UK Filipino business found in this research, a London halal caterer, can describe tiyula itum and piaparan accurately in its own marketing copy while not actually cooking either one.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Serves 4 to 6. Total around 1 hour 25 minutes.

Ingredients

For the palapa

4 stalks spring onion, finely chopped
30 g ginger, pounded to a paste
2 bird's eye chillies, finely chopped

For the soup

1.5 kg chicken legs
6 cloves garlic, minced
2 red onions, thinly sliced
240 ml coconut milk
1.4 litres water
1 chayote, sliced
3 stalks spring onion, chopped
to taste oil, salt

For the coating

180 g shredded coconut
4 g turmeric
½ green capsicum, sliced
½ red capsicum, sliced

Method

Pound the palapa ingredients, the ginger and bird's eye chillies, together in a mortar.
Sauté the garlic and onion in oil, then stir in a tablespoon of the palapa until fragrant.
Add the chicken and salt, brown lightly on all sides, pour in the water, bring to the boil, then simmer 25 minutes.
Remove the chicken. Add the chayote to the pot, cook 5 minutes, add the coconut milk, cook 5 minutes more, stir in the spring onion, then turn off the heat.
In a separate wok, sauté the remaining palapa with the turmeric, shredded coconut and capsicum until evenly toasted and coated.
Fold the chicken through the coconut coating, cover, and finish on low heat.
Serve the coated chicken on a platter with the soup alongside.

What a modern chef changes

Sous vide chicken and freshly ground coconut, folded through a soup-based sauce

Rungs 1 and 2

Method

Sous vide the chicken legs at a controlled temperature before finishing in the coating, avoiding the risk a simmer-then-refry method carries of overcooking the outer flesh before a bone-in leg is done through.
Toast and grind the coconut coating fresh in a spice grinder immediately before use, rather than letting toasted coconut sit, for the same aromatic-freshness reason as tiyula itum's charred coconut above.
Blend a portion of the finished soup with a spoonful of the toasted coconut coating into a light, pourable sauce, plated as a pool beneath the coated chicken rather than served only as a separate broth.

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