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

Tiyula itum

Name: Tiyula itum
Total time: 2 h 20 min
Yield: Serves 6
Cuisine: The Moro South, Mindanao and Sulu
Ingredients: 1 kg beef brisket, cubed; 45 g fresh coconut meat, grated; 4 stalks lemongrass, white part only, pounded; 3 bird's eye chillies, finely chopped; 950 ml beef stock; 1 thumb ginger, thinly sliced; ½ thumb turmeric, thinly sliced; 6 cloves garlic, minced; 3 shallots, thinly sliced; to taste salt, black pepper, oil for cooking

Jolo, Sulu

Tiyula itum, the Tausug black beef soup built on charred coconut and pamapa spice paste: a wide shallow bowl of deep matte-black broth, tender chunks of braised beef brisket submerged just beneath the glossy dark surface.

Illustration

Time: 2 hours 20

Researched: 6 sources cited

Jolo, Sulu. Tausug. "Head of all viand," served at weddings, at Hari Raya and at the seventh-day funeral memorial feast, carried by Tausug communities as far as Sabah and North Kalimantan.

by Jolo, Sulu

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 6. Active work 30 minutes, simmer 1½ hours, total around 2 hours 20 minutes.

Ingredients

1 kg beef brisket, cubed
45 g fresh coconut meat, grated
4 stalks lemongrass, white part only, pounded
3 bird's eye chillies, finely chopped
950 ml beef stock
1 thumb ginger, thinly sliced
½ thumb turmeric, thinly sliced
6 cloves garlic, minced
3 shallots, thinly sliced
to taste salt, black pepper, oil for cooking

Method

Spread the grated coconut on a foil-lined tray and broil on the highest setting until genuinely, fully black, not merely browned. Cool, then grind to a fine powder.
Season the beef with salt and pepper. Brown it in batches in hot oil, then set aside.
In the same pot, sauté the garlic, shallots, ginger, turmeric and chilli, then stir in the burnt coconut powder.
Return the beef to the pot with the lemongrass. Pour in the stock, bring to the boil, then reduce and simmer 1½ hours, until the beef is tender and the broth is dark and rounded.
Season to finish.

What a modern chef changes

A dry-aged short rib crusted in charred coconut, and the broth run through a chinois

Rungs 1 and 5

Method

Dehydrate the fresh coconut fully before charring it, so the broiler or a direct flame chars rather than steams the surface moisture off first, giving a more even, genuinely carbonised result edge to edge.
Sous vide a beef short rib for 24 hours at 60°C, then finish with a hard sear on the Big Green Egg run wide open, for a texture no stovetop simmer of brisket reaches, while keeping the same charred-coconut crust as the traditional marinade.
Grind the charred coconut fresh in a dedicated spice grinder immediately before it goes into the pot, not ahead of time; ground spice loses its more volatile aromatic compounds within hours, and this is the ingredient the whole dish is named for.
Strain the finished braising liquid through a chinois for a genuinely clear, glossy black broth, plated as a small poured sauce around the sliced short rib rather than served as a stew, the same reframing Cortes's own plate makes.

Notes

Julie Cortes, Executive Chef at Hiraya in Washington DC, has already shown one way to take this dish apart and rebuild it as a plated course rather than a one-pot stew, crusting a dry-aged NY strip in the burnt-coconut paste overnight before searing, and building the tiyula itum sauce as a separately strained component. This version credits that approach and adapts it to the kit already in this kitchen.

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