The Pinoy Style Spaghetti

Since the advent of time the term spaghetti has been synonymous to birthday parties, children's occasion, fiesta, baptisms, parties, and anything related to a cause for celebration. Spaghetti for pinoys is a loose term for a long strand of pasta with sweet tomato sauce and topped off with pasteurized cheese. This means, the term spaghetti does not refer to the pasta but the dish itself. This is the same situation that goes for our term with Colgate, Coke, Frigidaire, Vetsin, and all those brand names that are synonymous to the generalization of a product.

We are as passionate of our spaghetti as the Italians. It takes a lot of measures and careful errors to create this celebrated dish. I remember being taught by my mom how to make this dish before, and being scolded on occasions for not following the proper procedure. It takes a lot of love and Filipino taste for a person to get this dish right, and anything that falls out of proportion would make your neighbor or aunt's spaghetti the better contender. It's only in recent years that the term "spaghetti" was corrected by the media and corporations by using the term "Pinoy Style Spaghetti" to refer to our sweet-bloody red pasta.

Along the years, after making countless batches in my effort to stray away from the repetitive taste of our nation's prideful version of spaghetti bolognese, I've come to realize a couple of things that makes our pasta become the pinoy style spaghetti:

Rules to cooking the pasta:

1. If the pasta is "al dente" it means it's under-cooked. We don't like that bite, we want it soft enough so we can chop it up with our plastic forks.

2. The 12-inch pasta is too long to fit in a standard pot, so you must cut it in half before dropping it in the boiling water.

3. Salt AND oil must be used to boil the pasta because it has the tendency to stick on the edge of the pot or the bottom. Oil prevents that disaster.

4. You must NEVER forget to stir the boiling pasta every few minutes else it will stick to the bottom of the pot and your whole dish will taste of burnt pasta.

5. The moment you strain the pasta, you must quickly wash it with running water to remove all the starch so that it won't stick with each other. You may slather it with butter or oil as added precaution to the pasta-sticking-to-each-other issue.

6. Let the pasta sit and cool while you make the sauce.

Rules to cooking the sauce:

1. Start with sauteeing the garlic, then add the onion only when the garlic has turned golden brown.

2. You may use ground pork because it's cheaper and the taste isn't as powerful as beef. No, meatballs are not a welcome addition.

3. Use a bouillon cube (aka Knorr Pork or Beef Cube) to enhance the meatiness of the dish.

4. Don't EVER forget the red hotdog! Put lots of it! And sweet ham too if desired.

5. Before the dawning of those commercialized spaghetti sauces, we use tomato sauce, lots and lots of it. If you see the foil pack has some traces of tomato sauce residue sticking to it, wash it off with a few tablespoons of water and add it to the sauce. Yes, we like our sauces watery.

6. The key rule to the pinoy style spaghetti is that it needs to be red, the redder the better. Take Jollibee's spaghetti as the perfect example of how red we want it. For the desired redness, you can add tomato or banana ketchup to add their bold color and flavor to the sauce.

7. Everyone knows that sugar is added to the sauce to make it sweet, so do it!

8. A secret ingredient of some include liver spread to add a dimension of meaty-saltiness to the dish, while some add peanut butter to add a nutty-sweetness to the sauce. Shhhhh!

9. You can add a dash of white or black pepper. That is all. DON'T EVER EVER add any herb or other spices, even basil...it's gonna make it totally Italian.

10. CHEESE! CHEESE!!! AND MORE CHEESE is a must! We don't like the pungent taste of Parmesan, that's totally gross to the sacredness of the pinoy dish. We want only the commercialized pasteurized cheeses because even if they label it "cheddar" it's actually processed cheese. So choose only the best cheese that suites our taste, no more no less. The grated cheese is halved, a portion of it goes into the sauce to make it thick, and the rest of it is later scattered as garnish and topping.

11. Once the sauce has been boiling for a long time...you know, when the sauce has already splattered throughout your stove top, then it's done.

12. Plating the pasta by separating the sauce from the noodles is nice, but we prefer it mixed, very well mixed even if the pasta ends up two-inches short.

13. The finishing touches are the grated cheese and extra slices of hotdogs. Trust me, people will immediately dig in to make sure they get a portion of those toppings.

14. If it tastes like your childhood, then it's perfect!


I distinctly remember my aunt eating one of the pasta batches I did when I was much younger and this is how our conversation went:

Aunt: Your pasta looks pale. I think it lacks some sauce.
Me: No, it tastes just fine. If I add any more it's gonna be drowning in sauce.
Aunt: No, really, it looks pale.
Me: Just taste it!
Aunt: (gobbles a forkful) Tastes fine.
Me: See?
Aunt: But it still looks pale.

This goes to show that we have standards to what we call spaghetti. I also remember a time when I discovered the wonders of herbs and the Italian way of cooking pasta from some of the shows in Lifestyle Network back in the 1990's and how my mom was so skeptical about what these professionals had to say. I once suggested to add some dried basil on the sauce and the deliberation just went on until my mom said, "fine, but just a pinch." So, it was a pinch of dried basil in 1.5 liters of sauce then. Well...that's when I got my childhood theory that herbs are only there to add specs on your pasta and not really do anything more. I remember the argument back then was the assumption that the guests are not familiar with the taste of herbs and therefore it follows that they don't like herbs at all, that's just the way things are according to my mother. This is where, I believe, we Filipinos think like the Italians when it comes to food. This is how we do things, therefore this is the only way to do it. No questions asked. And despite the fact that the world still cannot put a finger on what Filipino food is because of our mixed ethnicity, we Filipinos simply know what our food is, it all comes down to the DNA of our ancestral palettes.