This essay is part of our column, A Taste of Climate, that considers the intersection of food and climate.

Growing up, I knew that the version of pork sinigang we were eating in California was not the one my mother grew up with in her home country of the Philippines. 

Some of the sour stew’s ingredients weren’t available at our supermarket. Instead of using kangkong, or water spinach, my mom used regular spinach. Instead of boiling green tamarind to flavor the broth, she stirred in a packet of instant sinigang mix (the third ingredient was MSG). 

I didn’t care. The big pot of mouth-puckering broth had everything I loved in it: chunks of pork belly so tender you could slurp it; daikon, which I bit into crescent moons; and bright green, barely cooked green beans for crunch. Enjoying it spooned over steamed rice, I told myself that in heaven, I would eat sinigang forever and never get sick of it. 

My mom’s chief goal as a Filipino immigrant was to make her sinigang taste just like her mother’s. And for a long time, that was my aim too. 

But over the past few years, that motivation for me has changed. I want to cook food—including traditional Filipino dishes like sinigang—in ways that align more closely with my values. I want to know that my food choices have minimal impact on the environment, that I am eating in harmony with the season. 

To do that, I needed to tweak the recipes I grew up with, though I had a lot of mixed feelings about that. Part of me was worried about what it would mean to dilute these precious family heirlooms that defined so much of my childhood. Another part of me knows that for any culture to survive, it has to adapt. 

I told my friend Yana Gilbuena-Babu, a Filipino chef and the founder of Lamon, a zero-waste Filipino food festival in San Francisco, about my dilemma. She put the issue into context. Filipino cooking “is not just about authenticity anymore,” she says. “It’s about preserving our cultural identity through our culinary foodways” in the age of climate change. 

So how do I do that? How do I make a sinigang dish that honors my mother, but also the planet? To answer this question, I needed to understand the true nature of sinigang, its history and its origins, so that I could deconstruct the recipe and make something new. 

People have been eating sinigang in the Philippines for hundreds of years, says R. Alexander Orquiza Jr., a history professor at Providence College and the author of Taste of Control: Food and the Filipino Colonial Mentality Under American Rule. It’s a precolonial, indigenous food. It was there before Islam arrived in the fourteenth century and the Spaniards arrived in the sixteenth century. 

“Spanish explorers taking in the cultural anthropology of the country would write a lot about stew dishes being cooked in clay pots,” says Orquiza. 

In Tagalog, sinigang’s root word is “sigang,” which means something similar to “to cook.” And so you can “sigang” almost any combination of meat and vegetables that the Philippines’ over seven thousand islands have to offer. Some sinigang dishes have beef, chicken, pork, milkfish, or shrimp; others consist of only vegetables. 

This is one of the reasons why “sinigang seems to me the dish most representative of Filipino taste,” writes Doreen Fernandez in her essay “Why Sinigang?” from the 1988 book, Sarap: Essays on Philippine Food. “It is adaptable to all tastes, to all classes and budgets, to seasons and availability.”

Sinigang recipes can vary by region, by family and, as I learned through reporting this story, even by generation. But there are a couple of features that define the dish, says Orquiza. 

Sinigang is sour. The broth can be flavored by unripe fruits or vegetables like green tamarind, guava, or mango; citrus fruits like calamansi, a native Philippine lime; or even tomatoes. Many South Asian cuisines have this flavor profile, such as Thailand’s tom yum soup or Indonesia’s sayur asem, says Orquiza. 

Sinigang is simmered, traditionally in a clay pot, a palayok, over an open fire. It’s a dish of the working class, says Orquiza. “It’s much like red beans and rice in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. It’s something that’s cooking while people are in the field.” 

The mark of an excellent sinigang, writes Filipino chef and food writer Anne Marie Bernal Castro in her essay titled “Inacia’s Sinigang” from the 2005 book Slow Food: Philippine Culinary Traditions, is that it is “greater than the sum of its parts.” The ingredients must not “overpower the taste of another” and must “meld beautifully” from its cooking process. 

I asked my ninety-seven-year-old grandmother, Felisa Mercene, to tell me how her grandmother, Paola Conde, made sinigang in their province of Marinduque. “Paola didn’t buy vegetables for sinigang. Money was scarce. Whatever was growing on the side of the house went into the pot,” she says. That includes ingredients I’d never heard of in sinigang before: the tenderest leaves of the tamarind tree, lima beans, and green papaya.

I then asked my aunt, Jasmine Eugenio, to tell me about the sinigang of her grandmother, Loreto De Leon. Just like Paola, Nanay Luring, as she was called, cooked her sinigang over the fire in a palayok. She would gather the firewood herself. Some vegetables she grew and foraged, but some she bought at the market, a departure from Paola’s method. She fortified the broth with the head of a fish—and fried its body to serve with the meal so the family would have something other than soup to eat. 

“She had to go through such an effort to feed me,” recalls my aunt. “I can still see the sweat on her forehead.” 

My grandmother Felisa’s sinigang was more modern. Like Nanay Luring, she soured her broth with fresh green tamarind, but she cooked her stew in a kitchen, not in a fire pit. She cooked with vegetables from the market that she liked, not just what was available. And she used tomatoes in her broth, an uncommon ingredient for sinigang back then. 

When my aunt and my mother moved to America in the 1980s, they started cooking their sinigang with pork instead of fish like their forebears. In the provinces, many people were too poor to afford meat and so they only ate it on special occasions. But in America, meat was cheap. Our family was earning more money. And so they could eat pork whenever they wanted. 

Retracing my family’s versions of sinigang through four generations—my great-great- grandmother, my great-grandmother, my grandmother, and my mother—I realized something. Their recipe for sinigang was never static. It was always evolving.

When I told Hannah Ritchie, the deputy editor of the U.K.-based research group Our World in Data and a researcher at Oxford University, about my quest to make a climate-friendly sinigang, she emailed me the carbon footprint of each ingredient in my mom’s recipe within an hour. This footprint measures how many kilograms of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide—greenhouse gasses emitted in agriculture and food production—are released into the atmosphere in order to produce that food. 

Around 80 percent of the carbon footprint of my mom’s sinigang “is dominated by a few ingredients: the pork and the rice,” says Ritchie. “That’s better than a beef burger, but compared to a chicken burger or a slice of pizza, it has a pretty high carbon footprint.”  

In general, says Ritchie, emissions tend to be greatest in “beef, then lamb, then pork, then chicken and fish,” in that order. While estimates vary, livestock production accounts for between 11.1 percent to 19.6 percent of global greenhouse emissions, according to a 2023 analysis from the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental research group. 

If I want to reduce my sinigang’s carbon footprint, she recommends swapping the pork for a plant-based protein like tofu, peas, or meat-free substitutes. “That’s probably where you’re going to get the most gains in terms of reducing climate impact,” she says. They’d cut down the dish’s carbon footprint by 75 to 90 percent. 

Then she suggests subbing the rice for a grain with a lower carbon footprint, like quinoa or maize. “Unlike other grains, rice emits methane,” says Ritchie. According to the World Bank, rice grown in flooded fields thrive on decomposing organic matter, which releases the gas. 

With Ritchie’s recommendations in mind, I reached back out to Gilbuena-Babu, the Filipino chef, and asked her to develop a custom sinigang recipe for me. In addition, I told her I wanted to use fresh, seasonal produce from nearby farms. After learning how my ancestors made sinigang, this step seemed like a return to form. 

Gilbuena-Babu was up for the challenge. About a decade ago, she traveled to all fifty states in America to cook Filipino food, often highlighting local ingredients in each dish (the recipes are documented in her 2018 cookbook, No Forks Given). 

Gilbuena-Babu created a recipe called sinigang na kabute, sinigang with mushrooms. Like my mom’s recipe, it uses a packet of instant sinigang mix, but instead of meat it uses a mix of shiitake, oyster, and enoki mushrooms. 

I was excited and intrigued, but also a little scared. What if I couldn’t find the ingredients? What if the dish tasted horrible? 

In September, shopping list in hand, I was off to the farmers market where I live in Nashville, Tennessee. I sourced the mushrooms from a local grower. Check. Then it was time to buy the rest of the vegetables. I was able to find long green pepper, okra, tomatoes, onion, and green beans from a vendor based in Bowling Green, Kentucky. 

But where was the daikon? “We’re a few months off from that,” the farmer told me. “We harvest it from December through February.” D’oh. To make up for it, I threw a few eggplants, a common sinigang ingredient, into my basket. 

And so I began to cook. When preparing traditional sinigang, you dump everything into one pot. But this recipe had a few more steps. Gilbuena-Babu suggests roasting key vegetables—the tomatoes and peppers to deepen their flavors, and the green beans and okra to maintain their texture and add heft to the stew. 

Once I added the instant sinigang mix, the concoction started to smell and look more familiar. I started to suspect that you could make anything sinigang so long as you had this $1 flavoring packet.

At this point, I wondered whether I might have gone overboard with this project. I could have just boiled some vegetables and called it a day. It’s not like I would have invented anything. Veggie sinigang isn’t unheard of in the Philippines. And it’s inherently climate-friendly because it doesn’t have meat. What was I really doing differently? 

I sat down to eat my sinigang with this question in mind. 

I loaded up a bit of stew onto a spoon of steamed jasmine rice and quinoa. (I wasn’t quite ready to eat Filipino food without white rice as Ritchie suggested, so I used this mix at a three-to-one ratio. I thought this was a good compromise.) 

I was impressed by the intense flavor of the broth, which used nontraditional ingredients like a whole head of garlic and a tiny mesh umami bomb of Japanese dashi. I thought the textures of the mushrooms were clever—the enoki had a stringiness like shreds of pork. The coconut oil that I used to roast the veggies imparted a subtle, sweet, nutty fragrance that I didn’t hate. 

What surprised me most was the feeling of emotional fullness that came with cooking my sinigang so intentionally. I loved knowing that just like Nanay Luring’s sinigang, I used fresh, seasonal produce from the local market. That it sustained and nourished me with minimal harm to the environment. That even if I lived all the way in Tennessee, my family’s traditions still lived on in me. 

A few days after I cooked my sinigang, my mom came to visit Nashville. I was anxious for her to try it, so I heated her up a little serving of stew and asked her what she thought. 

“It’s good,” she said.

She was being polite. I knew she was looking for the pork and missed the fatty broth. She didn’t finish the bowl I gave her, and I didn’t mind. My version of sinigang may be nothing like hers. But it was all mine. 

Sinigang na kabute

Mushrooms in Sour Tamarind Soup
Courtesy of chef Yana Gilbuena-Babu

Serves 4-6

Ingredients:

1 tbsp. canola oil
1 head of garlic, crushed and minced
1 small red onion, diced
1 bunch scallions, sliced on a bias (save the sliced tops for garnish)
6 oz. shiitake mushrooms cut into 1/4” slices
6 oz. of king oyster mushrooms cut into ½” cubes
4 oz. enoki mushrooms, bottoms cut and separated
4 quarts water
1 32-oz. bottle tamarind concentrate (can sub with ingredients below*)
1 Tbsp dashi (Hondashi or mushroom dashi)
1 pack sinigang soup base
1 lb. plum/Roma tomatoes, quartered and roasted (can be canned roasted tomatoes)
1 small daikon, peeled, cut into 1/4” coins, washed and soaked in water for 5-10 minutes
1 small taro root, peeled and cut into 1/4” coins, washed and soaked in water for 5-10 minutes
10 long green beans, cut into 2” lengths
1/2 lb. of okra, washed, cut in half on a bias
3 tbsp. of coconut oil
2 tbsp. of garlic powder
2 long green peppers, roasted and chopped
1/4 cup of calamansi juice
¼ cup of fish sauce (can use vegetarian fish sauce)
1 tbsp. fried garlic

Directions:

• Preheat oven to 375°F. 
• Prep all vegetables, and soak daikon and taro root for 5-10 minutes.  
• In a 6-quart pot, heat oil on medium-high. Add garlic, red onion, scallion bottoms, and all mushrooms. Sauté until brown.
• Add water, tamarind concentrate, dashi, and sinigang soup base. Let boil for 15 minutes. 
• Add the roasted tomatoes, daikon, and taro root. Simmer for 20-30 minutes.
• While the soup base is simmering, toss okra and green beans in coconut oil and garlic powder in a separate bowl.
• Roast the green beans and okra for 15-20 minutes at 375°F until you can see them brown. Set aside.
• To the soup base, add fish sauce and calamansi juice incrementally to taste. The goal is to have that face-puckering sourness, balanced by saltiness.
• Serve in a bowl with the roasted green beans and okra. Garnish with the sliced scallions and fried garlic.

*You can also use 1 lb of rhubarb cut in 2” lengths and 8 oz lemon, guava, or tomatillo juice as a souring agent instead of tamarind.