How to Cook the Best Kilawing Labanos Recipes

Radish has many types and varieties that you would enjoy exploring and cooking. It is a kind of root crop related to the cabbage family. 

These radish types are Green radish, Black Radish, Wild radish, Oilseed, Red radish, and the most common type is the daikon radish that is the main ingredient to the dish called Kilawin Labanos. 

But it is not the only dish you could cook in a daikon radish. You could cook a dish like Ginisang Labanos and any other recipes that used radish as an ingredient to the dish. 

Kilawin is another dish that uses the daikon dish to create an incredible palette to taste. If you wonder what this Kinilaw na radish dish is, then continue reading this article and explore this amazing dish made from the radish. 

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What is Best Kilawing Labanos

Kilawin is a very well-known dish on the Filipino menu in restaurants and at home. It is usually and normally served as beer, a side dish, an appetizer, and even a main course. 

It is a vegetable dish composed of daikon radish chopped in a uniform shape then marinated in a vinegar-citrus mixture. The veggie meat for the pickled radish boiled and chopped with the same size as the radish, then saute with onion and garlic. After that, you could mix and blend the dish's flavor and taste by adding more seasonings and sour agents to it. 

This menu is perfect for serving on different occasions and gatherings with your family and friends. 

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Ways to Cook 

There are a bunch of ways you could cook the best Kilawing Labanos. And some of the common ways are listed below. 

Stovetop

A stovetop is a perfect method to use in sauteing ingredients. You have to put a pan or casserole on the burner and fire it up to achieve the right heat temperature needed to saute the onion and garlic along with the veggie meat. 

In this technique, you control whether you would turn the fire high or low, depending on the cook you want to eat, pork, chicken, and other ingredients. 

Instant pot

It is a cooking technique that requires you to have a multi-cooker to make cooking easier to do. Since you don't need to cook the whole dish in a pot, and the ingredient you have to cook is the veggie meat, an instant pot is a perfect choice. 

When you would tenderize the veggie meat like tripe, liver, and other meat to add to the recipe, the instant pot would help you. All you have to do is prepare the veggie meat for boiling and then set the time required to cook the veggie meat to perfection. 

This method makes it easier and less handwork; unlike the stovetop, you have to carefully watch and turn the meat on different sides to ensure that the meat you cook is perfectly and tenderly fine. 

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Other Delicious Variants and Recipes

An amazing recipe surely has different varieties. Many people would love to recreate the dish to level it up and make it more appealing and tasty by adding different ingredients you could see in the market these days. 

Kilawing Labanos with pork or chicken liver recipes

Our menu's most popular variation adds pork or chicken liver as a flavoring agent and veggie meat. The kick of a bitter taste of the liver complemented perfectly with the fresh, savory, and sour taste from the marinated radish. 

Of course, you have to boil the pork or chicken liver to tenderize it then cut it in a small size uniformly with the radish for good appearance and texture of the featured dish. 

Batangas Style

This variant of the featured dish used pork as its veggie meat is the Batangas style that instead of liver, they used pork as an alternative. They saute the onion and garlic with the pork to tenderize it and perfectly cook to match the featured dish. The pork adds a more delicate and rich flavor to the sour-marinated radish. 

With Sardines Recipes

Before creating this another version, make sure that you remove the sauce of the sardines you are using. It could either plain-flavored sardines or spicy-flavored ones. But, whatever you use to elevate the dish would not matter. 

Like the other ingredients that you add up in this dish, you could saute the sauce-free sardines with garlic, tomatoes, and onion before mixing it with the vinegar marinated radish. 

With miso

Adding miso in the featured dish is another elevated variation of it. Like the other seasoning, you have to add this traditional Japanese seasoning to enhance the featured dish's flavor and taste. 

To make this variation possible, first, you must saute the garlic, onion, and tomatoes. After sauteing, you could add your miso and another seasoning to add a more succulent taste to it. The radish itself will not saute along with the other ingredients; it marinates with vinegar and then adds sauteed miso in the dish.  

With tripe

It is a dish in which instead of pork/chicken liver, sardines, miso, and another seasoning, you add tripe to the dish. Tripe is a stomach tissue of a ruminant such as goats, sheep, ox, and pigs. It gives more bold and succulent flavors with the vegetable dish featured in this article. 

You should tenderize the tripe if you boiled it for about half an hour. Then you could cut and slice it with a small size uniformly with the cut of the radish for better texture and appearance. 

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Trivia about this Labanos recipe

Did you know that Kinilaw and Kilawin are different from each other? Many people mistakenly recognize Kinilaw and Kilawin. 

Kinilaw is a dish that is a bit similar to the Latin American dish called ceviche. Unlike ceviche, the Kinilaw style protein is particularly and commonly soaked in the vinegar while ceviche soaked in citrus juices. But the similarities between ceviche and KinilawKinilaw is that the protein is raw and not cooked. 

On the other hand, Kilawin is the old version of the kinilaw-style dish, where they cooked the meat by heat and then soaked in the vinegar mixture before serving.

Also, KinilawKinilaw is the terminology used in Visayas and Mindanao to describe the dish. At the same time, Kilawin is the terminology used in many regions in Luzon for the same dish. 

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Tips

To prevent mistakes when cooking and serving a fantastic dish, you should follow some tips. 

• As you marinate the radish, add the souring agent little by little until you reach your desirable sour taste of the dish. 
• Do not overcook the veggie meat you desire to add to your dish because it might be tough and dry. 
• Use fresh daikon radish to get natural sweetness from it. 
• You could use citrus juices like lemon or calamansi if you taste your dish is lacking souring agents. 

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Troubleshooting

When you taste your dish, and it turns out bad, the only thing you have to do is save the dish. 

• If the dish is not sour enough, you did not season it right. So, you could add a souring agent or squeeze more citrus juices to it, then boil it in a few minutes.
• If the case is that your dish is too sour, you could add a pinch of salt and more water to remove the excess sour taste of the dish. 

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Best Serve With

A fresh vegetable dish like Kilawin does not work well without some dishes served along with it. Hence, here are the menus where you could choose the perfect dishes to serve with the featured dish. 

• White Rice- is food that matches the taste and works perfectly with the taste of the fresh menu. 
• Fish Sauce- is a type of condiment with a salty flavor that compliments the sour and fresh taste of the feature dish. 
• Beer - is a drink with a bitter taste highlighting the rich, sour, and fresh flavor of the dish.   
• Pineapple juice - Its sweetness helps the taste of the dish to stand out. If you are not an alcohol lover, yet you love our menu. You could partner the featured dish with pineapple juice.
• Papaitan is a pork stew dish with a bitter taste that compliments very well with the dish's fresh and sour taste. 
• Inihaw na Panga ng Tuna - is a fish grilled dish that has a complementary flavor with the recipes of the featured dish. It helps to balance the fresh and sour flavor of the featured dish. 
• Sweetened Saba Banana - this dessert suits very well with the dish because it helps eliminate the dish's gamey and sour taste, making it stand out even more though it is a fresh dish.
• Alpahor na Kamote - compliments very well with our sour and fresh flavor since this dessert is sweet enough. 
• Maruya Saba Banana- is a sweet delicacy that complements the dish. 

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Conclusion

Filipinos love the radish dish because of its sour-savory, succulent, delicate, rich, and fresh flavor that makes you eat that dish over and over again. It is an incredible dish from the Filipino palette. 

You could try this dish in the comfort of your home or served it with your friends during your night outs. It is a dish that everybody would love. 

Discovering other dishes like the featured dish would give you a great experience. The Philippines has many rich resources of spices and proteins, so try exploring and elevating dishes using different spices, just like the humble Filipino Kilawin Radish dish. 

For more delicious recipe, visit Eat Like Pinoy!

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