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Sizzling Plate · Chopped Pig Face

Sisig

Sisig — street food from Pampanga, Philippines
Photo: Ralff Nestor Nacor / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

The dish existed long before the sizzling version most people know today — an 18th-century Kapampangan dictionary describes 'sisig' simply as a sour green-papaya salad, centuries before anyone chopped pork into it.

Pig ears and jowls are boiled, grilled, then chopped fine and tossed with calamansi juice, onions, and chili, served on a blazing-hot sizzling plate that keeps cooking the meat at the table. Angeles City stalls often crack a raw egg over the top to stir in as it sizzles.

Why it's made this way: Angeles City vendor Lucia 'Aling Lucing' Cunanan reinvented the dish in 1974 by grilling and chopping pig ears and cheeks over a sizzling plate, a version so influential that Angeles now officially calls itself the Sisig Capital of the Philippines.
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Part of World of Street Food — 3248 dishes from 118 countries. Something wrong here? Tell us in the comments below. Photo credits.