You're Going To Want To Make These Pinoy-Inspired Spaghetti Recipes

How do you make Filipino-style spaghetti? 

There are some pasta dishes that are uniquely and universally loved by many Filipinos. Take a scroll through these recipe ideas and see which kind of Pinoy-style spaghetti you love and would love to taste again: 

Photo by Bianca Laxamana

1 Make your spaghetti sauce sweet. 

Filipinos have a love for anything that's sweet. It isn't even limited to our desserts! Even the ulam that we serve with steamed white rice or garlic rice is sweet! Other cultures may not understand this love affair but there is more to it than just our devotion to sugary food. 

The thing with our love for sweet food is that we love many tastes all at once. Just think about the adobo recipe which is a classic combination of salty and sour or the sinigang recipe which is sour and savory. It just so happens that the taste of sweetness is one of our favorite flavors.

It should not be a surprise that our favorite spaghetti recipe is sweet as well. To all those who wrinkle their noses in disgust, you really need to try it before you totally dismiss it! There is a sweetness level even for you, non-believers! It's all about how much sugar to add to your sweet-style spaghetti recipe. There are pasta recipes that call for adding sugar to the tomato sauce to tame the sourness of the tomatoes and adding more offsets the sourness and turns it toward the sweeter side than sour. 

If you have a particular craving for a fast-food variety of spaghetti and can't wait for the delivery, try this spaghetti recipe hack that may have you craving it even more after trying it for the first time. There are a few surprise ingredients in this recipe that you may not think would work in a pasta sauce but it amazingly does! Temper the sweetness by reducing or increasing the amount of condensed milk you add to the sweet spaghetti sauce. 

Photo by Bianca Laxamana

2 Add all-purpose cream and load it with bacon. 

Ever since bacon became more mainstream, it has been added to many recipes and dishes. From bacon cupcake recipes to caramelizing bacon so one can eat it as a candied snack, bacon is the sweet-savory meat that, for Filipinos, proved that sweetened meats are indeed a delicious thing. 

However, this wasn't the only thing that made bacon a key ingredient in Filipino-inspired pasta recipes. Another key ingredient is cream and together with bacon, it creates the creamiest carbonara pasta sauce that spaghetti has ever met. Seasoned just right, this is the creamy, savory spaghetti that Pinoys love. 

3 Make it meatier! 

We may love our sinigang, adobo, menudo, and other Filipino dishes but when it comes to spaghetti, we love it when it's saucy. We love it more when it's also loaded with meat. There are a number of ways to make your pasta meaty. You can use more ground meat than tomato sauce and make it like a bolognese spaghetti sauce, add slices of chorizo or ham to give it another flavor altogether, or use an already flavorful meat like leftover adobo to add even more oomph and meatiness to your sauce. All you have to do is shred the leftover adobo meat, stir in some of the salty-sour adobo sauce into the sauce, and you have an adobo pasta that's worthy of a dinner date. 

One of the best ways to amp up meatiness is to add meatballs to your spaghetti. There are ways to make your meatballs juicy and adding breadcrumbs to the mix is one way of doing that. Another way is to add chopped fat into the mix like you would with meat in siomai recipes. The chopped up fat in the siomai ensures that the siomai remains moist even after steaming. This is exactly what you want in your meatballs, too. This meatball hack is perfect for those times when you don't have time to make your own meatballs but find yourself in the fresh meat section of the supermarket where they sell the pre-mixed siomai or lumpiang shanghai meat mixes by the kilo. Take advantage so you can save time prepping in the kitchen.  

 

Photo by Aldwin Aspillera

4 Add hot dogs to the sauce. 

Other people may wonder about our obsession with hot dogs, especially those red-hued ones, but even we have to admit that hot dogs really are delicious. All those kids who love those meaty hot dogs can't be wrong! That's the secret to these incredibly kid-friendly meatballs. There are hot dogs ground up in the meatballs. 

Even if you don't want hot dogs in your sauce, grown-ups can use chorizo or sausage links instead to add to the meatiness of your spaghetti sauce but also the overall flavor of the resulting dish, too. 

Photo by Aldwin Aspillera

5 Stir in Pinoy food and flavors. 

We already said that meatballs are the easy answer to making your spaghetti sauce meatier and what better way to do that than with longganisa. This is an easy swap for fancy sausages that might be pricier than you can afford and since longganisa is a kind of sausage, it's a great-tasting substitute, too. 

 

Bangus is a decidedly Pinoy favorite fish. We love it when it's made into daing na bangus so it can be a surprising food when served with your pasta. The idea isn't a weird one since the fish is treated like a chicken fillet or eggplant. What you do is make a boneless bangus fillet that is breaded and fried until golden brown and delicious. It's then simmered in a flavorful tomato sauce. All that's left is to top a mound of cooked spaghetti with it. What you get is a different kind of spaghetti parmigiana with a Pinoy twist, courtesy of the bangus. 

What other ways can you make a pasta dish more Pinoy? Putting a twist to a dish isn't just about adding, removing, or swapping out an ingredient for another. It can also be the treatment of an ingredient and making it taste just like you want it to. With the Pinoy palate, it's always about making dishes as flavorful as it can get. With both boxes check-marked, you can be sure that anyone who loves their Pinoy-inspired pasta will love these versions, too.