Halo-Halong Kapampangan at Kabitenyo

Halo-halo, that mix of boiled, sweetened rootcrops, beans and saba bananas, with a handful of shaved ice lodged in, poured with a dollop of milk, then topped with a thin slice of leche flan and a spoonful of ube pudding, is the ubiquitous favorite Filipino summer snack. By February every street corner across the country sprouts a table laden with jars of the ingredients and a chestful of block ice on the side.

It's already the first week of April, but the winds have been blowing cold at night, and LPAs have been hovering over the islands, that it doesn't feel like summer yet. PAGASA even declares that it's not yet summer season. So it's not surprising that I rarely see halo-halo tables so late in the season. Perhaps because holy week is late this year.

Anybody who knows how to boil and dice, and has the grit to manually shave ice, can put up a halo-halo stand. But some people have been at it for so long they are institutions in the industry, and their halo-halo are worth having even through the raging of typhoons, summer or not.


Digman halo-halo is familiar to mall rats in the past as it used to be a mouth-watering presence in all the food courts of Metro Manila malls. It has since disappeared from mall basements, but Digman still exists, though now its operation is limited to the hometown from which it originated.

Digman is actually a place – a sitio of the municipality of Bacoor, the first town in the province of Cavite after the Coastal Road. The area has become a tourist spot, a sort of stop-over for travelers going to Tagaytay and the beaches of Batangas on weekends, as well as a destination unto itself for serious foodies.

The hallowed halo-halo destination is composed of two streets at a right angle to each other, and on each alley is ensconced an eatery proclaiming it is the original Digman halo-halo. I know each eatery has its own followers, but the offerings look the same, and I can’t much tell the difference, so I think either one will do.


Digman is the embodiment of the Filipino streetcorner halo-halo. Sweetened legumes, saba and langka, coconut products – kaong, macapuno, nata de coco - jelly cubes, sago, and the ube and leche flan topping.

But while your streetcorner halo-halo would only contain ingredients that’s perhaps what’s available in the market that day, or maybe what’s cheap, or what the vendor feels like including, at Digman you are guaranteed of its byline, Sang Dosenang Sarap, always a dozen unvarying ingredients throughout the year.


That guarantee is evident in the halo-halo itself – served in a bowl instead of a tall glass, so that the delicious dozen can all fit in.

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Digman Halo-Halo
Digman, Bacoor, Cavite

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Asiong’s Carinderia is a sort of an institution in Cavite City. People say it’s been there forever, and locals recount childhood memories of going out to eat at Asiong’s with their families.

I’ve only been there twice, so I can’t account for much of the food, but I’ve had the halo-halo. And it’s the quintessential halo-halo - chunky, bean-y, chewy, full of contrasting textures and flavors, rounded off by the creamy milkiness of the shaved ice.

Asiong’s halo-halo is quite close to Digman’s, that I think this is how halo-halong Kabitenyo is, or at least in this part of Cavite.

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Asiong's Carinderia & Cafe
719 P. Paterno Street
Caridad, Cavite City

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Halo-halong Kapampangan is best known for the halo-halo made popular by Razon’s, and, lately, Kabigting’s. They both started as home-based enterprises, but are now bywords in malls. Razon’s, particularly, have gone as far as General Santos City in Mindanao, so is now known nationwide, though I've heard the quality is not consistent in all branches, especially in the franchise outlets.

Halo-halong Kapampangan is quite the opposite of halo-halong Kabitenyo. Whereas the latter guarantees as much as a dozen deliciousness, the former is minimalist - the least possible number of ingredients that can be called a halo-halo.

Razon's only has leche flan, macapuno strips, and sweetened saba. All three are in such minimal size they are almost mashed up, so that they meld together in every spoonful.

With scant ingredients the halo-halo can only take off with the quality of each component. And each ingredient of Razon's halo-halo is a fine example of the well-known Kapampangan fastidiousness.

Razon's halo-halo is not a macho halo-halo - with the almost mashed ingredients it obviously doesn't have brawn. It's not for those who like chunky halo-halo, but rather for senior citizens, and it's a child's dream halo-halo.

I didn't like beans in my halo-halo when I was a child, and chickpeas, and kamote. So I rather squeal like a child again every time I have a glass of Razon's.

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Razon's Halo-halo & Palabok
Website
Facebook Page

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Kabigting halo-halo used to be, for the longest time, so out of the way in its original outlet in Arayat, Pampanga. But serious foodies organized Kapampangan food tours that included a trip to Kabigting's.

Thankfully, the owners decided to go out of their comfort zone and thought of branching out. There are at least three branches that I know of, at Robinson's Starmills in San Fernando, Pampanga, and at the Marquee and Nepo malls in Angeles City.

Kabigting halo-halo is similar to Razon's in that it has only three ingredients - pastillas, sweetened beans and corn. But the similarity ends there. Kabigting is more brawny, chunkier.

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Kabigting Halo Halo
Facebook Page

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Related Posts
Streetside Halo-Halo
Ginataang Halo-Halo

Nature’s Tropical Summertime Largesse

The blazing hot Philippine summer season means it’s tangay-tangay time. In the Pangasinan language, tangay-tangay describes people – children and adults alike – who are always looking up towards the heavens.

And that is because during the sultry months, most trees teem with fruit, branches laden with so much that they are almost perpendicular to the ground, and one ripe fruit is bound to slide down straight to your mouth if you open it wide while looking up.

I have fond summer memories of going around with a gang of friends raiding the neighborhood guava trees, leaving them bereft of fruits, which we collected in our upturned shirt hems that inevitably got stained.

Somebody invariably always brought a packet of rock salt, and we just wiped the guavas on our shirts to remove the accumulated dust, dipped them on the salt, and bit on them right there under the guava tree.

We bit on the fruit in a circular fashion – going around the fruit, not through it, to avoid the core of tightly packed seeds. Or maybe it was just me, because I didn’t like eating the seeds (they came out of me the next day still whole).

The guavas of my childhood are small, round with dark green skin, which turn pale and tawny as they ripen. The flesh is white when unripe, and an opaque yellow when ripe. We always picked and ate them hard and unripe – they had that characteristic sour apple taste then, but not acidic.

The skin was bitter, but we didn’t mind because they were always very thin. We didn’t like the sweetish taste of them when they turned soft, and there was always the risk of biting into a fruit full of worms.

The pink ones are rare. These are bigger guavas, the skin lighter green, the flesh yellowish when unripe but turn into a lovely coral-pink shade when soft and ripe. My kids rather like the fragrant ripe fruits, which I get hard and unripe, letting them ripen on the kitchen counter.

Guavas are not really high-value fruit in these parts, despite their being touted as superfruits because of their being chockfull of vitamins, minerals, carotenoids and polyphenols. They sprout, bear fruits, which are harvested by the entire neighborhood, and then left on their own until the next harvest. Which explains why we didn’t even bother to wash them when I was a child. Guavas weren’t acquainted with harmful chemical sprays. I hope that is still true today.

Several trees in the backyard would spell a surfeit that would litter the ground and perfume the air, which might turn unpleasant with the heat. So some people end up selling some guavas at the market. But the price is always pamigay - so low it’s tantamount to giving the fruits away.


These mangoes are called pao in the Pangasinan language, or pajo somewhere else, accent on the last syllable, so it is sometimes mistaken as referring to a sensitive female body part.

These mangoes are also eaten maeta – unripe, the younger, more immature, the better. I even pick out those whose seeds are still bald and bereft of those strands of fiber that develop as the fruit matures. The undeveloped seeds are still very small, ensconced in a thin, tender white shell, so I get more of the tinglingly sour flesh, and I don’t get pesky fiber tangled in-between my teeth.

Unripe pao is crisp, with a slight sourness but not in a forward manner, like apple that’s not sweet but not sour either. It is a few centuries removed from the blasting tartness of carabao mangoes. So even though unripe carabao mangoes are also eaten (to get a kick), it is a more agreeable experience for the teeth to eat unripe pao.

Like eating apple mango, too, sometimes called Indian mango, which are bigger but also heart-shaped. Apple mangoes have paler skin, with a blush of pink.

Accompaniment is a simple saucer of salt, which can be mixed with crushed siling labuyo so to tease the sweltering summer, or even a few drops of vinegar to amp the sourness a notch.

We don’t eat ripe pao either. Or apple mangoes. They both develop a medicinal taste that’s repulsive when ripe. They sweeten a bit, yes, but medicinally sweet.


Chicos are so sugary sweet I’m afraid to give them to diabetics. The grainy texture of the flesh lets me imagine that it’s made of brown sugar crystals. Even though they are harvested still unripe they ripen to an indomitable candy sugariness.

They cannot remain long on the tree, for once they soften the birds will go crazy and peck on each and every one of them. So the unripe fruits are harvested once mature, scrubbed of the sap in water, then left to dry. After a few days the fruit will be soft and ready to eat.

They should be soft, but not yieldingly so. A small pressure applied to the middle of the fruit will halve it, and so the chico feast commences. We scrape the flesh to the thin skin. When I was a child we were made to eat the skin, washed of course, because the elders harvested our chico bounty from our own trees.

Fruits that feel bloated to the touch are already over-ripe and have started to rot, tasting sour. Having too many rotten chicos is always a problem in our house because they proceed to ripen all at once, and it’s difficult to keep up because you can only eat that many chicos.

Their sugary nature prohibits one from indulging – it gets cloying because the sweetness is so straightforward. I can’t make them into something else – the distinct chico taste disappears once it is mixed with other ingredients.

More Summer Fruits
Chico Lassi
Bioko
Anonas/Guyabano
Guapple
Cashew Fruit (Apple)
Siriguelas
Duhat
Kaimito
Carabao Mangoes