Pork Giniling is one of the best Pinoy dishes of all time in my book. It's one of those special dishes that even picky eaters will approve of, I know my parents didn't have a hard time getting us to eat it back in the 90s and the same goes with my kids today. But for health reasons due to my age hahaha, cutting down on fatty intake meant eating more vegetables than meat, which is not looking good for my pork giniling. This is where Mr. V's dad comes in. He told us about how banana heart is used as meat fillers in some massed produced burger patties and the like, which you might have guessed we decided to try out for ourselves. So here goes.
First we had to figure out how to prepare it, which took a lot of research. Thanks to My Filipino Kitchen for the blow by blow, definitely helped first timers on handling banana hearts like us to at least not make a total mess out of our experiment. The mincing took a bit of time, it's faster and more efficient in a food processor if you're in a hurry. We did forgo using the boiling water, we just gave the minced banana heart a good helping of calamansi juice, also to prevent it from oxidizing.
We cooked the usual Pork Giniling recipe that we follow, but instead of using 1 kilo of ground pork we only used 1/4 kilo and added the 1 whole large banana heart that we minced. The banana heart really did take on the taste of the pork, you couldn't even tell that the whole thing wasn't ground pork! We took it a step further by using it as a filling for some crispy spring rolls. We added 2 raw eggs to the cooled down dish to bind the whole mixture together and then started wrapping the rolls. We took the deep frying it in Palm Oil route, don't use Canola oil since it's GMO.
Our light dinner of home made crispy spring rolls was very satisfying, couldn't even tell that there wasn't much meat in the filling at all. We all had seconds, good thing we did a bigger batch than usual. When we were all but stuffed, a cousin of mine suddenly dropped by and had a helping of our "pork" spring rolls, she didn't even suspect a thing until we told her! She totally thought the whole thing was made of pork. She even dissected one to check the filling, still couldn't make out which part was the heart or the pork but veggies were all recognizable. So there you have it, guilt free Pork Giniling and Crispy Spring Rolls with banana heart! No need to skimp out on your favorite ground meat dishes! Try it yourselves and start stretching your peso with Puso ng Saging! 
Reference:
http://panlasangpinoy.com/
http://panlasangpinoy.com/2010/05/31/ground-pork-giniling-recipe/
http://www.myfilipinokitchen.com/
http://www.myfilipinokitchen.com/how-to-prepare-or-cook-banana-hearts-for-your-filipino-recipes/comment-page-1/
Post a Comment