Filipino Whole30 Eats: Pork Barbecue

Last Sunday in the month-long series of Sunday lunches for my family! I went with barbecue today, always a favorite for social gatherings. There are any number of recipes and techniques for making Filipino-style barbecue; quite a few (including the one I learned from an aunt a few times removed who helped raise my sisters and me) rely on a marinade containing that uniquely Filipino condiment, banana sauce or banana catsup.

As I said in a previous post, the problem with banana sauce is that it’s laced with a number of non-Whole30 ingredients, including starch, sugar, preservatives, and dyes. To get around this – and anticipating I would be needing it for this dish – I prepared my own homemade banana sauce from saging na saba several days ago. That made getting everything ready for today’s lunch a relative cinch.

An aside: The veggie accompaniment to today’s barbecue was a Filipino-style Russian salad (that’s what we call it, anyway) – basically a potato salad (sweet potato, in this case) mixed with shredded chicken, cubed carrots, cubed beets, cubed apples, and raisins, all slathered in (homemade) mayo. I made a version of it during my Whole30 in April.

Translations
Saging (sah-ging – first “g” is a hard “g”): banana
Saging na saba (sah-ging nah sah-bah): sweet plantain, aka saba banana, also sometimes called cardaba banana

Ingredients

• 3 lbs. pork loin, cut into thin strips
• 6 cloves of garlic, minced
• 1 1/2 cups + 1 cup banana sauce
• 1/2 cup coconut aminos (soy sauce substitute)
• 1/4 cup white vinegar
• 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
• 1/2 teaspoon black peppercorn

Instructions

1. Place the pork loin strips in a storage container. In a small bowl, mix the garlic, 1 1/2 cups of banana sauce (keep the other cup in the fridge for later), coconut aminos, vinegar, salt, and black peppercorn. Pour this marinade over the pork and mix everything thoroughly to make sure all the pork pieces are coated. Seal the container and refrigerate at least overnight and up to 2 days.
2. Heat your grill to medium-high (I used an indoor grill set to 400 degrees). Skewer your pork with barbecue sticks and put them on the grill a batch at a time. (Tip: if you are using bamboo or wooden barbecue sticks, soak them in water for several hours beforehand to keep them from burning.) Turn each barbecue “kebab” over several times every few minutes, searing all sides, while basting the meat generously with the banana sauce you had put aside. 
3. Grill till the pork is charred in spots and the meat is cooked through. Then serve!

Makes about 18 sticks of pork barbecue.

How this is Whole30
As mentioned, by using homemade banana sauce, I avoided using the store-bought version that contains a number of prohibited ingredients. Also, that reliable standby, coconut aminos, stood in for the soy sauce normally included in the marinade.

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