when life gives you calamnsi: lomo saltado!

So my mom has a calamansi (Pilipino citrus, sort of similar in flavor profile to a lime) in our backyard. And when life gives you calamansi, the possibilities are endless. Calamnsi juice, bistek, a dipping sauce for lechon, a marinade for meat/seafood, squeezed on top of your pancit or arroz caldo-- ENDLESS!

I, however, decided to take things in a different direction. Since I had just cooked something #hellapilipino, I decided to instead cook a Peruvian dish (and one of my favorite dishes of all time) lomo saltado. What's cool about lomo saltado is that it actually is a chifa, or Chinese-Peruvian stirfry dish. The Chinese, many of whom were brought to Peru as laborers in the 19th and 20th century used cantonese cooking methods and ingredients (rice vinegar, soy sauce) with new world ingredients (potato and tomato).

As a Pilipino-Chinese American, feels close to my roots. A little reading uncovered that Chinese immigration to Peru has its first roots in the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade that was responsible for bringing some of the first Pilipinos and Chinese to the Americas. Given all this history, I felt it appropriate to use calamansi, a Filipino ingredient, as a substitute for rice vinegar, the more traditional acid.

To get started, I marinated pre-cut strips of sirloin (about a pound and a quarter) in a marinade of 2 tbsp soy sauce, 2 tbsp canola oil, hella calamansi (probably 6-8), a splash of rice wine vinegar, 3 minced cloves of garlic, and cumin, paprika, salt and pepper (to taste). I also put some beer in the marinade. Beer acts as a tenderizer, but I mostly just wanted an excuse to open a beer, since I only used a third of the bottle for the marinade. I took about half that marinade and put it in another bowl with a red onion (sliced in slivers). The meat and the onion get to swim in the marinade for at least an hour, so everything can make a flavor-packed Chino-Latino marriage.

A word of caution: making lomo saltado involves making french fries that are later tossed with the stir-fry. This will make it extremely hard to resist eating french fries while completing your cooking! I cut up and fried 2 yukon gold potatoes while waiting for the meat to marinate, and managed to eat fewer than I can count on one hand. Or maybe it was fewer than I could fit in one hand full? 

Once that was done, got some oil nice and hot in a large pan (couldn't find my mom's wok) then got going with the stir-frying. First I seasoned the meat with a little more salt, pepper, cumin, and paprika the meat brown with the marinade , then added tomatoes and let it simmer for a couple minutes. Then I added the onions, hot yellow pepper, and cilantro.

To finish it off, the stir-fry is tossed with the french fries and plated over white rice.

 While fusion might be considered a "food trend," the best fusion often comes out of necessity, when people are given a new ingredient to place within their culinary canon. In my case, the ingredient was calamansi, and the result was delicious!