Sinigang na may mayang isda or red snapper fish sinigang is one of those Filipino dishes that embody the everyday Filipino meal. You probably already know what sinigang soup is, especially if you’re a Filipino. If you’re a foreigner delving in Filipino cuisine, you’re sure to come across the sour sinigang soup.
How could you not? Practically every Filipino household has its own version of sinigang. For those who don’t know, sinigang is a sour and savory soup from the Philippines made up of your choice of meat, vegetables like string beans and water spinach, tomatoes, fish sauce, onions, siling mahaba or long pepper, and a souring agent, most commonly tamarind.
Boil all of these ingredients together and you’ve got a savory sour dish. The broth is packed with flavors and you’ve got a variety of ingredients to put on your plate. Of course, being a Filipino dish, you can’t have sinigang served at your table without it being accompanied by a serving of white rice.
I love to drown my plateful of white rice in the sour broth, sprinkle it with the vegetables, and get half portion of my plate of the meat of choice from the pot of sinigang. It’s such a hearty meal and it’s typically served for lunch or dinner.
It’s such a well-loved dish in the Philippines too that it’s popularly a contender to be the unofficial national dish of the Philippines.
The cooking process of the sinigang is a fairly simple affair, you pretty much only need to do some quick prep work and stew all the dish together along with some cups of water to create the broth. In fact, sinigang is a Tagalog term that means “to stew” when translated.
You can get creative with your sinigang ingredients as much as you want as long as the essential components in what makes it a sinigang dish are all there. The choice of meat is entirely up to you. The most common meat ingredients being pork along with seafood like fish and shrimp. Meats like poultry and beef are less common but aren’t unheard of.
I know some adventurous cooks out there like to mix the different types of meat together in their sinigang dish to create this huge pot sour broth from the mixture of meat. Not really sure how that would go, flavor-wise but I would love to try it!
I love using pork in my sinigang and it’s my favorite choice of meat. It seems like many foreigners gravitate to shrimp sinigang whenever they got a chance to order the dish.
Yes, the type of meat you use in sinigang does affect the flavor but it shouldn’t lose the sourness of the dish. The sourer the better as far as the sinigang recipe goes.
I love the pork sinigang recipe because I always find it to be the heartiest option for a sinigang meal. But there are some days where I just want to have a lighter affair when it comes to my sinigang meals and I have just the perfect recipe for exactly that.
Our very own sinigang na maya mayang isda or red snapper fish sinigang is that sinigang recipe. Using fish in a sinigang recipe gives the broth a saltier and lighter taste compared to the pork sinigang which is richer in flavor and heavier in the stomach.
I like to use maya mayang isda for my fish sinigang recipe because the fish’s meat takes no time to cook at all and always comes out soft and tender. It just melts into your mouth with every spoonful. Plus, the red hue of the fish looks beautiful in the broth along with the greens of the other ingredients.
Make sure to get a maya maya fish that’s a sizable amount or get multiple maya mayas to achieve a weight of 1 kilo of the fish.
This fish recipe we’re going to share with you is a special one because all the ingredients give the broth the perfect sour balance. The tamarind powder in the broth won’t be overpowering to the other ingredients and the maya maya fish is perfectly cooked.
With the number and amount of different ingredients we’re going to use for this sinigang recipe, the amount of prep work is substantial but the result would be worth it. As for the cooking process, it’s a fairly simple case of dumping the prepped ingredient in the pot but you do need some patience and timing to get everything right.
All the ingredients that we’ll need for this sinigang na maya mayang isda recipe are enumerated down below as well as the cooking instructions to achieve this recipe. If you’re not fond of just reading instruction, no worries. We’ve created a fun video with all the relevant information about this sinigang recipe including the ingredients used, prep work, and the step by step cooking instructions.
Serve this sinigang na maya mayang isda with rice and you’ve got a delicious flavorful meal on your plate. Enjoy!
- 1 kilo of Maya-maya Fish
- 2 pc eggplant
- 1 pc radish
- 2 pcs chili finger
- 3 pcs tomato
- 5 pcs okra
- 1 bundle of string beans
- 2 pcs onion
- 5 cloves of garlic
- 1 bundle of water spinach
- 1 tbsp salt
- 1 tsp pepper
- 3 tbsp fish sauce
- 2 tbsp tamarind powder
- 1 liter water
- Heat the pan and add water, onion, garlic, and tomato. Let it boil
- Add all the vegetables except for water spinach and chili finger.
- Seasoned with salt, pepper, and fish sauce. Then stir and cover, let it boil
- Add the fish right before the vegetables are well cooked.
- Lastly add the tamarind powder, water spinach, and chili finger and let it boil for a minute.
- Turn off the heat and serve with white rice. Enjoy
Youtube Video
