The Landang Story

Do you know what landang is? Landang is a very important ingredient for binignit, a local dish and snack staple in the Philippines.

Do you know how landang is made? No, it is not grown like most of the ingredients for binignit. Well, the raw material is grown, however, the final product is manufactured through a process that is as old as our grandparents.

The raw material for landang is derived from a tree called buli, which looks almost like a coconut tree except that it doesn't have fruits. According to our local guide Rolly, the buli blooms and releases thousands of pellet-sized seeds. Trees are allowed to bloom before they are chopped down, they said. A buli tree grows to maturity after 30 years, our other tour guide Archie added.

Another interesting fact is that the different parts of the buli tree when harvested are useful in the entire process of creating landang. Here's how it goes.

First, the bark is scraped off the trunk of the tree. This bark then serves as firewood to fuel the fire that is used to boil the raw material for landang, which is the final step of the process. After the bark is scraped off, the inner skin of the tree is then harnessed and this serves as the raw material for landang.

This is the raw material for landang. At first, it takes a wood-like appearance but this is refined later on to the powdery form you see above. The refinement process involves the raw material being pounded with mortars until it reaches the desired consistency. Check photos below.

After the material is pounded to pure dust-like appearance, it is then mixed with water. There even is a "landang pool" where children swim just to stir the material and make sure the powder is dispersed evenly in the water. Unfortunately, we were not able to take pictures of this pool but we did take pictures of the small-sized pools where the material is stirred by hand.

All in all, the entire process take eight hours to complete until the binignit-ready landang is produced. We were not able to see how the landang is coagulated to its final form, but we were explained that it is heated. Besides, we already know what landang looks like.

~ Immortalundead

Inside San Fernando Rey Church

By the sweats of forced labor, the church of Liloan was built in 1847. As previously blogged, we asked the parish priest's permission to take pictures of the underground tunnel. The priest couldn't know where the opening of the tunnel is.

It was reported that during the American offensive to liberate the Philippines in WWII, the US Airfoce dropped bombs to destroy the church. It was absolutely an easy target yet there were no hits (only big holes in the ground). It was as if the bombs were like "thrown stones deflected in their flight by a sword."

Was it because Liloan Church's patron saint was a warrior king?

Take a look at the well-designed and highly furnished interiors of the church.

Rosquillos

We can never talk about Liloan if we don't mention the mouth-watering and sweet-tasting cookie called rosquillos from Titay's. For many Cebuanos, Liloan is even synonymous to rosquillos. If Carcar has ampao and "itlog mo noy orange", Liloan's perennial pride has been the rosquillos. The truth of the matter is that when Liloan joined Pasigarbo Sa Sugbo's Festival of Festivals, the town showcased its uniqueness and pride by featuring the Rosquillos Festival to all onlookers.



Rosquillos is a cookie curiously shaped as ringlets. The Spanish word “rosca” means ringlet. The ingredients for rosquillos include flour, egg, sugar, shortening and baking powder. But many people have felt that there must be a secret ingredient why rosquillos tastes so good.



Titay’s Rosquillos traces its roots all the way to 1907 (the year before UP’s founding), when Margarita “Na Titay” Frasco one day got bored and started experimenting with her baking ingredients and all of a sudden made her new culinary creation. Like a real scientist, Na Titay used her neighbors and passerby as lab rats who were offered the snack as a freebie for every purchase of a bottle of soda. The yet-to-be-named cookie was “baptized” by then Cebu governor Sergio Osmeña, Sr., who called it rosquillos in reference to the Spanish wine ring cookie known as Rosquillos de Vino.


After more than a century of home baking tradition, the patented secret family recipe has been passed on to the next Frasco generations paving the way for Titay’s to continue making delicious and one of a kind rosquillos. People going to northern Cebu have made it a habit to drop by her store to buy and enjoy the rosquillos. Titay’s Rosquillos gains the prestige of being known domestically and internationally. For foreign nationals who want to get a taste of rosquillos, most Filipino stores abroad have a display of this cookie wunderkind.

While Titay’s is synonymous with rosquillos, the family baking business has expanded to an array of homemade delicacies ranging from galletas de bato, torta, peñato, binangkal, polvoron, mamon, monay, otap, caycay, CPA (chicken pork adobo), bao-bao, elorde and a lot more mouth-watering pastries.

But before you taste other different animals, you got to try out rosquillos first for its charming tongue treat. And because rosquillos recipe can never be replicated in any other home than Liloan.