4-in-1 (+1)

My friends love balbacua (ox-tail soup (stew?)). I always counter that if I have to go to the trouble of tenderizing ox tail, I might as well go the extra mile and make kare-kare, with vegetables in creamy peanut sauce, served alongside sautéed fermented shrimp paste. There just isn’t much flavor in ox tail — texture, yes, but I find it terribly one-dimensional.

So, have I had a change of heart? Not really. I had ordered a whole tail from my suki without realizing that the thing amounted to a lot, enough to feed a small platoon. Besides, I recalled something a casual acquaintance once told me after a case or two of Red Horse. The secret to good balbacua, he had offered (because I do not remember asking), is sibót.

Huh?

It’s a mixture of Chinese medicinal herbs, he added, but more than that he could not elaborate. When I finally came upon sibót some years later, it did not help that the packet it came in offered no information about what the stuff was composed of, much less how to use it. I bought one anyway. Stuck in the pantry, it was promptly forgotten. Until last week, when I decided to make a go of making balbacua. The expiry date was a good six years ago, so I thought it best to buy a new pack (actually, two: the 40-gram pack similar to the one I threw away, and the 10-gram Metro house brand that cost at least a third).

A packet of sibót typically contains Chinese foxglove, licorice, and lovage roots, and goji berries. I say “typically” based on some quick Googling. In any case, the house brand did not include goji berries.

Pa was cool to the dish (Him: “You should have made kare-kare.” Me: “But we just had some the other day!”). My balbacua-loving friends were more enthusiastic and pronounced it very good.

“Good how?” I said.

“It’s balbacua,” they said, “it’s supposed to be good!”

“Thank you; you’re very helpful.”

My concern was that the Chinese herbs would be overpowering (not at all, even if they were pressure-cooked with the meat for an hour). Just goes to show how much I know about balbacua, huh? Maybe they are essential to this dish, and I’m just the last person to hear about it. After all, if the local Metro carries two brands of sibót, one of them in-house, then there must be a market for it. If only I can say the same of hon-dashi. Come to think of it, that, most probably, was what made my balbacua taste extra good.