Breakfasts to Wake Up For

Imagine if your tapsilog was crispy, not chewy. This twist on Filipino tapa does just that, with a process closer to 

 than your traditional marinated and air-dried beef: It's battered, fried, and glazed in sauce.

 A light coating of cornstarch with some black pepper—that’s it.

 A shallow-fry in a pool of hot oil, just deep enough to cover the thin strips of tapa.

 The classic tapa marinade of garlic, soy sauce, black pepper, and calamansi juice, reduced until thick, syrupy, and concentrated with flavor.

 when making tapa. This recipe makes use of fatty beef belly, which we've made the case for in our 

 You want it thinly sliced, like beef bacon.

Some groceries sell thinly sliced beef belly in packs for 

 and hotpot. Try to avoid sukiyaki cuts—they can vary wildly in terms of thickness and parts used. Better to buy a slab and ask your butcher to slice it for you, or par-freeze it at home to slice yourself.

Crispy Tapa

Tapa Reduction

For Serving

Crispy Beef Tapa

Crispy battered beef belly dressed in garlicky tapa reduction just made your breakfast silog more exciting.

When you add a heap of green onions to gingery, chicken-packed 

 form. The ginger-scallion flavor permeates the entire dish, from the flavorful broth to the shredded chicken, all the way to the extra ginger scallion sauce drizzled on top. Everything else is Hainanese chicken-inspired: crispy chicken skin for texture, soy sauce for roundness, and sliced cucumbers for freshness and crunch. Different flavor, same nourishing hug in a bowl.

For a More Flavorful Broth, Use Chicken Bones

After shredding the chicken, add the chicken bones and scraps back into the broth. Add a cup of water at a time and continue simmering, skimming any scum and impurities that arise on the surface.

Want a clear broth? Pour it through a fine mesh strainer before using.

If you have the time, scrape off the extra fat from the chicken skin before frying. You'll get crispier and more brittle chicken skin for it.

Ginger Scallion Sauce

Chicken Broth

Crispy Chicken Skin

Arroz Caldo

Make Ginger Scallion Sauce

Prepare Chicken and Broth

Cook Arroz Caldo

Hainanese Chicken Arroz Caldo

Transform your classic arroz caldo to a Hainanese chicken-flavored porridge by adding green onions.

 may seem bland, if not tasteless. But it makes up for its lack of flavor with a high melting point—kesong puti holds its shape when pan-fried, forming a toasty crust and a soft, oozing interior.

While warm, dress your kesong puti with a honey and flaky salt. This transforms the humble cheese into a lavish sweet-salty snack. It's an approach inspired by Middle Eastern 

 a similar semi-firm, squeaky cheese. Chili flakes and lemon juice add an exciting zip.

Kesong Puti

Kesong Puti and Honey on Toasted Pandesal

Mild-flavored kesong puti becomes a canvas for flavor when pan-fried and dressed in honey, salt, chili flakes, and lemon juice.

This extra-chocolatey champorado does away with the distractions of milk or sugar, relying solely on two kinds of chocolate to deliver flavor. And with less ingredients (just chocolate and rice!), this version becomes simpler to make than your traditional 

A mix of your favorite dark and milk chocolate creates a rich, creamy champorado that's deeply flavored and perfectly sweetened—pure, unadulterated double chocolate in every spoonful.

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Filipino champorado has roots in Mexican 

, a hot beverage made with chocolate, sugar, milk, and masa harina, the corn flour used to make tortillas.

The chocolate drink reached Philippine shores in the 17th century through the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade. Since we didn't have masa, locals used malagkit (glutinous rice) instead. The drink eventually evolved into a sweet chocolate porridge to enjoy for breakfast or on rainy days.

Tablea makes a fine bowl of champorado. It's pure unsweetened chocolate, and you can't get any more chocolatey than that. But it's also extremely bitter.

s milk and sugar to balance out the bitter cacao. It's borderline inedible without them. However, you can go overboard and hurt the champorado's flavor and texture. Too much milk will water it down. Too much sugar will stifle the chocolate's bitter, roasted notes.

We wanted to make the most chocolate-centric champorado possible, sticking to just chocolate and rice as much as we can. Was there a way skip the hassle of milk and sugar? What if the milkiness and sweetness came from the chocolate itself?

After a series of chocolate experiments, we found that 

 made a deeply flavored, purely chocolate champorado with the perfect pitch of sweetness.

 with at least 85% cacao brings the bittersweet, mildly tangy notes that we love from tablea.

works as a substitute for sugar and milk. It adds a milky, mellow sweetness with hints of caramel and vanilla, all while adding points to the chocolate flavor as well. A win-win!

Choose a dark and milk chocolate you love—the kind you'd buy an extra bar of to snack on. If you can't find 85% dark chocolate, pick up a bar at the 75–80% range.

Now that you have your chocolate, all you need is glutinous rice and water. Once your rice starts to thicken, chop up the chocolates and stir it in until completely melted. No milk, no sugar. Just creamy, chewy rice in pure melted double chocolate: the ultimate champorado.

Champorado

Double Chocolate Champorado

Instead of tablea, this ultra-rich champorado gets all its flavor from dark and milk chocolate. No additional milk or sugar required.

 Singapore and Malaysia have kaya: a sweet, creamy coconut-egg custard perfumed with 

 leaves. Kopi tiams (coffee shops) slather it between charcoal-grilled bread as kaya toast, with soft-boiled eggs and a cup of kopi waiting on the side.

Kaya is readily available in Singapore and Malaysia, but not so much in the Philippines. Good thing you can make it from scratch in 15 minutes, and it comes out just as great, if not better!

Local coconut jam or coco jam is also called 

In Tagalog, bao (pronounced ba-o, with two syllables) means "coconut shell".

Minatamis na bao has a dark brown color and a syrupy viscosity. You make it by cooking down coconut milk and sugar until it's reduced and caramelized—almost like a coconut dulce de leche. We have a recipe for it 

Kaya has the same ingredients as minatamis na bao, but with the addition of eggs and pandan leaves. These give the spread a custard-like texture and a nutty fragrance from the pandan.

Kaya comes in colors ranging from golden brown to vibrant green. Singapore separates kaya into two types: caramel-colored 

The color you end up with will depend on two things: the sugar you’re using and how you infuse the pandan.

Kaya will pick up the color of the sugar you’re using. 

 gives you a pale base and a clean sweetness that works great for green kaya. 

 like coconut, palm, and muscovado sugar will result in colors between a caramel tan to a chocolate-like brown.

 solid brown bricks of palm sugar similar to our local panutsa. The boiled-down palm sugar takes on a deeper, almost smoky flavor that you won't get from regular sugar.

To keep the ingredients accessible, this kaya recipe uses white sugar with a bit of 

 This combination gives the kaya a golden brown color and a wisp of coconut sugar's caramel-like depth.

Most homemade kaya recipes steep pandan leaves in the coconut mixture. It's what we do in this recipe, too. This is enough to infuse its flavor, but not its green color. You will still end up with sugar-colored kaya.

To get green kaya, you will need to use fresh pandan extract. Blitz chopped pandan leaves with a bit of water in a blender or food processor until you get a mushy green mixture. Strain the pulp—the fragrant green liquid left over is your fresh extract, which you can now use to flavor 

This kaya recipe needs only four ingredients: coconut cream, egg yolks, your sugar of choice, and pandan leaves or extract.

For foolproof smooth and creamy kaya, cook it over a 

 This ensures that you're cooking over gentle heat the entire time. If you cook it straight in the pot, you risk curdling your eggs and forming lumps in your spread.

If you're lazy, you can actually toss all your ingredients in the double boiler for a one-bowl kaya situation. But we suggest whisking the yolks separately, tempering them with hot coconut cream, and adding the mixture at the last step. This makes your kaya extra rich, velvety, and creamy—almost like caramel fudge—ready to glide over toasted bread, cakes, and pastries.

Homemade Kaya (Coconut-Egg Jam)

Make kaya toast for breakfast with this rich, velvety-smooth, pandan-infused coconut jam. It only takes 15 minutes!

, you make adobo flakes. It's how Glenda Barretto, the restauranteur behind 

 invented it in the 70's. She made the toasted flakes for her father, 

 by shredding leftover adobo and frying it until dry.

in Mindanao. Made with meat or fish, the shredded and dried flakes are used as a topping for 

Most home cooks still make adobo flakes when they need to clean out the fridge. But what if you wanted to make adobo flakes 

This recipe makes a simple chicken adobo destined for adobo flakes. Boneless thighs save you the trouble of picking out bones while flaking the meat. How you shred your chicken is up to you, whether it's long, meaty strands; short, almost ground-up floss; or something in between. Serve these crispy flakes with garlic rice for breakfast, over lugaw for texture, or with banana leaf-wrapped rice for homemade pastil.

Chicken Adobo

Adobo Sauce

Adobo Flakes

Boneless Chicken Adobo Flakes

Make crispy, flavor-packed flakes out of this quick and easy boneless chicken adobo.

To get a taste of Hong Kong cuisine, you need to visit a 

 These 1950s-style post-war diners emerged as a reponse to British influence, resulting in eclectic Canto-Western dishes now considered icons of Hong Kong: think pineapple buns, egg tarts, milk tea, and deep-fried French toast.

To make Hong Kong-style French toast at home, start with a triple-decker sandwich of milk bread and peanut butter. You then dip it in egg, then deep-fry the whole thing until crisp and golden brown on all sides.

Before serving, finish your toast like a local: drizzle it with condensed milk or maple syrup (or both!), then top it all off with a big slab of butter. If that sounds over the top, trust us and just do it. You'll thank us right after your first bite.

Hong Kong-style French toast

Hong Kong-Style French Toast

Hong Kong's take on French toast layers milk bread and peanut butter, soaks it in egg, and fries the whole thing into a glorious golden brown treat.

We take the versatile oven toaster back to its roots, but a notch higher. On the heels of the crowd favorite, avocado toast, our ricotta toast serves as a great alternative for days when you’re feeling naughty. Our toast seamlessly combines the fruity sweetness of apples, pungency of 

Don’t be daunted by the lengthy cooking period it takes to prepare the apple butter—once you’ve cooked it down, you can store leftovers in the fridge for future snacking.

So whether you’re feeling peckish for a light snack or if you’re looking for a grown up appetizer, our recipe for toast is an easy solution to your needs. We promise that all your friends and family will love this toast (plus no one needs to know how easy it was!).

Apple Butter

Ricotta Toast

Make Apple Butter

Make Ricotta Toast

Ricotta Toast with Tuyo and Apple Butter

Make this fancy toast for breakfast with your trusty oven toaster!

Long before Italians knew what a tomato was, Roman shepherds made cacio e pepe, meaning "cheese and pepper", with aged Pecorino, black pepper, and dried pasta from their sacks. The dish eventually made its way to restaurants and households as one of the simplest Italian pastas you can make—no skillet sauce required.

Here, we brought the flavors of the Roman pasta dish to an even simpler medium: scrambled eggs.

No need to fuss over tradition and use Pecorino Romano; save it for your pasta. Parmesan cheese works just as well in this recipe. (If you have Parmigiano Reggiano, even better.)

Cacio e Pepe Scrambled Eggs

Like the Italian pasta, these scrambled eggs get their flavor from heaps of cheese and black pepper.

Ever since we hacked Ate Rica's bacsilog a few years back, we've been 

. Not a month goes by that someone in the team doesn't ask, what else can we put that cheese sauce on? The answer: everything. And we prove that once again in this bacsilog-style egg drop sandwich recipe. 

We take the popular Korean street food, inject it with a classic American breakfast combo, and add a Pinoy-style twist with a sweet cheese sauce. The result is a no-frills sandwich that'll get you excited enough to get out of bed just to crawl right back in it.

Cheese Sauce

Sandwich

Bacsilog-Style Egg Drop Sandwich

Inspired by Ate Rica's bacsilog, this bacsilog-style egg drop sandwich is an American breakfast sandwich loaded with sweet cheese sauce.

 If cooked poorly or sliced too thick, the lean cut would end up leaving your jaw with a workout.

This tapa defies tradition by switching out sirloin with affordable, fat-heavy beef belly. And instead of marinating overnight, the meat gets its seasoning from a quick braise in soy sauce and vinegar. This softens the beef belly's fat and tough meat. The result: a tender, flavorful tapa coated in just enough sauce to let the beefy flavor shine.

Modern Beef Belly Tapa

Traditional sirloin can give your jaw a workout. This modern tapa recipe uses thinly sliced beef belly for soft, flavorful meat every time.

You probably grew up eating tapa this way, piled on garlic rice with a sunny-side-up egg for breakfast. Classic tapa calls for sirloin—a firm but flavorful cut. Compared to fatty beef belly, which we use in our modern tapa recipe, sirloin is super lean. Without fat to give it moisture, it can get dry and tough when overcooked.

An overnight marinade in a soy-garlic-sugar mixture softens the sirloin while providing flavor and chew. A quick pan-fry caramelizes the beef and reduces the marinade to a shiny, dark glaze. Round out the salty-sweet beef with atchara or vinegar.

Classic Sirloin Beef Tapa

This is the classic sirloin beef tapa you grew up eating for breakfast. Serve with garlic rice and crispy fried eggs for the perfect tapsilog.

It’s 2022, and the Korean food boom in Manila has not died down. Instead, it’s stronger than ever, and you can order everything from Korean fried chicken, to Korean hotdogs, to Korean barbeque everywhere. It’s invading our grocery shelves too, in the form of Highlands Gold Korean-Style BBQ Corned Beef. 

The flavor is one of two new delicious variants they’ve just released, including the spiced Black Pepper Corned Beef, and is bound to wind up in your grocery cart. To take it just a little bit further, we’ve made a corned beef bibimbap breakfast bowl with it that would be great for breakfast. 

Corned Beef

Bibimbap Sauce

Rice

Mung Bean Sprouts

Assembly 

Corned Beef Bibimbap Breakfast Bowl

Make breakfast more exciting with a corned beef bibimbap bowl. All you need is rice, veggies, and Highlands Gold Korean-Style BBQ Corned Beef.

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 like Rodic's, the legendary diner from UP Diliman's Shopping Center. Who else would think of chopping their tapa into corned beef-like shreds? It looks less like your textbook classic tapa and more like 

 showered over a pile of rice on a stainless steel plate. But it's this unique approach to tapa—flaky, tender, seasoned with anise—that has drawn crowds to the hole-in-the-wall since 1949.

Of all our tapa recipes, this style takes the longest. Here we use beef shank, a cheap yet flavorful cut that's low in fat—we want our chopped beef to be as meaty as possible. A long braise in an anise-spiked marinade injects the shank with flavor while breaking it down into softer, shreddable meat. It's then chopped and fried, caramelized in its braising liquid until flavorful and glossy.

Rodic's-Style Chopped Beef Tapa

Here's how to make beef tapa inspired by Quezon City's beloved Rodic's tapsilog, which uses anise-flavored chopped beef.

Shakshuka is a hearty Middle Eastern and North African breakfast of eggs poached in a tomato and bell pepper sauce. Traditionally, it's served straight from the skillet with pita bread.

This recipe adds rice (how Asian of us!), which soaks up the shakshuka sauce. Cooking it low and slow makes sure that every bit of rice is perfectly cooked and coated in the sauce. It's a crispy bottom away from becoming a vegetarian paella. Add color and flavor with crumbled feta, chili flakes, and fresh greens like spinach or cilantro.

Shakshuka Skillet Rice with Feta Cheese

To call these rolls are “chocolate-y” is an understatement. These rolls are chocolate itself, from the buns to the filling and glaze! Using tablea lends a deeper, darker, and more pronounced chocolate flavor.

If it’s your first time making bread, don’t worry: rolls are actually very forgiving and easy to work with. It helps to have a stand mixer, but making it by hand—with patience and arm muscle—is not impossible.

Dough

Filling

Glaze

Tablea Chocolate Rolls

These tablea rolls taste like pure chocolate. The dough? Chocolate. The filling? Chocolate. The glaze? You guessed it.

 for breakfast. First, he scoops freshly cooked rice into a stainless steel bowl. Then goes the toppings, piled over the rice: 

 tuna straight out of the can. Lastly, a fried egg with a jiggly yolk to finish. He tries to slide it out of the pan to complete the picture-perfect bowl, but the egg lands yolk-first with a sad plop.

 with a runny sunny-side-up, but go fry up a crispy-edged egg if you prefer some texture. The kimchi and anchovies can be bought from a Korean grocery store. The 

 or pickled onions, are simple enough to make at home—we used 

Ingredients

Jin’s Breakfast Tuna Bibimbap

Champorado is a Filipino start-of-the-day staple that almost doubles as a dessert: chocolate rice porridge made with sticky rice (malagkit) and chocolate (usually tablea). It's creamy, sweet, and filling, best eaten on a cold day.

This recipe guides you through how to cook a perfect version of traditional tablea champorado. No fancy ingredients, no out-of-this-world techniques. A tried-and-tested method to make champorado that gives you the pure flavor of cocoa and the pure texture of malagkit in a thick, creamy soup.

Tablea Champorado (Filipino Chocolate Rice Porridge)

Here's how to cook champorado, the rich Pinoy chocolate rice porridge, using tablea.

Let’s be real, the real star of Tapa King isn’t their King—it’s the sweet and spicy Tapa Queen. This recipe hacks the perfect ratio of chili to sugar to make your tapa taste exactly like it. Serve with garlic fried rice and atchara.

Tapa King-Inspired Sweet-Spicy Tapa Queen

As the Nicki Minaj line goes: "You could be the king, but watch Tapa Queen conquer."

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Thick, savory breakfast toasts are a huge staple in Asian countries like South Korea and Japan. This savory egg & cream French toast recipe is a cross between those dishes and the French croque monsieur. It comes together easily; all you need is soft bread, brioche or your preferred type, and a few ingredients such as cheese, eggs, and butter.

What makes this toast richer is the addition of 

. While french toasts are usually just dipped in milk or butter, the extra step of soaking the bread with cream and spices ensures that each slice has a velvety texture, and is steeped in the flavor of the savory marinade.

Savory Egg & Cream French Toast

Make this creamy and savory French toast recipe, a cross between French Croque monsieur and Japanese and Korean honey toast.

Smoothie bowls were all the rage a few years back. It's healthy and easy to eat, but the good ones are always expensive. We'll prove in this breakfast smoothie under P200 recipe that you don't need strawberries and chia seeds to make it delicious; nor do you have to go to a hip brunch place to enjoy a well-made one.

This breakfast smoothie bowl recipe uses ripe mango, papaya, and bananas; all of which you can easily get from your local fruit vendor. To make sure your smoothie is thick (you're not making a drink here), it's necessary to freeze the fruits overnight. Don't sleep on the granola (or cereal)—you'll love (and look for) that contrasting crunch.

Mango-Banana-Papaya Breakfast Smoothie Bowl

You don't need to be fancy when making a breakfast smoothie bowl under P200. All you need is a blender and a complementing combo of fruits.

Overnight oats may be a quicker alternative to other breakfast options, but it's certainly packed with health benefits. Avocado is one of the go-to fruits for many health-conscious people today. It's become so popular that you're bound to see a toast or rice bowl version of it on a menu. For most of us, it's been a common dessert staple that's very reminiscent of our childhood. But this sweet avocado oats recipe recognizes those nostalgic roots and brings them back to the healthy eater today. 

Sweet Avocado Overnight Oats with Honey and Almonds

We’ve created a version of sweet avocado oats using Quaker Oats that’s a grown-up, nutritious take on our childhood favorite.

This recipe marries bibingka with another comfort dish—waffles. A simple homemade bibingka batter comes together with rice flour, brown sugar, and coconut milk. We also decided to brighten it up ourselves with some salted caramel, using some salted eggs to bring out more of the caramel’s buttery flavor.

Since you’re working with rice flour, the waffles will be on the richer side. For crispier waffles, add 1 to 2 minutes to the cooking time.

To Finish

One-Bowl Bibingka Waffles with Salted Egg and Caramel

Overnight oats are definitely the most efficient way to get in tons of nutrients before your day begins. Because assembly happens at night, all you need to do in the morning to get a complete breakfast is to open up a pre-prepped jar, and dive in. So easy, that you can down a whole jar of the stuff on your commute, or while catching up on work emails at your desk.

And if you have an overnight oats habit already going, you might find it challenging to create new recipes daily. Up your game and evolve past the regular granola-fruits-superfoods combo with our collaboration with Quaker Oats.

These halo-halo flavored oats add ube to the soaking milk, adding instant sweetness and flavor, with the plus of a visual delight once that ube colors up the oats. Layer some saba and macapuno to make it feel as if you’re having dessert for breakfast, and this recipe alone will be worth waking up for.

If you like this overnight oats recipe, visit http://quakeroats.ph/ for even more ideas, or share your own on 

 using the hashtag #QuakerOvernightBreakfastClub.

Halo-Halo Overnight Oats

It’s unclear when it happened, but locals have turned the universal Cuba libre into something that is now inherently part of Philippine drinking culture.

A bottle of good old Tanduay rum and cans of Coke will share a table with a bucket of ice cold San Miguel beer on any given night, when locals are at their regular haunt, gathering over the drunken dishes of the night

 The Filipino rum and coke is a simple concoction that brings on immediate, down-the-hatch, inebriated satisfaction. The sweet notes of each beverage come together to make a drink that is almost confection-like on the palate.

Here’s the dessert version of the ever-reliable libation: crisp waffles aerated with Coke, which has the light and lingering presence of the soda, and a dangerously addictive rum syrup that’s as thick as caramel, and as boozy as last night’s drink.