Make your Noche Buena better than ever with these 18 traditional Filipino Christmas foods. Just know that you will not see any sugar-free or low-carb dishes on this list.
Filipino cuisine is rich, fatty, and packed with hearty ingredients. These tasty Filipino Christmas eats are perfect if you want some exotic comfort food for your holiday menu.
1. Filipino Pork BBQ
Americans usually think of smoked or grilled meats like pulled pork, chicken, and ribs when they hear BBQ. The Filipino version refers to pork cutlets threaded onto skewers and marinated in a sweet sauce.
You grill them to smoky perfection and glaze them with even more BBQ sauce. Street vendors sell this more often than home cooks make it.
Do not worry because making this at home is just as simple as grilling any other meat.
2. Crispy Pata
Crispy pata is a delicious dish featuring a deep-fried whole pork leg. The deep-frying process makes the skin seriously crispy while keeping the meat juicy, tender, savory, and rich.
You dip this unctuous dish in a tangy, salty, and sweet sauce made from vinegar, soy sauce, salt, garlic, and pepper. It usually comes with a freezing cold beer since a Filipino Christmas celebration feels incomplete without one.
3. Buko Salad
You will absolutely love this Filipino dessert if you enjoy fruit salad. It resembles a standard fruit salad since it is coated with cream and loaded with fruits.
The Pinoy version is much more decadent for two specific reasons. It contains popular Filipino delicacies like palm sugar and nata de coco along with coconut strips.
Condensed milk sweetens the creamy dressing. This salad will definitely satisfy your sweet tooth.
4. Filipino-style Pasta Carbonara
Here is a pasta dish we all know and love but with a distinct Filipino twist. The sauce for Pinoy-style carbonara uses cheese and heavy cream unlike the Italian classic.
Italians might frown at the concept. I find this sauce much creamier and richer than the traditional parmesan and egg based sauce.
5. Chicken Macaroni Salad
Chicken macaroni salad is a staple food for Filipino Christmas. This cream-based salad bursts with color and features elbow macaroni, shredded chicken, bell peppers, carrots, raisins, pineapple, and cheese cubes.
You might have noticed that Filipinos love adding raisins to their dishes. It is not an obsession but rather an easy method to add sweetness to a dish that is otherwise purely savory.
6. Filipino-Style Fried Chicken
Pinoy-style fried chicken is perfectly juicy on the inside and deliciously crispy on the outside. Its flavor is truly one of a kind.
Filipinos soak chicken in a mixture of garlic, soy sauce, pepper, salt, and calamansi juice instead of the usual buttermilk marinade.
Calamansi is a local citrus fruit similar to lemons in flavor. This marinade gives the chicken a beautiful combination of spicy, savory, and earthy flavors plus a lovely hint of tartness for balance.
7. Filipino Pancit
China has a huge influence on Filipino cuisine as a neighboring country. Filipinos have adapted their own version of Chinese noodles or pancit because of this.
There are many methods for cooking pancit in the Philippines. Some use thin noodles while others use thick or a combination of both.
You will use thin vermicelli noodles in this recipe and fill them with colorful vegetables and pork cutlets. Yum!
8. Buko Pandan Salad
Let us start with something sweet because Filipinos absolutely love dessert. Buko and pandan are basically the Filipino version of jelly and peanut butter.
Pandan is a plant with sweet smelling leaves while buko refers to young coconut. You combine strips of sweet coconut with pandan flavored jelly in this salad and toss it in a creamy sweet sauce.
This addictive dessert appears on Christmas and all other special occasions.
9. Kare-Kare
Kare-kare will almost certainly be at the top of the list if you ask a local for a recommendation. This wildly savory and rich stew features a thick sauce based on peanuts.
It swims with ox tripe and melt in your mouth beef along with exotic veggies like banana heart, long beans, and bok choy.
You serve kare-kare with a sweet shrimp paste called bagoong and white rice. It is so insanely delicious that eating only one serving is almost impossible.
10. Lechon Cebu
Cebu is a Philippine province famous for its scrumptious food and pristine white sand beaches. Lechon Cebu is a must-try dish from the area featuring a whole pig roasted to crispy goodness.
It offers a unique aromatic taste that no other dish can offer thanks to flavoring from anise, bay leaves, garlic, onions, and lemongrass.
11. Puto Bumbong
Street vendors commonly sell puto bumbong along with bibingka during the Simbang Gabi midnight masses. This rice based delicacy is delightfully chewy and soft with a distinctive purple hue and a mildly sweet flavor.
You garnish it with a mix of muscovado sugar and shredded coconut for crunch and sweetness plus a dab of butter.
12. Lechon Kawali – Crispy Fried Pork Belly
Lechon is the Spanish word for roasted pig and kawali is the Filipino word for frying pan. You typically roast Lechon on a spit but this dish involves deep frying pork belly cutlets to crispy perfection in a pan.
Think again if you believe this is just your typical fried pork dish. You have not had a more addictive piece of fried pork in your life until you try lechon kawali.
13. Bibingka (Filipino Baked Coconut Rice Cakes)
Christmas in the Philippines officially begins on December 16 with the first night of Simbang Gabi even though celebrations start as early as September. Simbang Gabi is a series of midnight masses running every night until Christmas.
There is also bibingka whenever there is Simbang Gabi. This warm rice cake comes garnished with shredded coconut, a dab of butter, and a slice of salted egg.
Street vendors sell bibingka right outside churches to tempt mass goers with the sweet buttery aroma.
14. Lechon Manok (Roasted Chicken)
Lechon manok is probably the most common dish Filipinos serve for lunch and dinner when they lack time to cook. You will commonly see shops in the Philippines selling roasted pork and chicken on every corner.
Making it at home is easy enough even though you will not see these Filipino roast shops in the US. Lemongrass makes the Pinoy version of roasted chicken wildly aromatic.
It also has a wonderful savory and sweet flavor profile from a mix of brown sugar, bay leaves, soy sauce, and fish sauce.
15. Lumpia (Filipino Fried Spring Rolls)
Lumpiang Shanghai is the Filipino take on Chinese fried spring rolls. These are small logs of minced meat that are covered in spring roll wrappers and deep fried until golden.
I must warn you that these are beyond addictive especially when you dip them in ketchup or sweet and sour sauce. You will often see Filipino moms wrapping mountains of lumpia on Christmas Eve morning.
16. Embutido
Embutido means small funnel in English and is a Filipino Christmas dish with a unique cylindrical shape.
It combines bread crumbs, ground pork, minced bell peppers and carrots, sweet pickles, grated cheese, and raisins into a log baked in the oven.
Think of it as the Filipino version of meatloaf with a special surprise in the center. A slice of sausage and hard boiled egg hides inside.
17. Filipino-Style Spaghetti
You can spot Filipino-style spaghetti from a distance. Italians might cringe at it but it is always a hit in the Philippines especially with kids.
No celebration is complete without it. This spaghetti has the same basic components as the traditional version plus some fun extras.
Expect the meat sauce to be studded with cut up hotdogs and much sweeter. Filipinos have a love affair with hotdogs if you have not noticed yet.
The dish is garnished with a generous sprinkling of cheese to contrast the sweet sauce. Cheddar is often used since it is cheaper and more accessible than parmesan.
18. Filipino-Style Pineapple Glazed Ham
It is not a Christmas feast without queso de bola and hamon. These two always show up at Noche Buena which is the Philippine Christmas midnight feast.
The Philippine Christmas ham is sweeter than usual because it is covered in pineapple syrup and a crunchy sugar glaze.
This is why it is commonly paired with queso de bola which translates to ball of cheese. They create a salty and sweet combination together that makes for perfect sandwich filling or finger food.