One of the most filling and satisfying #meryenda the Bicolano cuisine has to offer. Pinakro is a Filipino snack dish that is made with saba bananas slowly cooked in coconut milk until tender then sweetened with sugar.
This is what my childhood teatime snacks looks like, growing up with a Bicolana grandmother I got used to having snacks like our post today, something cooked in coconut milk and sugar. She loves making this every single day, a laborious process that needs a lot of manual effort like grating coconuts, extracting the milk out of it, light up a wood fire then cook. For them it’s the only way as they grew up with it, that is why even though it takes her 2 hours just to prepare a snack, its normal for them but the results is nothing you can compare to today’s methods, ingredients are freshly sourced and made and no shortcuts in the process giving it a better outcome.
Pinakro is a Bicolano dish, it is also called as saba sa gata, ginataang saging or ginataang saba in other regions. Pinakro though is known to be prepared with saba bananas, this word in the Bicolano dialect can also be referred to other starchy root crops like taro, cassava, and breadfruit where it is cooked similarly with sugar. It can be consumed warm or chilled. Today I won’t be able to recreate the exact taste of how my grandmother did it, it’s not smoky since I used a stove top as opposed to wood fire, it’s not as tasty since I used canned coconut milk but one thing for sure is that we both made this and my other recipes with love, this Pinakro snack is as good as it gets to today’s modern standards.
