Pamplina Soup

November 19, 2009 • Hello. I am currently out of the country and unable to respond to comments and e-mails. Rest assured, however, that future posts have been scheduled so new recipes will go live almost everyday during my absence. I'll be back soon with lots of stories and photos. Ciao for now! ~ Connie

Pamplina is a very rich soup, highly aromatic and boldly flavored. And yet, the ingredients are simple and quite few. The cooking procedure is straightforward too so even novice cooks can make it. The secret is in the correct combination of ingredients and the slow simmering. And this soup requires patience — patience that gets well rewarded.

In Spanish, pamplina means trifle or something unimportant. This soup is made with inexpensive cuts of meat, scrap ham bones and vegetables. And I suppose that’s how it got its name. What really flavor this soup are the bits of smoky chorizo. And you don’t really need much because when the chorizo bits simmer along with the rest of the ingredients, they lend their flavor to everything else.

Sopa de Pamplina

What its origins are, I have no idea. It appears though in a couple of cookbooks that purportedly feature Filipino cuisine. At first I thought the name was a misspelling of Pamplona and that’s where the soup originates. I have a strong suspicion that it is a local version of a Spanish soup but I can’t seem to find a reference anywhere to a pamplina soup in Spanish cuisine. So, whatever. I got interested in pamplina when it was served at a birthday party we attended two weekends ago and I promised myself I’d deconstruct it and make my version at home.

You’ll find a few references of pamplina soup on the web — recipes that use ox leg (pata), tripe and one that even includes hotdogs, the latter something I’d rather not include in mine.

Serves 4 to 6.

Ingredients:

about 70 g. of smoky Spanish chorizo (Bilbao or Iberico, either is good), chopped
a small piece of ham bone
1 c. of chopped cooked beef (scrap ham meat, if you have some, will probably taste better)
1 c. of chopped cooked ox tripe
4 cloves of garlic, chopped
1 onion, chopped
1 red bell pepper, cored, seeded and chopped
about 2 c. of shredded cabbage (white cabbage or pechay baguio)
2 tbsps. of olive oil
salt and pepper, to taste

Heat the olive oil in a large pot. Saute the garlic and onion. Add the chopped chorizo, beef (or ham) and tripe. Cook, stirring, until the chorizo bits start to render their color.

Pour in about eight cups of water.

Throw in the ham bone.

Season with a little salt (chorizo is salty and so is the ham bone so go easy on the salt) and pepper.

Bring to the boil then lower the heat, cover and simmer for an hour.

After an hour of simmering, add the bell pepper and cabbage. Simmer for another ten minutes. Serve hot with crusty bread.

October 22, 2009  Print This Post   
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Comments

2 Responses to “Pamplina Soup”
  1. Lisa says:
    November 12, 2009 at 5:32 am

    How do you clean the tripe?

    Reply
  2. Marvin Pamplina says:
    November 16, 2009 at 5:18 pm

    I’d be glad to cook this sometime. Maybe in a gathering of the Pamplina’s (see my surname, hehe). The first and last of my encounter to this is when it was featured in “Katok Mga Misis.”-long long time ago. “Pamplina” may also mean chickweed which is a medicinal plant. With regards to the origin of the name, I don’t think it originated from Pamplona. What i think is that it is the origin of Pamplona (the surname). According to my father, during the Japanese invasion, once a person is proved to be against them, they would kill everyone having that person’s family name. So what they did is that they just changed one of the letters in their surname claiming it is different. However, I did not find proof to such.
    Thanks for posting this.
    Chow…

    Reply
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