Dagmay or Laing is a dried taro leaves cooked in coconut milk is a popular dish in the Philippines particularly in Leyte. I have been trying to cook this dish for a while now using different recipes, but nothing compares to the Spicy Laing Recipe that I recently learned from a friend.This is one of the dishes wherein availability of ingredients can be an issue to some. Fortunately, there are packaged dried taro leaves nowadays, and I can easily grab them from Filipino stores. It is nice to have some dried taro stalks in the pack though. As for the “gata”, I used canned coconut milk and cream.

This is the simplest of all the recipes that I have tried; it also tastes really good. Instead of using “bagoong” or shrimp paste to add flavor, I got some salted dried fish (daing). You may use any kind of salted dried fish, but I will recommend dried “labahita” because it has more meat compared to the others. I also used a ton of Thai chili to spice-up this dish. It is all up to you if you prefer a Spicy Laing as indicated in this recipe.

The dish’s main ingredients are taro stem and leaf cooked in coconut milk, salted with fermented shrimp or fish bagoong. It is also heavily spiced with red hot chilies called siling labuyo (“Bird’s eye chili”).

25 pieces gabi (taro) leaves, dried and shredded

1/2 kilo pork, diced

5 cloves garlic, minced

1/4 cup shrimp bagoong

2 tablespoons ginger, minced

2 red onions, chopped

5 jalapeno pepper, sliced

1 cup coconut cream (katang gata)

1/2 teaspoon monosodium glutamate (MSG)

2 cups coconut milk (gata)

2 tablespoons of oil

1 teaspoon salt

1. In a casserole, sauté garlic, ginger and onions then add the pork.

2. Mix in the gabi leaves.

3. Pour in the coconut milk (gata) and bring to a boil then simmer for 15 minutes.

4. Add jalapeno, bagoong, salt and MSG and simmer for another 5 minutes.

5. Add the coconut cream and continue to simmer until oil comes out of the cream.

6. Serve hot with plain white rice.