Bringing Home the Zubuchon

Zubuchon
frozen, Php490 per kilo

There was a time, when I was a little girl when Sunday meant lechon day. Back then, every Sunday, when my mom comes home from work for lunch, she would bring home a kilo of fresh lechon. Her suki would bring the choice cuts of lechon, still hot and piled high with unfairly generous amounts of red-golden crispy crackly pork skin and lots of liver sauce, to the clinic. That was one of my memories about food and family that I will cherish forever.

We still do have lechon in the house, once in a while. I, no longer, but the rest of the family still enjoys the occasional lechon treat. That was why when I came from Cebu, a couple of months ago, my pasalubong for them was a kilo of Zubuchon.

I bought the Zubuchon from the Mactan Airport departure area. I meant to buy the fresh version but I was 5 minutes late from the time the last delivery got sold out, so I bought the frozen Zubuchon instead. Not getting the fresh lechon was a little disheartening, actually, but I convinced myself that it was better that way because my family most likely would not be eating the lechon until the next day.

When I reheated it come eating time, the frozen Zubuchon, then thawed, immediately redeemed itself. First of all, it did not look to pretty frozen, I thought I was getting scrap portions of the lechon. But when I peeled off the cling-film and laid it on the baking dish, I realized that it was a beautiful beautiful cut of pork.

I followed the reheating instructions enclosed in the Zubuchon box, placing the defrosted lechon in a 375F oven. It took at least half an hour until the skin crisped up. I did not even have to fry it. What I also liked about this method is that after reheating, excess oil came out from the lechon resulting in a lechon a little less greasy than it would have been had it been eaten fresh.

Comments

i♥pinkc00kies said…
woooow!!! lechon for the win :)
Unknown said…
i've been to cebu a number of times and i always forget to try the zubuchon. what's funny is that it's in manila that i first had a taste of it courtesy of my brother and his family who went there for a visit