Ilocos Empanada

The Ilocos empanada is not the Spanish pastry it descends from. The dough is rice flour coloured orange with annatto, rolled thin, filled with grated green papaya, mung bean sprouts and a length of garlicky Vigan or Batac longganisa, then an egg is cracked in and the whole thing folded, crimped and dropped into deep oil. It comes out crisp, orange and translucent with fat, and is eaten standing up with sugarcane vinegar poured in through the bitten corner. Vigan's version leans on the sour sausage; Batac's is greasier and more filling. Both are made to order in a few minutes at open-front stalls.

What you actually see

• The orange crust - rice-flour dough coloured with annatto, fried until crisp and blistered.
• The egg cracked to order - a whole egg broken into the filling just before the pastry is folded.
• Vigan longganisa - the short, fat, garlic-and-vinegar sausage that goes inside.
• Sukang Iloko - the local sugarcane vinegar poured in as you eat rather than dipped.

When to go

Year-round, and best in the late afternoon and evening when the stalls around Vigan's plaza fire up and the frying is constant. Eat it standing at the stall within a minute of it coming out of the oil; it does not survive being carried anywhere. Batac's empanadaan runs a cluster of stalls in one place.

Honest expectations

It is deep-fried and heavy, and one is usually enough. Quality varies sharply between stalls in the same row: a slow stall means a pastry that has sat, and a sat empanada is limp and oily. The queue at the popular ones around the Vigan plaza runs long in the evening. Vegetarians should know the sausage is not optional in the standard version, though some stalls will make it without.

Nearby

Vigan's colonial streets are around the plaza stalls; Batac and Paoay are an hour north.