INdulge: It's heating up. Popular Filipino icy dessert is best thing I ate in Indy this week

Indianapolis Star

21 hours ago

We're starting to get some hot and humid days in Indianapolis, which some people allegedly enjoy.
While summer is, to me, essentially one long Sisyphean effort to not sweat through my clothes, I must confess the season has one huge thing going for it — cold desserts. For this week's INdulge, I cooled off with the treasured sweet of a far-off nation. Brain freeze notwithstanding, it was certainly:
If there is another dish like halo-halo, I certainly haven't encountered it in my (admittedly brief and very Middle American) existence. The popular Filipino dessert is a technicolor jumble of shaved ice, condensed milk or coconut milk, a scoop of ube ice cream and — so it would seem to someone eating halo-halo for the first time — pretty much whatever else the person making it feels like throwing in. On Sundays at the south side's Philippine Cultural and Community Center, you can find a lovely rendition prepared by Ardys Concession ($9).
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There is no set-in-stone recipe for halo-halo. But many modern renditions, like the one at Ardys, feature scarlet jelly-like bulbs of kaong palm fruit, cooked saba plantains, Filipino leche flan that's a touch denser than its more well-known Spanish counterpart, agar gelatin cubes called gulaman, sweetened kidney beans and bits of toasted flattened rice, or pinipig.
Those ingredients and a few others await at the bottom of the glass. That's also where the thick, sweet milk concentrates, so be sure to mix your halo-halo well before digging in — easier said than done considering the top half of the dessert is already mushrooming out of its dish.
While it may make for awkward consumption, that combining process effectively defines halo-halo. The dessert gets its name from the Filipino word haluhalo, which roughly translates to 'mixed together.' Many scholars trace halo-halo back to pre-World War II Japanese Filipinos, who adapted the Japanese class of shaved ice desserts called kakigōri by adding syrup-boiled Filipino mung beans rather than Japanese azuki beans.
Filipino cuisine largely mirrors the Philippines' history of foreign intervention and immigration. The island nation endured centuries of Spanish imperial rule before declaring independence on June 12, 1898, then spent a half-century under a United States Insular Government and a few bloody years of Japanese occupation. Many Filipino soldiers and civilians were killed under both regimes.
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Over time, Latin and Asian culinary traditions intersected. Since the creation of halo-halo, Filipinos have incorporated ingredients like kaong and saba, ultimately arriving at the splendid hodgepodge I recently downed too quickly at Ardys.
The sweet milk, ube and shaved ice form a faintly fruity glue that marries together a seemingly incongruous spread of flavors and textures. The crunch of half-melted ice and nutty pinipig meets wobbling gulaman and gilded chunks of flan that may sound like overkill but, in my experience, went down just fine. Where one bite delivered candy shop levels of saccharine, the next brought starchy kidney beans and plantain.
It's an unusual assembly of ingredients to a Westerner like me, but halo-halo makes a strong case for, literally, mixing things up now and again (side note: if anyone knows how to mix a towering glass of halo-halo without looking like you're using a spoon for the first time in your life, see my email address below).
What: Halo-halo, $9
Where: Ardys Concession (currently open Sunday only, see Facebook page for updated hours to come), 4141 S. East St., [phone], facebook.com/Ardys-Concession