The Spy in the Sandwich

Monday, January 20, 2025

11:44 AM | How to Make Baye-Baye

If you hail from Bayawan, down at the southern bend of Negros Oriental, chances are you have grown up eating the city’s foremost delicacy—the baye-baye. Ian has maternal roots in Bayawan, and spent a significant part of his childhood there before the family moved for good to Dumaguete in 1980. He grew up eating the baye-baye, will trust only the ones made by the family of Manang Julia Occena of Barangay Villareal [formerly Balabag]—and until today, he has very specific tastes that determine for him which baye-baye is the real deal.

“Don’t eat the popular and commercial ones you find readily available in stores,” he says with a passion. “They’re rubbish.”

My mother Fennie with Manang Julia in Bayawan in 2017

Manang Julia's baye-baye

The baye-baye is made from roasted glutinous rice, coconut, and sugar that are pounded or ground together, and is often mistaken to be the local equivalent of the espasol. It is not. It is its own unique thing. It is also actually not native to Bayawan, but has roots in Pavia, Iloilo. There was a significant migration of Ilonggos to Bayawan at the turn of the 20th century, owing to agricultural opportunities, which is why many Bayawanons speak Kiniray-a, and baye-baye became a local delicacy. The Bayawan variety though is more starchy, while the Iloilo original is more sticky. [They’re also finished differently, with the Iloilo baye-baye shaped into a roll, while the Bayawan baye-baye is made into a sandwich-shaped cake.]

Ian insists on eating it fresh—because the delicacy quickly turns bad after a day of storage. “Fresh baye-baye is soft and pillowy,” Ian says. He also insists that its stickiness should be well-balanced with the pinipig powder that coats the entire thing.

A few years ago, in 2018, Ian’s family found themselves back in Bayawan for a visit—and somehow also found themselves making a trek to old Balabag, to search out Manang Julia where she still lived in her advanced years in her hut, already blind from old age—but still directing her family to make the delicacy that has been their tradition for generations. The baye-baye they bought that day in 2018 still retained the same sticky goodness from memory. Last year, one member of Manang Julia’s family came over to Dumaguete to demonstrate the making of baye-baye at Adorno Galeria y Café at the Locsin Heritage House, masterminded by proprietor Jansen Tan, with the whole event made possible by the Bayawan City Tourism Office, and through the efforts of Pristine Martinez-Raymond, the first lady of the city.

For one day last August, Manang Mercy Barroca let us into her world of baye-baye making. We watched her hands mix glutinous rice and coconut into something more than food: a story, a memory, a taste of heritage. Manang Mercy’s reputation preceded her: she carried not just the skill but the heart of her in-laws’ legacy, a lineage intertwined with the rhythms of mortar and pestle, with the scent of toasted rice hanging in the air.

The stage for this demonstration was set with care. In the center stood the tools of her trade: the “lusokan,” a mortar and pestle made from casay wood. Casay, Manang Mercy explained, is not just a traditional implement; it was necessity. Other woods, though abundant, cannot promise the food-safe quality that casay does. And like any artist, Manang Mercy’s tools carried their own history—her mortar was twenty years old; the pestle was sixty. It was a lineage of objects meeting a lineage of hands.

To understand baye-baye is to begin with the grain. Glutinous rice, whole and unassuming, will find its place in the “kalaha,” the wok. Over steady flame, Manang Mercy stirred the ingredients, her movements deliberate, patient. Soon the grains turned golden, releasing a nutty fragrance that danced through the air and signaled their transformation. These toasted grains, tinged with fire, were milled into a fine powder, soft as talcum.

But baye-baye does not rest on rice alone. There is the coconut, grated and cooked down in its milk with brown sugar until it becomes caramelized perfection. The mixture, dark as molasses and glistening with unctuous richness, held the promise of flavor. “It shouldn’t be dry,” Manang Mercy said. “It should still shine.”

The marriage of these ingredients is where the craft truly begins. The glutinous rice flour and the caramelized coconut are mixed in the lusokan, where they are pounded and rotated in a ritualistic rhythm. No white streaks of flour should remain; no hint of separation should betray the harmony of the ingredients.

Manang Mercy demonstrating how to make baye-baye

Mixing baye-baye ingredients in a demonstration at Adorno Cafe

Manang Mercy worked with quiet confidence. Her hands guided the pestle, her movements precise yet unhurried. She knew when to stop, when to let the mixture rest, and when to press forward. In her hands, the lusokan seemed alive, an extension of her will. When the texture was just right—smooth and pliable—Manang Mercy reached for a rectangular plastic container, its surface dusted with flour. She pressed the mass into it, shaping it with a sandok until it took the form of a rectangle. With a practiced flip, she plopped it onto a plate, where it laid like a gift. The final act was a careful slicing the delicacy into squares, each piece a testament to the culinary craft that birthed it.

In a world rushing toward convenience, where food often loses its soul in the quest for speed, Manang Mercy, with her carrying on the traditional way of making baye-baye, stood as beacon of patience, of reverence for tradition. Her baye-baye was more than a snack; it was a connection to the past, a bridge to the future. The lusokan, the casay wood, the golden rice—each element held a fragment of memory, each strike of the pestle an affirmation that some things are worth preserving. Bayawan’s cultural stewards understood this, which is why they facilitated that demonstration. Baye-baye, humble as it may seem, is a symbol of resilience, of community, of the enduring power of tradition.

As we left Adorno Café, the scent of toasted rice and caramelized coconut still clung to the air, a reminder that sometimes the most profound stories are told not in words but in the simple, deliberate act of making something with love, and from tradition.

Labels: food, heritage, negros