We test 8 frozen ready-to-eat pork sisig brands based on tang, heat, texture, and overall satisfaction.
Sisig is an iconic Filipino dish that doubles as your Tita’s favorite potluck contribution and your Tito’s favorite pulutan. The parts used in traditional sisig like liver and pig’s face (maskara) lend interesting and unique textures to the dish, making it crispy, chewy, and hearty, while also giving it deep, fatty, and gamey flavors that balance its spicy-tangy seasonings perfectly. And it goes perfectly with beer!
Originating from Pampanga, traditional sisig uses parts of livestock that are usually discarded like chicken liver, the pig’s face and ears, and sometimes even the pig’s brain. The fatty, gamey flavors work well with the dish’s main seasonings: onions, calamansi, and chili.
But it’s not always easy to source these parts, and prepping them takes time and effort. Often, you’ll need to painstakingly remove any hairs left on the skin, boil the pork parts to soften them, and then chop it all up into little pieces for easier frying. This can be a bit of a hassle if you’re just craving it on a normal weeknight, or just want something flavorful and greasy to eat as a pulutan.
This is why nowadays, most restaurants and home cooks will use more accessible, easy to prepare cuts like pork belly, pork shoulder, or leftovers like lechon or bagnet. Many versions of the dish even substitute pork with other proteins like bangus, tofu, oysters, and even processed meats like tocino.
And for those who really don’t have the time or just don’t want to bother, there are plenty of ready-to-eat options that can easily be spiced up to taste just as good as the real thing. We set out to compare the readymade sisig options available at your average supermarket so you can have an affordable sisig experience with minimal effort and maximum satisfaction.
For this taste test, we focused on frozen ready-to-eat sisig. It’s probably the most common readymade sisig you’ll find at your local supermarket. This stuff is already cooked and seasoned, so all you need to do is let it thaw and heat it up on a pan for a quick and easy weeknight dinner.
We placed our winning brands into the following categories:
Note: We cooked all ready-to-eat sisig according to package instructions. If no instructions were provided, we resorted to pan-frying by default.
The most tita-esque of all the brands we tested, if you handed me a plate of this and told me it was homemade I would believe you. Marby specifies that you do not need to use oil to reheat their sisig, since there’s plenty of fat that renders out while cooking. They also ask you to put chopped onions in when you’re almost done cooking, which gives a nice sweetness and crunch to round out the fattiness of the dish.
This one is definitely for the Litid Lovers. Marby’s sisig had the best and most interesting texture, with tender, meaty chunks as well as pleasantly chewy bites of fat, litid (ligaments and tendons) and pork skin—although it’s worth noting that there wasn’t a lot of cartilage. Marby’s sisig also had the most depth of flavor. You can immediately taste the rich, gamey liver as soon as you take your first bite.
Marby lands somewhere above average in terms of price, but considering how good the texture is, we think it’s well worth it to splurge a little. Flavor-wise, there’s a very mild hint of spice, and it leaned more towards savory rather than tangy. A quick addition of chopped chilis and a squeeze of calamansi will do a great job of bumping it up a notch.
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