Press Kit

A Tale of Turkey and the Deep Fried Pig

By Lori B. Baltazar
Food Magazine
November 2004

If you love pritchon™, you’ll love pritchopabo™, too.

It’s November and almost Thanksgiving Day. Are you going to roast that turkey again? Why not deep-fry it this year? Or order one that's already deep-fried?

One enterprising couple, Charlie and Dina Esguerra, has made a business out of deep-fried turkeys and offers a unique way to eat it: The meat is carved and rolled with sliced vegetables in a pita wrapper topped with one's choice of sauces - cranberry, mushroom gravy, Mexican salsa, and curry.

Although the idea may be novel here, deep-frying turkeys is common in the Southern states in the U.S., where it’s called turkey fry. Charlie and Dina buy imported U.S. turkeys though they would have preferred to use the local ones. (The local turkeys are so tough they have to be boiled a month to become tender.) "We started frying turkeys when some clients asked for a less fatty pritchon™, but did you know that a turkey’s (or any fowl’s) skin fat content is more than that of a pig?"

If this all sounds suspiciously like something you've heard of (and tasted) before, it’s because the Esguerras are also responsible for introducing pritchon™, deep fried lechon, into the Filipino culinary scene. A colloquial term for the Tagalog "piniritong lechon," pritchon™ has become a favorite at parties and family get-togethers. It's actually the precursor of the deep-fried turkey, which the Esguerras call pritchopabo™.

This is the couple’s third year in business, which all started with the pritchon™. "We were stuck in traffic and Charlie was daydreaming," Dina recounts. "Then he said, Why don’t you fry the pig?" The seemingly offhand statement wasn’t taken seriously until two weeks later. "I don’t know if you believe in dreams," Dina continues, "but I dreamt of my mom (who passed away in 1996), and in this dream she told me to wrap the pritchon™ in pita bread and to make several sauces. So we combined the idea and that's how the pritchon™ came about."

It soon became an extended family effort. Charlie’s sister-in-law helped the couple formulate the sauces. They started out with an astounding 20 sauces for the pritchon™, which were whittled down to the present seven by the Esguerras' three children, who judged which sauces were the best: hoisin, white garlic, honey mustard, chili Tagalog, liver, honey-lemon, and satay. A friend makes the pita wrappers, of which there are four varieties: plain, tomato, herbed. and spinach.

Dina says, "Our eldest was 12 when we were started out, and she was already [chopping the pritchon™]. We brought them along serve the guests, but now because they have to concentrate on their studies, they just help out during weekends." Today the Esguerras work with what they describe as "lean and mean" staff of 14 people.

This is a far cry from Charlie and Dina’s first entrepreneurial effort, where they employed 120 workers in the garments business. The couple was making and exporting children's wear to the United Kingdom as well as lingerie to the U.S. We wouldn’t sleep for three to four days until the shipment was out,Charlie remembers. "If it was shipment time, it was shipment time or else." After five years of the garment business’s assorted stresses, the couples decided to shift to food.

The Esguerras bring another meaning altogether to the term "multi-tasking," since they have another business aside pritchon. With a staff of 15 people whom they supervise, the couple also sells pre-need plans For Loyola Plans. Dina's mom was a sales manager for the company, and as early as high school Dina was already helping her mom with secretarial duties. The couple works 18 hours a day. "It’s a balancing act," admits Charlie, "but we enjoy the people we work with and the people we get to meet."

Pritchon™ has not only taken the couple places, but it goes places as well. The company has delivered to as far as Subic, Olongapo, and Batangas, and has even fulfilled orders for Hong Kong and Singapore.

The Esguerra family seems tailor-made for this business. Various relatives have piggeries in the provinces, which is where Charlie and Dina source their pigs for the pritchon™. The pigs weigh about 11-15 kilos live, but that decreases by almost half after slaughter and cleaning, and even more after cooking.

The pritchon™ and pritchopabo™ are fried in a custom-made fryer - "a bathtub-sized vat," as the couple describes it, "deep enough for the pig/turkey to be submerged." One vat can cook a single pritchon™, while a larger vat can fry up to four pigs at a time. An entire drum of oil is used, a special type of deep-frying oil is not available commercially.

Asked about the cooking process, Charlie says, "There are plenty of ways to make it (the skin) crispy. But we just keep it in there and then we wait. The time, that’s the secret. After it’s cooked, we drain it - we also have a special way of draining it - (so that) the oil and the fat of the pig drip too,"

Aside from the pritchon™ and the pritchopabo™, the Esguerras offer pritchon salad™, an offshoot of the pritchon™ served Caesar’s Salad style: assorted greens, pritchon™ strips, crispy pritchon™ skin in place of the bacon bits, kani (processed crab sticks), fried noodles, and mandarin orange segments. It’s all brought together with a creamy hollandaise-like sauce redolent with garlic, and the detectable tang of vinegar, hoisin sauce, and sesame oil. It's an addictive balance of flavors that will keep one coming back for more.

The Veggie Wraps came about because of a request from a vegetarian client who often orders the pritchon™ for her meat-loving husband. A medley of greens, carrot strips, shredded cucumber, seedless grapes, walnuts, and feta cheese are drizzled with a balsamic sauce and eaten in a pita. Vegetables don't get tastier than this.

First pig, then turkey. What will the Esguerras deep-fry next? "I was toying with the idea of deep frying all sorts of animals - pigs, turkeys, geese, goat, lamb, but goat and lamb have tough skins," relates Charlie, his eyes wide with excitement. "We even went as far as the North to inquire about ostrich. I thought it would be cheap. But then the owner said one ostrich costs P120,OOO. That’s like buying a second hand car! An ostrich egg is P10,OOO! And there I was daydreaming that I was going to have a huge sunny side up egg for breakfast!"

While Charlie’s new deep-fried innovations may be a while in coming, pritchon™ and its cohorts are here to stay. According to Charlie, the record for the most number of pritchon™ wraps eaten at one time is 35. The young man’s mother had to remind her son to leave some for the guests. There are 80 to 100 wraps maximum per pritchon™, depending on the size ordered. Charlie also tells us of a group of six girls who polished off one whole pritchon™ among themselves.

Now that’s what you call going the whole hog.

Charlie’s Pritchon™. 921-0405 /921-0415 426-5501 fax #: 259-5557

Read Articles About Charlie’s Pritchon™

• It's A Wrap for Charlie's Pritchon
  Philippine Daily Inquirer
  Eric S. Caruncho
• The Whole Hog
  People Asia
  Patricia M. Romualdez
• A Tale of Turkey and the Deep Fried Pig
  Food Magazine
  Lori B. Baltazar
• Reinventing the Native Lechon
  Weekender -Business World
  Cherry C. Bobadilla
• Pritchon™... The lechon reinvented!
  Manila Bulletin - Sunday Leisure
  Lai Suarez-Reyes
• Pritchon™: The " Pritong Biik" Deep Fried in Stainless Steel Tub
  Philippine Star
  Millie Reyes

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