Puto maya and sikwati

Puto maya and sikwati

For the past few weeks, I have been living alone here in Cebu. I have to readjust everything, from environment to finances. There are times that I only have a few pesos in my wallet. Not even the usual rice and ulam breakfast can fit in. Yet luckily, Cebuanos have one thing in their culinaria that is often overlooked in this day and age—puto maya and sikwati!

The combination of puto maya (rice cake) and sikwati (chocolate) for what some people call, “the poor man’s breakfast.” For payday’s eve, people call it “Manna from Heaven!”

Puto Maya is a rice cake made with sticky rice, coconut milk, sugar, salt, and ginger juice for flavour and aroma, shaped like a triangle and wrapped in banana leaves. I heard cooking this, although easy, is time consuming. Some of the puto maya street vendors near my pad start cooking before midnight for the usual breakfast time orders from parokyanos.

Also, puto maya doesn’t look like your ordinary sweet puto cheese sold on supermarkets. It rather looks like Japanese sushi maki wrapped in banana leaves!

And puto maya’s partner, sikwati, is just hot chocolate—Spanish tablea (tablet) chocolate. The term sikwati is perhaps the Visayan name for the Aztec’s xocoatl—yes, it’s chocolate.

You can dip the warm puto maya at sikwati, or eat the puto maya and sikwati. The combination of tastes reminds me of champorado!

They also said that a real Bisayang Puto Maya has that ginger flavour and aroma. Good thing my neighbours here cook their puto with it.

What’s more, puto maya is sold at only PhP5 per piece! Sikwati is also PhP5 per cup! Having at least two rice cakes and one order of chocolate is enough heavy breakfast!

The combination is a perfect match of carbohydrates and caffeine—a perfect pick me up aside from coffee. Aside from the two, you can also add up mango to the perfect combo, and you’ll have a perfect breakfast!

Hence, I owe a lot for this humble puto maya and sikwati sold on the streets of Cebu City. Nabuhi ko tungod nila.