You had me at Halo-halo: What makes this Filipino dessert so satisfying

American celebrity chef and TV host Anthony Bourdain once called halo-halo “satisfying” and “oddly beautiful”.

During his first visit to Jollibee, Bourdain tried halo-halo (meaning mix-mix) for the first time and declared it oddly beautiful.

The dessert is a favourite among Filipino locals, especially on hot, humid days. There’s usually someone in any given neighbourhood in the Philippines making halo-halo with a metal ice scraper selling their own version of the iced delicacy.

The frozen dessert traces its origins from Japan’s kakigori desserts, with its shaved ice and a sweetener. Similar also to Hawaii’s shave ice, except halo-halo has more ingredients and is made from coarser ice shavings.

At the bottom of the cold, layered dessert–usually served in a tall, clear cup or glass–is a mixture of candied plantain bananas, sweetened red beans, jackfruit, coconut meat, kaong (sugar palm fruit), gulaman (agar) and tapioca pearls.

The middle layer is made up of shaved ice drizzled with evaporated or condensed milk, then topped with ube or mango ice cream, pinipig (pounded, flattened dried rice) and leche flan (the booshie version).

Indeed, Bourdain is right about halo-halo being oddly beautiful. There is something odd about a dessert with red beans (albeit sweetened) and coconut meat mixed together.

There’s something odd about biting into your first kaong (sugar palm fruit) with its round, jello-like appearance on the outside, but a hard, chewy, bite on the inside.

It’s definitely odd to destroy a beautifully presented, layered dessert by mixing it vigorously, upending the colourful ingredients, cutting into the soft leche flan topping and turning the whole thing into a swirling mess of shaved ice and colourful bits of fruit.

And yet, arising from the chaotic mess, you’ll find a nuanced dessert that’s milky sweet, cold as a freezie, equal parts chewy, soft and crunchy: a beautiful chaos that somehow works. Those odd red beans grow on you, and you won’t even notice you’re chomping on sweet legumes in your dessert.

The satisfaction, methinks, arises from having all that fiber and fruit.

Just don’t ever forget to mix.

Mix you must, as that is how you get the flavour. An acquaintance of mine, someone unfamiliar with the proper way of eating halo-halo, remarked how the dessert tasted like nothing at first, but “got tasty toward the end”.

The poor soul. He didn’t mix-mix his halo-halo.