What Are Street Snacks?

Exactly what they sound like: snacks sold on the street. In Cebu, especially in the early morning, you’ll encounter vendors selling traditional sweets and snacks — plus things like boiled corn, massive skewered candied sweet potato, and saba banana wrapped in spring roll skin and deep-fried.

Walking while hungry in Cebu is a liability.

Different parts of Cebu Island have their own regional specialties, so trying snacks you haven’t seen before is one of the genuine pleasures of exploring the island.

From my experience, street snack ingredients tend to be: glutinous rice, palm sugar, coconut, and cassava. Many are wrapped in banana leaves — the fragrance reminds me of the chimaki rice dumplings eaten in Japan on Children’s Day. (Cassava, by the way, is the starchy tuber that tapioca pearls come from.)

1. Cassava with Coconut Milk

First up: cassava with coconut milk — my pick for Street Snack #1. The texture is like a stringy sweet potato, or maybe slightly stickier. Cassava itself has no natural sweetness. With salt it tastes like boiled potato; with sugar and coconut milk, it becomes something closer to a proper dessert. The street version is sold in plastic bags — sweetened coconut milk poured over steamed cassava. About 20 pesos a bag. Microwaved leftovers are somehow even better. Essential for anyone who likes root vegetables and coconut.

2. Cassava Cake

The same cassava, baked into a cake. The tapioca ancestry shows — the texture is wonderfully chewy, somewhere between a mochi and a sweet potato cake. About 20 pesos each.

3. Bibingka

Bibingka is one of my all-time favorites. Made from rice flour and coconut milk, it resembles a steamed bun in flavor — but with one crucial difference: bibingka is baked. The banana leaf it’s cooked on chars slightly, giving it a toasty, fragrant edge that the steamed version (puto, which is far more common) simply doesn’t have.

Because I love bibingka and it’s the less famous one, I’ve introduced it first. Small sizes run 10–15 pesos each. Large ones are available too.

Continued in Street Snacks Part 2…