Fake versus authentic Carigara pastillas

On the night after the papal events in Palo while passing through the town of Carigara, we stopped by Danny 's, a store selling two delicacies the town is known for: pastillas de leche, a sweet paste made usually from carabao milk, and roscas, a biscuit made with anise. These delicacies are powerful reminders of my youth while I was studying in the seminary. In those years, which would be the 60's, overland trip from Ormoc to Tacloban was an arduous trip through a jungle area and unpaved roads. At the halfway mark, we would always make a lunch stop at Carigara and inevitably buy bags of these delicacies. Carigara was and is still known for these products as well as the manufacture of long bolos. Anyway, when  I ate the roscas back home, i discovered that they were stale and no longer crunchy. As for the pastillas , I could immediately tell that were made with condensed or powdered milk and not from carabao milk as the seller claimed. It was a disappointment. So buyers beware! If going through Carigara, don't buy anything from Danny's. Ask around because there are still a few Carigaran-ons who care about their products' reputation. A friend pointed out later that he buys his pastillas from Lumen's, so I guess that is as good a recommendation as you can get.

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Sometime later, I was told by my house help Veny that my nephew Butch ate the lot and found it to be (seemingly) real pastillas. To my taste though, they were fake, even if they seemed kind of a toasty color, like the authentic ones. So I puzzled over it because it had a very fine milky taste with none of the richness of carabao milk. When I tasted one batch, it seemed to have a definite starchy taste, like cornstarch. So are pastillas made with cornstarch? You bet. This is also why it had a toasty color. It was the cornstarch, which acts as a binder to the milk, that was responsible for the toasty appearance. These pastillas were not authentic carabao milk pastillas. To find out what goes into the making of authentic carabao milk Carigara pastillas, you can read this blog entry which I discovered on the internet.

http://definitelypinoy.blogspot.com/2013/09/pastillas-de-leche-of-carigara-leyte.html