I’ve finally made first contact with a professional hunter, Mang Jose. He walks up the mountains at 1am and hunts for wild pythons, wild soft shell turtle, wild tilapia, wild dalag, wild hito / catfish, wild palakang bukid / edible frog. In this first meeting with him, he had 3 soft shell turtles. I thought turtles were slow, but not these turtles, they are fast and feisty, they’ll bite you if you aren’t careful.

This report serves to uncover a lost old time food, that of turtles. I’m pretty much convinced that turtles were a human staple and nutritious food in the old neolithic and paleolithic times. In the Chinese community in our city, turtles are still staple food. You can visit the restaurants in Chinatown and order turtle. You can go to the Chinese wet market and buy turtles.

The protected species of Philippine turtle are the ocean going pawikans, they have a conservation effort and pawikan repopulation centers around the country. Let’s hope their efforts are successful so some of us can get back to eating them ocean going pawikan turtles when their numbers have been replenished and the ban is lifted.

In the meantime, we can legally get a taste of an old staple food in turtles with freshwater river dwelling soft shell turtles, curiously, the native people also call this “pawikan”. My hunter calls it pawikan and so do his grandchildren. You can see the joy in the eyes of the hunter’s grandchildren, they love eating turtles and find them delicious. Found out the provincial people occasionally ate turtles on quite a regular basis, this is not exotic to them… there’s my father in law, my mother in law, all our maids, my security guard friend, my brother in law’s girlfriend… I feel small, me the city boy missed out.

Mang Jose the hunter demonstrated how to slaughter and cook the soft shell turtle. Sorry, raw meat fans, my hunter is not a raw foodist so I guess I’ll have to find out by myself in the future how to eat these turtles raw. In the meantime, I found out they were very simple to prepare. Just knock them on the head with your big knife, no need to outright kill it, then put the whole turtle in your boiling pot of water with some tanlad leaves. Boil for about 10 to 15 minutes, then clean the turtle with your hands. Simply remove the coating on the shell to expose the gelatinous edible shell on the sides of the hard shell, do the same with the belly. Upon removing the top and belly shells, you remove the head, and the claws, the large and small intestines, and careful to remove without breaking the gall bladder so there is no bile spilled or your turtle will taste sour / mapait. Then you cook the turtle by some other recipe you want. In this example, Mang Jose’s wife made adobo. I just made sure he didn’t put that nasty poison MSG on our turtle. I learned it was really easy to prepare these tasty turtles ourselves.

How did the turtles taste? Very good. Very tender. Very tasty, it has its own taste. The whole family enjoyed the turtles for dinner. I hope it brought really good wild nutrition to my kids, I drove quite far to get this to the table.

Nutritional value? My security guard friend who introduced me to his neighbor Mang Jose the hunter swears it was a month long regular ingestion of cooked turtle meals that got rid of his then 6 year old daughter’s asthma. Her asthma was the killing kind where she found it difficult enough to breath her lips turned blue. His daughter is now 8 years old and asthma free.

There must be something of high nutritional value in wild turtle, first of all it is wild. I remember my acupuncturist traditional Chinese doctor giving me directions to his favorite Chinese restaurant that served turtle, but I never got to going there. Mang Jose says regular ingestion of wild turtle can make 75 year old men virile again,  my Chinese doctor also told me this.

Is all this turtle nutrition sales talk? Probably not, Mang Jose is the kind of man who can’t sell anything and will always live a hunter’s existence. No, I’m not sharing my hunter’s contact number. Go find your own hunter. Mang Jose and I hope to have a nice long professional relationship.