What is asin tibuok and why is it trending online?

Artisanal salt: The taste of asin tibuk is smoky, almost fruity. Chunks can be broken off for cooking and eating, or be dipped or ground into a powder and sprinkled over food. — Courtesy of X PY_BUN/TikTok

Asin tibuok is one of the latest Filipino ingredients to go viral online.

Israeli vlogger Nas Daily featured the ingredient in one of his recent videos, which garnered more than 70,000 likes on TikTok alone. In his clickbaity title, he presented the ingredient as a “dinosaur egg”, but that’s not what it is. Aside from Nas Daily, recipe YouTuber, Emmymade has featured it on her channel. Instead of labelling it as a dinosaur egg, she called it what it is: “The rarest salt in the world.”

Asin tibuok is an artisanal salt made in Alburquerque municipality in the country’s Bohol province. Its name literally translates to “whole salt” in English. It is a rare heirloom ingredient that is dying out because of the lack of people who know how to make it.

The process of making asin tibuok is labour-intensive and consists of many steps spanning months.

In a feature on salt around the Philippines for F&B Report magazine, Nayna Katigbak writes: “(Dried) coconut husks are placed in coastal mangroves to soak in seawater for several months, ensuring each is thoroughly saturated with salt from the water.

“They are then dried under the sun, then slowly burned until reduced to ash. The ash is mixed with more seawater to form a smoky brine, after which the mixture is boiled down in clay pots to form a solid mass of salt.”

As opposed to what the Nas Daily video claimed, the salt does not necessarily taste like coconut. — Philippine Daily Inquirer/ANN