Guimaras guinamos

What guinamos is

Guinamos is a shrimp paste made on Guimaras, an island in the Western Visayas of the Philippines. It is made from hibe, a small shrimp, mixed with salt and dried in the sun. What makes it a paste rather than dried shrimp is the working: the mass is trodden by foot until it turns uniform and smoother, then dried again.

The name and the method come from one documented practitioner in Barangay Morobuan, in the municipality of Jordan. FEATR's 2023 report calls the product Guinamos, and its companion article links the same practice to the local term. The same family of pastes is called bagoong and ginamos elsewhere in the Philippines, so the name alone does not identify the method.

How the maker works the mixture

The process starts by mixing the shrimp by hand with salt. The mixture is spread by the sea to dry. In the documentary's sunny-day example the drying runs from about seven in the morning until eleven. If rain interrupts, the maker salts the mixture again and resumes drying once two or three rain-free days have passed.

After the sun drying, the maker washes his feet and steps on the mixture. The narration says this lowers the moisture and speeds up fermentation. When the mass is uniform and smoother, it goes back into the sun. FEATR's article says the finished paste is packaged and shipped; it does not describe the packaging.

What the report leaves out

The report gives no quantity of shrimp, no quantity of salt, no salt ratio, no complete fermentation time, no measured drying condition, no yield and no measurable endpoint. Nor does it give a storage schedule. These are the points a household cook would need, and the source does not supply them.

The narration also says that sunlight disinfects the mixture. That statement is not a validated safety control, and it should not be read as one. The missing values are not filled here with the figures of another shrimp paste.

Uses

The narrator names batchoy and other dishes as places where guinamos is used, but the source gives no dish recipe or serving quantity. The paste is a seasoning and a base for cooking, which is how shrimp pastes are used across the Philippines.

Safety and evidence

This is a descriptive account of one documented practice. It has not been reviewed by a qualified process authority, and the original audio and video frames were not independently checked. FDA's consumer guidance says seafood is safest when cooked thoroughly. That general advice does not assess the sun-dried, trodden process documented here, so the paste should be treated as an unvalidated preparation.