THE ONLY RULE when making ube halaya in my Filipino family: If you’re snagging a bite, you’d better stir. The bubbling, electric-purple jam must be mixed steadily for nearly an hour on the stovetop. Once it cooks down to a viscous consistency, the jam delivers the concentrated flavor of the purple yam ube, sweet and nutty with a fragrant vanilla note—a taste growing increasingly familiar stateside.

“I think there’s a sense of wonder around the flavor,” said Brooklyn chef Angela Dimayuga. Her recent cookbook (right), “Filipinx: Heritage Recipes From The Diaspora” (Abrams), includes dishes that derive their round, mellow taste and vivid color from ube.

“It’s this royal purple, like Grimace from McDonald’s,” Ms. Dimayuga said. No doubt the Instagram-friendly shade accounts, at least in part, for the ingredient’s recent spike in popularity, with a torrent of posts flaunting everything from ube doughnuts to ube lattes, all emitting that distinctive deep-violet glow.

Indigenous to the Philippines, ube traditionally features in sweets such as pandesal, a soft, yeast-risen roll; ice cream; polvoron, a type of shortbread; and chewy pastilla candies like the ones Ms. Dimayuga shares a recipe for here. She swaps in a combination of sweetened condensed milk and dry milk for the kalabaw (water buffalo) milk typically used in the Philippines, and she seasons the ube halaya base with a balancing pinch of salt and a little grated lime zest to brighten the flavor, which she describes as reminiscent of vanilla with hints of pistachio.

Thessa Diadem, pastry chef at Los Angeles restaurants All Day Baby and Here’s Looking at You, dollops her ube pie with chamomile whipped cream.

Photo: Thessa Diadem

In Ms. Dimayuga’s view, ube pairs well with “anything milky and creamy.” Across the Filipino diaspora, chefs are putting the ingredient to use in all manner of desserts, many of them creamy, some of them traditional, others wholly new.

“We’ve tried ube with everything,” said Gemma Ballesteros, founder and owner of Marley’s Treats in Hayward, Calif., including horchata, Oreo cookies and the tropical leaf pandan. The bakery’s popular “finkle,” an ube crinkle cookie, comes filled with a caramelly leche flan. On April 30, the Marley’s Treats food truck will roll up to the Ube Fest in San Francisco’s District Six with ube cupcakes and macarons, ube frozen treats and more.

Thessa Diadem, pastry director at All Day Baby and Here’s Looking at You in Los Angeles, makes ube cookies with caramelized white chocolate, marshmallow and coconut. She tops her ube pie with a dollop of chamomile whipped cream.

“I imagined that adding a floral component to the ube [would] complement its nuttier flavor profile, and the combination was better than I imagined,” Ms. Diadem said. “In the Philippines, ube flavor is used how vanilla is used in the U.S.”

Inspired by all the ube experimentation, I decided to attempt my Tita Lorna’s ube halaya recipe, among my favorite treats when I was growing up. One recent afternoon, I began the long process of simmering and stirring, for the first time solo. By the end, my arm was aching, but the result was just as delicious as I remembered. That taste will always be a bridge to my family and heritage.

“The recent rise in recognition of Filipino chefs is probably why the interest in ube has soared,” said Ms. Diadem. “This is a flavor that hits some kind of core memory in a Filipino chef, and we’re more than happy to share it with the world.”

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