A really good adobo
I found a secret to cooking (and eating) really good ADOBO.
Although the recipe is so simple (and looks quite easy to do) there really is a secret to making adobo. The basic ingredients are pork or chicken (or better a mix of both), soy-sauce, vinegar, bay leaf, crushed garlic and peppercorns. The taste must be a blend of all the ingredients. My own mom will tell you how inept I was at making adodo since she started teaching me to cook in grade school. I just couldn’t get it right! Well, that is until last year, when I watched an Ilocano cook this popular dish. Simply, he combined all the ingredients (before adding the meat) but used SUKANG ILOKO (the first secret), a variant of vinegar that’s not too acidic or strong but rather balances the taste of soy sauce. He tasted the marinate and adjusted until it was exactly what he wanted, and when I did taste it, I swear I could have used that as a “sawsawan” (dressing/sauce). Then, he SLOOOOW-COOKED everything until the broth had all but evaporated, and lastly FRIED the meat in its own fat. The smell that filled our house made even my neighbor’s tummies long for it. Delicious!
We ate adobo with just-cooked still-steamingly hot rice(oh, YUMMY), with our hands of course :-) and as our custom I brought a big bowl home. Half I froze for later eating. It keeps forever - well, maybe not really forever but a really long time, and the flavor actually gets better with age. The other half I ate the next day for breakfast with boiled eggs and garlic fried rice, then whatever was left I ate for lunch with sandwich. I don’t mind eating this everyday I think, although I haven’t had to, because we still have other equally delicious dishes to choose from. But if you’ve eaten adobo made by an Ilocano, then you’ve tasted a masterpiece. And once you know how to cook it that way, there’s really no other way to do it, but that’s just me.
How do you cook adobo?
Related Stories
POSTED IN: Lifestyle, Food and Transportation
June 30th, 2006 at 2:18 pm
[…] We have adobo almost every week in our house. It’s great for dinner and even better the day after, for breakfast, when the flavors have been absorbed by the meat. But two appearances on the family table are enough for me, no matter how much I love adobo. Sometimes, there are still leftovers after that. So what to do with them? […]
October 16th, 2006 at 4:57 am
I think you should have it for baon
September 21st, 2007 at 9:25 pm
[…] many ways can you cook adobo? The wise answer is that there are as many ways as there are Filipino cooks. For a sampling, here […]