Adobo Totally Explained

Everything about Adobo totally explained

:See also adobo sauce. Adobo is the Spanish word for seasoning or marinade. The noun form is used to describe the actual marinade or seasoning mix, and the term used for a meat which has been marinated or seasoned with an adobo is referred to having been adobada.
The word is the first-person singular present indicative form of adobar, a Spanish verb meaning "to marinate."

General

Adobo can be a general term referring to marinated dishes, such as chipotles en adobo, which are chipotle chili peppers marinated in a rich, flavorful, tomatoey sauce.
   Adobo is also the name of a common and very popular dish in the Philippines; indeed it's considered a national dish. Typically made from pork or chicken or a combination of both, it's slowly cooked in soy sauce, vinegar, crushed garlic, bay leaf, and black peppercorns, and often browned in the oven or pan-fried afterwards to get the desirable crisped edges. This dish originates from the northern region of the Philippines. It is commonly packed for Filipino mountaineers and travelers. Its relatively long shelf-life is due to one of its primary ingredients, vinegar, which inhibits the growth of bacteria.
   The standard accompaniments to adobo — and ultimate comfort meal for many Filipinos — are mung bean stew (monggo guisado) and lots of white rice, unless adobo is eaten for breakfast, in which case fried or scrambled eggs, garlic-fried rice, chopped tomato & onion salad, and atchara (green papaya pickle) are the tradition.
   Outside the home-cooked dish, the essence of adobo has been developed commercially and adapted to other foods. A number of successful local Philippine snack products usually mark their items "Adobo-flavored." This assortment includes, but isn't limited to nuts, chips, noodle soups, and corn crackers.

Ingredients

Traditionally adobo is one of the first dishes Filipinos learn to cook, it's simple and requires just a handful of ingredients. In good-tasting adobo, none of the spice flavors dominates but rather the taste is a delicate balance of all the ingredients. The most widely preferred type has been traditionally pork adobo, followed by chicken adobo which is generally considered somewhat healthier.
Other ingredients such as squid, beef, lamb, game fowl like quail and snipe, catfish, okra, eggplant, string beans, and water spinach (kangkong) are also made into adobo, with appropriate changes in the basic recipe. Squid adobo (adobong pusit), for instance, is quite different. While most adobo preparations have a brownish sauce, squid adobo has a deep, purplish-black sauce not unlike the Spanish dish calamares en su tinta due to the inclusion of squid ink.
In addition, there are other varieties of adobo that use the following ingredients: milk giving the sauce a creamy pastel color and a milky thickness; distinctly Chinese ingredients such as star anise, rock sugar, and rice wine typically found in the Chinese-Filipino community; a Mexican ingredient, the earthy red-coloured spice achiote (atchuete in the Philippines), also known as annatto, as found in a beef variety from Batangas province in the Philippines; sugar, or sweet orange juice or pineapple juice yielding a sweet-sour variety; and hot chili peppers (often Thai peppers) to produce a spicy variant.

Presentation

As with most dishes, there will be slight variations in the ratios of the ingredients or the cooking process, and the cook's unique touch is impressed upon the final outcome. One noteworthy preparation style is the pinatuyo or, literally, dried method. In this method, the traditional pork or chicken in the adobo is dried of its sauce by slow-frying, resulting in a delicious caramelization of the meat and the creation of the much desired crispy bits that go so well with a plate of freshly cooked, steaming hot rice. This style of adobo has parallels with the Mexican pork dish called carnitas, which employs a similar cooking method. Another presentation of adobo uses combinations of several main ingredients. Typical combinations include adobo made with pork and string beans, or pork/chicken adobo with hard-cooked eggs and potatoes.

National dish

While there has been debate amongst local food historians as to what the national dish of the Philippines actually is, most Filipinos consider adobo (pork and/or chicken) to be the dish of their country. Most families have their own recipe and most regions have their own variant. In fact, the phrase "adobo country" is sometimes used to refer to any geographic area containing a large population of Filipinos.

Further Information

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