Philippine adobo
Philippine adobo is a popular Filipino dish and cooking process in Philippine cuisine. In its base form, meat, seafood, or vegetables are first browned in oil, and then marinated and simmered in vinegar, salt and/or soy sauce, and garlic. It is often considered the unofficial national dish in the Philippines.
History
The cooking method for the Philippine adobo is indigenous to the Philippines. The various precolonial peoples of the Philippine archipelago often cooked or prepared their food with vinegar and salt in various techniques to preserve them in the tropical climate. Vinegar, in particular, is one of the most important ingredients in Filipino cuisine, with the main traditional types being coconut, cane, nipa palm, and kaong palm. These are all linked to traditional alcohol fermentation.There are four main traditional cooking methods using vinegar in the Philippines: kiniláw, paksíw, sangkutsá, and finally adobo. It is believed that paksíw, sangkutsá, and adobo are all derivations of kiniláw. They are also related to cooking techniques like sinigáng and pinangát na isdâ that also have a sour broth, albeit using fruits like calamansi, tamarind, unripe mangoes, bilimbi, santól, and star fruit as souring agents instead of vinegar.
When the Spanish Empire colonized the Philippines in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, they encountered the adobo cooking process. It was first recorded in the 1613 dictionary Vocabulario de la lengua tagala compiled by the Spanish Franciscan missionary, Pedro de San Buenaventura. He referred to it as adobo de los naturales.
The Spanish also applied the term adobo to any native dish that was marinated before consumption. However, the concept of cooking adobo already existed long before the arrival of the Spanish in 1521.
In the 1794 edition of the Vocabulario, it was applied to quilauìn a related but different dish which also primarily uses vinegar. In the 1711 Visayan dictionary Vocabulario de la lengua Bisaya, the term guinamus was used to refer to any kind of marinades, from fish to pork. Other terms for precolonial adobo-like dishes among the Visayan peoples are dayok and danglusi. In modern Visayan, guinamós and dayok refer to separate dishes. Dishes prepared with vinegar, garlic, salt, and other spices eventually came to be known solely as adobo, with the original term for the dish now lost to history.
Description
While the Filipino adobo and Spanish style adobo share vinegar and garlic, they are culturally distinct dishes with different ingredients and culinary traditions. Unlike the Spanish and Latin American adobo, the main ingredients of Philippine adobo are ingredients native to Southeast Asia, which include vinegar, soy sauce, black peppercorns, and bay leaves. Unlike Spanish and Latin American adobo, Philippine adobo does not traditionally use chilis, paprika, oregano, or tomatoes. Instead, they only share similarities in their primary use of vinegar and garlic. Philippine adobo has a characteristically salty and sour, and often sweet taste, in contrast to Spanish and Mexican adobos, which are spicier or infused with oregano.While the Philippine adobo can be considered adobo in the Spanish sense—a marinated dish—the Philippine usage is much more specific to a cooking process and is not restricted to meat. Typically, pork or chicken, or a combination of both, is slowly cooked in vinegar, crushed garlic, bay leaves, black peppercorns, and soy sauce. It is served with white rice. It was traditionally cooked in small clay pots ; but today, metal pots or woks are largely used instead.
There are numerous variants of the adobo recipes in the Philippines. The most basic ingredient of adobo is vinegar, which is usually coconut vinegar, rice vinegar, or cane vinegar. Almost every ingredient can be changed according to personal preference. Even people in the same household can cook adobo in significantly different ways.
A rarer version without soy sauce is known as adobong puti, which uses salt instead, to contrast it with adobong itim, the more prevalent versions with soy sauce. Adobong puti is often regarded as the closest to the original version of the prehispanic adobo. It is similar to another dish known as pinatisan, where patis is used instead of vinegar.
Adobong dilaw, which uses kalawag to provide the yellow colouring as well as adding in a different flavour, can be found in Batangas, the Visayas, and Mindanao regions.
The proportion of ingredients like soy sauce, bay leaves, garlic, or black pepper can vary. The amount and thickness of the sauce also varies as some like their adobo dry while some like it saucy. Other ingredients can sometimes be used; like siling labuyo, bird's eye chili, jalapeño pepper, red bell pepper, olive oil, onions, brown sugar, potatoes, pineapple, or lemon-lime sodas like Sprite. It may also be further browned in the oven, pan-fried, deep-fried, or even grilled to get crisped edges.
Adobo has been called the quintessential Philippine stew, served with rice both at daily meals and at feasts. It is commonly packed for Filipino mountaineers and travelers because it keeps well without refrigeration. Its relatively long shelf-life is due to one of its primary ingredients, vinegar, which inhibits the growth of bacteria.
Variations
Based on the main ingredients, the most common adobo types are adobong manok, in which chicken is used, and adobong baboy, in which pork is used. Adobong baka, along with adobong manok, is more popular among Muslim Filipinos in accordance with halal dietary laws. Other meats may also be used, such as pugò, itik, and kambíng. Seafood variants include fish, catfish, shrimp, and squid or cuttlefish. Vegan options utilize vegetables and fruits, like water spinach, bamboo shoots, eggplant, banana flowers, and okra.Offal and giblets can also be cooked as adobo, like liver, gizzard, heart, and neck.
Other versions include adobong sawâ, adobong palakâ, Kapampangan adobung kamaru, and the adobong atáy at balúnbalunan.
There are also regional variations. In Bicol, Quezon, and south in Zamboanga City, it is common for adobo to have coconut milk. In Cavite, mashed pork liver is added. In Batangas and Laguna, turmeric is added, giving the dish a distinct, yellowish color, as well as a red variant using achuete seeds in the former. In the northernmost province of Batanes, the Ivatan prepare a type of adobo called luñiz, where they preserve pork in jars with salt.
Adobo has also become a favorite of Filipino-based fusion cuisine, with avant-garde cooks coming up with variants such as "Japanese-style" pork adobo. Pork adobo with rice is a combination of jasmine rice with pandan leaf and served with mango atchara.