Adobo (Filipino cuisine)
Chicken adobo
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| Course | Main course |
|---|---|
| Place of origin | Philippines |
| Region or state | Philippines |
| Serving temperature | Hot |
| Main ingredients | Meat (beef, chicken, pork), soy sauce, vinegar, cooking oil, garlic, black peppercorn, bay leaf |
| Variations | some sugar for sweet-salty taste |
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Philippine Adobo (from Spanish adobar: "marinade," "sauce" or "seasoning") is a popular dish and cooking process in Philippine cuisine that involves meat, seafood, or vegetables marinated in vinegar, soy sauce, and garlic, which is browned in oil, and simmered in the marinade. It has sometimes been considered as the unofficial national dish in the Philippines.
Taken from the early Filipinos, the cooking method is indigenous to Philippines. Early Filipinos cooked their food normally by roasting, steaming or boiling methods. To keep it fresh longer, food was often cooked by immersion in vinegar and salt. Thus, it is very likely that Filipinos could have been cooking meat in vinegar as a means of preservation. This process dates back to the Pre-Hispanic Period and was used for pork and chicken.
When the Spanish Empire colonized the Philippines in the late 16th century and early 17th century, they encountered this cooking process. It was first recorded in the dictionary Vocabulario de la Lengua Tagala (1613) compiled by the Spanish Franciscan missionary Pedro de San Buenaventura. He referred to it as adobo de los naturales ("adobo of the native peoples"). Dishes prepared in this manner eventually came to be known by this name, with the original term for the dish now lost to history.
While the adobo dish and cooking process in Filipino cuisine and the general description of adobo in Spanish cuisine share similar characteristics, they refer to different things with different cultural roots. 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 (rather than a specific recipe) 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 (palayok or kulon); but in modern times, metal pots or woks (kawali) are used instead.
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Wikipedia