The Mighty Adobo

Every Filipino, by blood or birth, knows his adobo. Local culinary experts claim that adobo comes from our Spanish forebears who landed on Philippine
shores in the 1500s. It has since evolved into its present-day Fililpinized version, which is the heart and soul of traditional Filipino cuisine.

Lily Gamboa O’Boyle writes in Pacific Crossings (Acacia Corporation, 1994): “Adobo is considered the National Dish of the Philippines. This dish consists of chunks of chicken or pork or both cooked in soy sauce, vinegar, bay leaf, lots of garlic and whole peppercorns. The stew is allowed to cook until meats are tender and the remaining sauce is slightly thickened. Some people prefer their adobo dry, which may entail frying them afterwards, while others prefer them moist and served in their original sauce. As a style of cooking, it can be applied to fowl, shellfish and vegetables.”

Adobo is esteemed by all Filipinos, some more than others. The pinoy gourmand elevates his by substituting duck for chicken, while the minimum wager, whose adobo is de facto daily fare due to economic constraints, regards his with indifference. The health-conscious may insist on using free-range, organic chicken, while the poverty-stricken, apathetic eater, grateful to have something at all to fill his stomach with, enjoys his helping of chicken scraps and bones atop a mountain of steamed rice, smothered in adobo sauce just as well.

The socialite matron trains her maid to ladle her adobo using only Christofle silverware onto flawless Rosenthal china; while her trusty gardener quietly feasts on adobo, tomatoes and rice on a banged-up enamel plate, squatting in the dirty kitchen, ingesting mouthfuls with the graceful precision of his bare hands.

Malacanang occasionally includes adobo in its state breakfast repertoire, to the delight of visiting foreign dignitaries, while Aling Loleng’s carinderia around the corner dishes it out with a cup of rice and a finger of banana for twenty pesos a pop to the barangay tanods and the pinoy everyman.

Variations of the dish are about as diverse as the idiosyncrasies of every Filipino family, depending on its provenance, social class, and culinary persuasions. Most households remain steadfast in their adherence to the original chicken and pork, soy and vinegar recipe. The less queasy includes chicken heart, liver and gizzard. The sweet tooth adds sugar, which makes the stew an entirely different culinary experience. The Makati dona, who maintains a full kitchen staff, demands her adobo meats to be fried to a crisp, enhancing this already complex gustatory symphony with yet another dimension: texture. The Batangueno cooks his with vinegar alone and simmers the dish to veritable dryness, whence the meats have all but absorbed only the very essence of the vinegar. The innovative, fresh-out-of-culinary-school kitchen neophyte substitutes the sophisticated aceito balsamico for the de rigeur suka, only to eventually concede to the superior culinary merits of the native suka on Filipino cuisine. The copra farmer from Mindanao who lives for his mid-day cocktail, spikes his adobo with tuba (fermented coconut juice) to lessen his guilt over his alcohol intake with the it-doesn’t-count-as-liquor-if-not-ingested-as-a-drink mentality.

The Filipino never parts with his adobo. He lugs it with him to the ends of the earth. At any pinoy gathering abroad, be it on a beach, a picnic, a dinner party, or a civic function, the adobo is the center piece of the buffet, majestic in its stove-to-tabletop kaldero (cauldron). Chances are, right beside it, standing proud, would be its first cousin, the rice cooker.

One of the main reasons why this savory dish is widely cooked is because it does not require refrigeration; it is good to go anywhere at anytime. Its ingredients of vinegar, soy sauce, salt, and spices, act as natural preservatives so that it stays unspoiled for days at room temperature. In fact, the longer one keeps adobo, when all the flavours have completely blended together and have permeated deep into the meat fibers, the better it tastes.

In this country of 7,107 islands and 91 million people, who are regionalistic in sentiment and sensibility, who consider themselves Ilocano, Capampangan, Batangueno, or Cebuano first before being Filipino, and who speak 175 different native languages, the dish and the word—adobo—is the one consistent thing in the entire race. Be it the version of the northern mountains, the central plains, or the coastal south, the dish is still called adobo and whether it is kangkong (swamp cabbage), sitaw (string beans), pork belly, bangus (milk fish), tilapia, hito (catfish), bamboo shoots, prawns, squid, game meats, or crickets, it keeps its name. For a heterogeneous people separated by geography, language and subculture, adobo is the one unifying factor. It defines us; it burrows deep in our soul from the very first taste and we carry it in and with us for life.

But cooking adobo is not without its perils. The wafts of fermented vinegar from the pot as it hits boiling point, are unforgiving to the nostrils. The fumes from the vinegar and soy sauce emitted at length because of the required simmer period permeate the thickest of furniture upholsteries, drapes, carpets, clothing and hair, positioned within a fifty yard radius of the casserole. This aroma stays and is the dead giveaway of the homeowner’s nationality.

When preparing garlic for adobo, the peace-loving and laid-back, inner Juan Tamad in
the pinoy is transformed into a violent kitchen commando. He can never be content with
daintily peeling the garlic cloves with a paring knife and mincing it into neat little squares
of equal size as seen on the food network. Armed with mortar and pestle, he pounds the
garlic unto death, until the peel voluntarily separates from the pulp. He then pulverizes it
to smithereens and plunges it into a sizzling hot pot. Cursed is the sucker who is
burdened with this task for on his fingers will linger the offensive odor of macerated
garlic indefinitely. But the amount of effort one expends in the preparation of adobo, and the consequences involved are a pauper’s ransom compared to the bounty of pleasures one derives from the burst of flavours and play of textures in its every bite.

No matter his position in society, no matter his persuasions, and no matter his taste, there is no parting the Filipino from his adobo—every taste and every whiff of which is so uniquely Filipino and so utterly sublime.