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Are you a Filipino? Definitely, you know what adobo is. Let  me tell you a bit of background about  adobo.

Adobo is Spanish word for seasoning or marinade. Long before we have known about this dish, it has been cooked in the regions of Latin America, Spain, Mexico, Peru and  Bolivia. Ingredients using tomato sauce, oregano,pepper,crushed garlic, salt, and citrus zest are used.  When the Spanish colonizers came to the Philippines in the 1500′s, they found an indigenous way of stewing with  vinegar, they referred to it as adobo. Dishes cooked in this manner was eventually  known by its name.

Thus, the adobo dish and cooking process in Filipino cuisine and the general description “adobo” in Spanish cuisine share similar characteristics, but in fact refer to different things with different cultural roots. While Philippine adobo can be considered adobo – a marinated dish – in the Spanish sense, the Philippine usage is much more specific.

Typically, pork or chicken, or a combination of both, is slowly cooked in soy sauce, vinegar, crushed garlic, bay leaf and black peppercorns , and often browned in the oven or pan-fried afterward to get the desirable crisped edges. 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 best accompaniment to adobo is white rice.

In Latin America and the Philippines, preparing adobo is simple and requires but a handful of ingredients. In good-tasting adobo, none of the spice flavors dominate 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 swamp cabbage (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.

I bet every Filipino around the world will never forget to include adobo in their daily menus, especially for those having a hectic schedule and have no enough time to cook, adobo is a very quick to do recipe.

I have met a canadian couple in my work and became my good friends eventually. One day, we talked about our native food and they became interested to try adobo, so i decided to cook chicken adobo for them ( of course served with rice). They were so surprised how tasty and delicious adobo can be. They fell in love with it. So, every time i visit them, they request me to cook adobo.They weren’t rice eaters, you know, but they’ve learned to eat rice more often.

See how our taste in food influence other nationalities? I believe, we, Filipinos do not just have good taste in cooking but we have a good relational skills with whom ever we meet and that’s what makes us lovable and irresistable, just like adobo.

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