Filipino cuisine has been making a lot of headway in the US the past two years or so. At long last, it’s finally coming out of the kitchen closet, so to speak, but more importantly, breaking away from the long, dark shadow of lutong bahay or home-style cooking found is karinderia or cafeteria-style establishments that have bleakly represented our cuisine in the land of milk and honey for far too long.
The internet newspaper Huffingtonpost.com made a list of the Top 10 New Foods Of 2011, with Filipino cuisine as number three, calling it “Nouveau Filipino”: “Filipino food is among the most far-out in the world, so it was only a matter of time before it got a hipster update. From Adobo Hobo’s Filipino tacos in San Francisco to Maharlika Filipino Moderno’s spicy arroz caldo in New York, we’ll take all the creative Filipino cuisine we can get.”
Odette Alcazaren-Keeley, host and executive producer of New America Now, reported: “The Year of the Dragon will be the Year of the ‘Adobo’ if some local foodies are predicting it right. Braised chicken or pork in soy sauce, vinegar and garlic, adobo is considered a signature dish in Filipino cooking, which, judging from the buzz at this year’s Winter Fancy Food Show in San Francisco, could be poised to ride the next gourmet food wave.”
Another article going viral among Pinoy food bloggers was written by Sam Sifton, New York Times food critic, about our very own adobo. He wrote: “It is the national dish, many Filipinos say: protein braised in vinegar until pungent and rich, sweet and sour and salty at once, sometimes crisped at the edges in high heat, always served with the remaining sauce. Its excellence derives from the balance of its flavors, in the alchemy of the process. Cooking softens the acidity of the vinegar, which then combines with the flavor of the meat to enhance it. Whether consumed in Manila’s heat or on the edge of a New York winter, adobo holds the power to change moods and alter dining habits … As a result there is great fun (italics by me) to be had in asking Filipinos how to make adobo, particularly when they are in groups. Filipino cooking is an evolutionary masterpiece, a cuisine that includes Chinese, Spanish, American and indigenous island influences, all rolled into one.”
Sifton interviewed Amy Besa and Romy Dorotan of the Purple Yam restaurant (purpleyamnyc.com) in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, which he described as “excellent” and whose chicken adobo recipe he featured. It must be said that the couple had been operating the popular and highly acclaimed Cendrillon (French for Cinderella) in the hip Soho district of Manhattan for more than seven years serving Filipino and pan-Asian cuisine, but were finally forced to seek out greener (read: cheaper) pastures due to high rent. One of their best-selling dishes is Dorotan’s signature chicken adobo with soy sauce, gata (coconut milk) and siling labuyo (bird’s-eye chili), a dead giveaway of his Bicolano roots, growing up in Irosin, Sorsogon, where “he ate every dish with gata anyway,” according to my kabalen Besa, born in the Pampango-speaking side of Tarlac. This is the same creamy adobo that Dorotan cooked on Martha Stewart’s show back in 2006.
Meanwhile, on the west coast, Amy Scattergood reports in the LA Weekly blog that Marvin Gapultos and Natassia Johnson, both LA-based Fil-Am food bloggers (burntlumpia.com and letmeeatcake.com, respectively), broke barriers by becoming the first food bloggers to start their own food-truck business and the first in Southern California to specialize in Filipino cuisine in June 2010. In such a short time, their mobile restaurant The Manila Machine gained quite a following as well as critical acclaim. In fact, Gapulto’s recipe for Pineapple Adobo won the runner-up award for “Best Noveau Street Food” at the 2010 LA Street Food Fest, getting praise from the likes of famous American chefs Susan Feniger and Walter Manzke, and from Jonathan Gold, a Pulitzer Prize-winning food writer.
Where’s the beef, or rather, the chicken & pork adobo?
So, do we finally see our adobo trending in the US as a unifying dish that could propel Filipino cuisine into the mainstream American consciousness? After all, there are some five million Fil-Ams living in the US, making up the third largest ethnic group. But wait, “nacho fast,” as a popular food chain would have it. Which adobo, may I ask? In the Filipino context, adobo generally refers to the chicken/pork stew braised in vinegar and garlic. It is perhaps the country’s most popular dish, spawning countless variants, such that it is inaccurate to call it a singular dish. To say there are 7,100 recipes of our adobo is an understatement; there are as many kinds of adobo as there are households.
Treating adobo as a cooking technique will give us a better understanding of its nature. It is the braising of any meat (chicken, pork, beef, quail, duck, venison, seafood, etc.) or vegetable in vinegar, garlic, black peppercorn, and bay leaf, with regional variations or personal preferences of adding soy sauce (from the Chinese), achuete (a Mexican import achiote during the galleon trade), onion, coconut cream, lemongrass, or turmeric. It can be made like a saucy stew or thickened with chicken liver, or the cooked adobo meat pulled apart to be deep-fried into crispy flakes. It is this versatility that makes it the most popular and well-loved Filipino comfort food. It is also the great leveler, both the cooking method and the cooked dish transcending all economic boundaries.
And for the record, it is the venerable Glenda Barretto of Café Via Mare who first served crisp adobo flakes way back in 1975. It was such a novelty back then when it first came out, but it caught on and became part of our adobo repertoire. And to think all she had in mind was pleasing her dad, who was fond of crispy dishes. She fried some leftover chicken adobo, and voila, a new dish was born! Indeed, necessity is the mother of all invention.
Taking a quantum leap to the present, chef Roland Laudico of Bistro Filipino serves an over-the-top Adobo Overload. It is a generous portion of seared foie gras nesting on adobong kangkong on a mound of sticky rice (cooked with adobo sauce, we were told), stuffed with chicken adobo and salted duck egg, accompanied by more adobo in the form of pork cubes in a puddle of adobo sauce reduction. Does it make it any less “authentic” with the chef’s risqué interpretation, daring to go out of the rigid box with his western styling, without compromising the dish’s original essence yet still remaining within its comfort-zone Pinoy panlasa or taste/palate?
Doreen G. Fernandez wrote in Palayok that the Spanish and Mexican adobos refer exclusively to meat, while the Filipino adobo is an entirely different process of cooking not just with meat, but also with seafood and vegetables, with vinegar as a matter of seasoning and as a natural preservative necessary in our tropical climate. It is quite distinct from Spanish adobo, which uses a marinade of paprika, oregano, salt, garlic, and wine vinegar, while the Mexican version uses a spicy marinade called chipotle, a mixture of chilies, seasonings, and seeds that goes particularly well with pork.
In The Adobo Book by Ronnie G. Alejandro and Nancy Reyes-Lumen, there are at least 150 recipes of adobo, from the usual chicken, pork (belly, legs, trotters, innards), and beef, to duck, quails, snipes, fish, eel, prawns, crabs, oysters, mussels, squid, dried fish, frogs, kamaru (mole crickets), sawá (boa constrictor), balut (fertilized duck egg), tokwa, eggplant, ampalaya (bitter melon), radish, and banana blossoms. Indeed, it is a living testament to the versatility and popularity of adobo as a cooking method.
So, to claim your adobo is better than others is pretty much a personal thing. Isn’t it more fun having so many kinds of adobo?