Mama's House

Yup, I'm way behind posting these recipes but I'll catch up soon enough.

So one of the dishes I learned to cook has nothing to do with using a slow cooker for once. The good ol' chicken adobo, also known as the national dish of the Philippines, is easy to make.

Ingredients
Chicken - 3lbs.
Soy Sauce - 1 cup
Filipino Vinegar - 1 cup
Garlic - at least 3 cloves crushed
Dried Bay leaf - 1
Peppercorns - several
Fresh Ground black pepper - to taste

Instructions
1. Combine all the ingredients in a bowl or a plastic ziplock bag and marinate in the fridge for a few hours or overnight.
2. Preheat a pot (preferably not a non-stick one) with a little oil. Remove the pieces from the marinade/sauce and brown the pieces of chicken first.
3. Pour the marinade/sauce in with the browned pieces of chicken in the pot, bring to a simmer, cover pot, and let sit with occasional stirring for about 1 hour.

That's it. Really simple. The hardest part might be finding filipino vinegar but I encourage a trip to an asian market rather than substituting it with another kind just because vinegars can have really different tastes to them.

So if you try this recipe out let me know what you think.


Notes
1. Now some people like to "slow fry" their adobo afterwards which, "result(s) in a delicious caramelization of the meat and the creation of the much desired crispy bits that go so well with a plate of freshly cooked, steaming hot rice." It's not really the way I like it though. I prefer a wet adobo and like to use the sauce over my rice. But if you do want to have the dry adobo, you'll have to account for the extra cooking time of slow frying it by cutting down on the time you stew the chicken in the pot or else you'll have really dry chicken.
2. The 1 cup of soy to 1 cup of filipino vinegar produces a very tangy sauce which is the way I like it. But if you don't like tangy or want to control how tangy it is at the end, you can cut it down on the vinegar to about 1/2 cup or even less and add more later but don't leave it completely out (see note 3).
3. Some people, maybe lots, don't marinate their adobo. But the acidity from the vinegar makes sense to turn the adobo sauce into a marinade (while the salt from the soy sauce also kinda makes it a brine, which makes the chicken juicer) which can only bring more flavor to the chicken itself. But if in a rush I guess you can skip the marinating process as the sauce will provide plenty of flavor.
4. Although I didn't use the slow cooker for this I'm willing to bet that the slow cooker would help make a very tender, juicy chicken adobo.
5. I like to use at least 5 cloves of garlic and plenty of fresh ground black pepper.