Opinion – Recipes by Marcão: Pork Filipina style delivers exotic flavors with ordinary ingredients

I had no idea what Filipino food was until last week, when I went to a restaurant in São Paulo with a rather uninventive name: the Philippines.

The menu lists some decidedly exotic things, made with pork giblets, and a multicolored dessert based on sweet potato, purple yam, beans, sago and seaweed gelatin.

I went with something far less challenging: adobo, one of the Filipino national dishes. The name comes from the Spanish, people who colonized the islands, and means “marinade” or “vine d’alhos”.

Garlic, by the way, is not lacking in Filipino adobo. In the recipe that follows, a whole head goes. The other seasonings are also prosaic: onion, vinegar, soy sauce, bay leaf and black pepper.

The cool thing is that you get, by mixing common and inexpensive ingredients, food unlike anything in the cuisines we are familiar with. Filipino adobo is as Iberian as it is Asian, with its garlic and soy sauce.

The two most common meats for adobo are chicken and pork. I chose pork, the bacon adobong baboy. It’s a cut that withstands long, slow cooking – don’t remove the skin, it stays soft and its collagen helps thicken the sauce.

If making with chicken (adobong manok), use thighs or drumsticks, for the same reason: the connective tissue will thicken the broth.

Filipino adobo is usually served with white rice or fried garlic rice – it depends on how much garlic you can handle.

ADOBONG BABOY

Yield: 4 servings

Difficulty: easy

Ingredients

700 g of pork belly

1 thinly sliced ​​onion

1 head of minced garlic

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon(s) peppercorns

6 bay leaves

2 tablespoons of oil

200 ml of white vinegar

100 ml of shoyu

2 potatoes, peeled and cut in half

Way of doing

1. Cut the meat into cubes of about 3 cm on each side. In a wide pan with a thick bottom, mix with the onion, garlic, salt, pepper, bay leaf and half the oil. Let it taste for half an hour.

2. Turn on the low heat and sauté uncovered, slowly, until the onion and meat start to brown.

3. Add the vinegar, adjust the heat to medium and cook, stirring with a wooden spoon, for 5 minutes, until the acid evaporates. Add the shoyu and 200 ml of water. Cover the pan and reduce the heat again.

4. Let it cook for about 40 minutes, stirring occasionally. In a frying pan, heat the remaining oil and brown the potato on both sides.

5. Add the potato to the pork pan, cover with water and cook until the sauce thickens and softens the meat and potato. Serve with white rice or garlic fried rice.