Pork Adobo (The Philippines)

For those of you who are not familiar with Philippino-style food, Pork Adobo is a casseole type of dish with a slightly more exotic flavour.  The ingredients weren't much of a stretch for me, everything was quite standard but the mix itself was a new experience. 

I do have to admit that for this one, we did vear of the recipe a little.

In the book, Allegra says to fry the meat with most of the vegetables and cook it in the sauce for approximately 1 hour and 45 minutes.  We, however, decided to make use of Soph's slow cooker. 

So, we prepared the meat, vegetables and sauce and put it all in the slow cooker around 1pm and cooked it for about 6 hours. So after all of the prep was done, we had 6 hours off before we needed to do anything else.

I should note that we did not put the green pepper in at the beginning (as Allegra suggested) since we prefer it to be a little crunchy. 


So, about 6 hours later we went  back to check on the Adobo and decided that we had to reduce the sauce on the hob, rather than thickening it with cornflower.  

At this moment in time, the baby decided to wake up and Soph went to go check on her, leaving me to tackle the challenge of putting everything back into the biggest frying pan we have to reduce the sauce. I think I managed this very well.  After a minute or so I saw a bay leaf in the pan and removed it.  After checking the cook book I then began the hunt for the other 5 leaves.  I got all but one but, having only found a few other little pieces, I resigned myself to the idea that I had accidentlly broken the last leaf and it had flaked throughout the Adobo.  While I was assessing the consequences of this, Soph returned and informed me that, even though the recipe called for 6 leaves, we only had  5 and some little pieces so that's all she put in.  So thankfully no stray bay leaves, just 15 or so wasted minutes.  

Since Soph had reappeared, we then plated up and topped it off with a little fried garlic. 

The result was actually amazing.  Although it was a little vinagery for our tastes, the combination of flavours worked very well. We were pleasantly surprised to find that, even though there was a vast amount of soy sauce in the recipe, the end result didn't taste overly salty. Although, having said that, living in Germany has increased our tollerance for high salt content. 

The crispy fried garlic on top added a superb crunch and really made the finished dish look amazing. 

Sadly our efforts to keep the bite in the peppers didn't work very well and they were still a little soft for our liking but all in all it's a great dish we're sure to repeat.