Adobong Manok sa Gata

With the CSA on hold, I have time to make something more meat-centric that's been on my to-do list for quite a while: chicken adobo. This is classic Filipino recipe related to, but distinct from, the pork adobo I made and posted about last year.

Like that recipe, every Filipino mother has her own version but they don't vary a whole lot. Most just simmer the chicken in the sauce and call it done, flabby skin and all, but I really liked the ones that removed the meat and cooked it up crisp. A grill would likely be ideal, but I'm going to use my broiler (I'm writing as the chicken marinates, another unusual step). The most unusual aspect of this recipe is the inclusion of coconut milk. Almost nobody does that, but it seems like a good idea. I think that's what the "sa gata" means in the recipe name, but Babelfish finds the term confusing so I'm not sure.

I did a little research and found that the recipes on the web that include coconut milk can all be traced back to Memories of Philippine Kitchens, a cookbook by Amy Besa and Romy Dorotan. Coconut milk is, according to the book (according to a blogger who read the book, anyway) traditional in the Bicol region of the Philippines. I'm going to assume this is a regional variation.

I made a few changes away from the version in Memories based on some other recipes I found interesting.

Ingredients:
1 3 1/2 pound chicken, cut into serving pieces, liver and heart included and fat trimmed
1/4 cup light soy sauce
1/4 cup dark soy sauce
1/2 cup white vinegar [If you've got proper Filipino soy sauce and vinegar, definitely use that instead as this is just an approximation]
3/4 cup coconut milk
4 cloves garlic, crushed
1 sizable shallot, minced
2 bay leaves
generous ground black pepper [or double that whole peppercorns if you want to avoid black specks in your sauce]

1. Mix up everything but the chicken in a large bowl. Add the chicken and marinate in the refrigerator for 3 hours to overnight.

2. Move everything to a large pot (I marinated in my slow cooker pot and cooked it in there instead of the stovetop) and simmer the chicken over medium heat until mostly done, probably around 20 minutes. [Some recipes let the pot cool and refrigerate overnight before finishing the dish. It couldn't hurt if you've got the time.]

3. Remove and drain the chicken. Broil 4 inches away from the heat, skin-side up, turning the pieces with skin on both sides, until crisp and a bit charred. Mine went for 6 minutes but I left them in the pot a little long so take the chicken out sooner and go for 10.

4. Strain the sauce into a pot and reduce a bit. Add more coconut milk to taste.

Serve with white rice, sauce on the side.


Hmm...not bad at all. The chicken weathered the broiler without drying out. It's juicy and has picked up a bit of flavor from the sauce but not enough to overwhelm the mild flavor of the meat. The skin has some crisp bits, but could have stood a little more broiling. Still good through.

The sauce has pleasant levels of salty and tart, moderated by the slightly sweet richness of the coconut milk. A bit of herb comes through from the bay too, but not enough to really assert itself. It's a bit of an odd combination and I wonder if I was supposed to use Indian bay, which goes a bit better with soy sauce to my mind. I should check on that.

I reduced the sauce a bit more to intensify the flavors after I had dinner and then added a little more of the thick bit of the coconut milk--condensed coconut oil mainly--which mounted the sauce nicely like adding butter to French sauce. I think next time, I might not cook with the coconut milk, just add it at the end. I'm curious what sort of difference it might make.

One last thing, one recipe I saw called for a small chicken plus four chicken livers. I wasn't sure what that was about until I tried the liver I cooked and discovered that it was really great. The flavor is a great match for the sauce, better than just plain chicken by a bit. If you could crisp it up in the oven I'd make this with just livers.

Just a quick pointer

I've already used my green beans and radishes (in nothing terribly exciting so the details will have to wait for the wrap-up), but if you haven't used them or your collards, you might want to try a recipe I found that calls for all three. It's Sinigang na Manok, a Filipino dish of chicken in a sour soup. Here are a couple typical recipes. One substitutes in lemon for the traditional tamarind. I wouldn't do that, personally; The tamarind is the main flavoring. This page has another variation along with some interesting background information and advice.

If you do try it, do please let me know how it goes.

Pork adobo

Unlike like difficulties with African recipes, I've been pretty happy with my excursions into Filipino cuisine. It generally doesn't require a lot of hard-to-find ingredients and its vinegar-intensive sauces make it unlike anything else out there. I wish I had some good story about why I've been trying them, but I just found a stash of Filipino recipes on-line and they looked interesting.

This particular recipe is a Philippine staple--one of the dishes that has a million variations. The only universals seem to be soy sauce, vinegar, plenty of garlic and an odd cooking technique. I tried to stick close to the Platonic ideal I grokked from the range of recipes I looked at.

Ingredients:
1 pound pork butt or similar cut, cut in 1-2 inch cubes (or chicken)
1/2 head of garlic, minced
1/2 small yellow onion, diced
1/4 cup soy sauce
1/2 cup vinegar
1 cup water
1/2 teaspoon paprika (most recipes call for black peppercorns, but I liked the paprika idea)
2-3 bay leaves
1-2 Tablespoons sugar (optional. Only a substantial minority of the recipes include it.)
2 Tablespoons cooking oil

1. Heat a medium saucepan on medium, add 1 Tablespoon oil and sweat the garlic and onion for a few minutes until softened.

2. Add soy sauce, vinegar, water, paprika, bay leaves and pork. Bring to a boil, reduce heat to medium-low and simmer for 30 minutes. If using, add sugar at 15 minutes.

3. When the pork is tender heat the other Tablespoon of oil in a large frying pan. Remove the pork from the sauce, drain it well, and add it to the pan. Turn the heat up under the sauce and boil until it is reduced in volume by half. Meanwhile, brown the pork over medium high heat.

4. When both are done, serve with rice.

The traditional way to serve pork adobo is to leave the meat dry and pour the sauce over a scoop of rice. Garnishes are unusual, but I'm big on garnishes so I looked for exceptions and found that tomato wedges and/or hard boiled eggs are not entirely unheard of.



The meat has caramelized well, which I attribute to the sugar I added, and has absorbed some flavor from the sauce (plus it's lying in a shallow pool seeping from the scoop of rice) so the pork flavor is prominent, but nicely accentuated by tart and salty notes. The pieces are crisp and chewy--rather more dried out than most Western palates are used to, but I gather that that's how they're supposed to be. I know a lot of Indonesian recipes call for meat cooked to this texture so it's not too surprising to find it called for in the Philippines. The sauced rice--deeply savory, slightly sweet and brightly tart--is the real star here. The meat is almost dispensable. The tomatoes are a great match with the sauce--salt and vinegar bring out tomatoes' best. The eggs, on the other hand, I could take or leave. I do like the richness a bit of yolk dissolved in the sauce brings. Maybe whisking in a raw yolk to thicken and enrich the sauce just before serving would work.

Chicken and squash chicharrones

Yes, I know those words don't make any sense together; bear with me a little while and I'll explain.

What I was actually making for dinner were just chicken chicharrones which aren't actually chicharrones either (although I have made the chicken equivalent of pork rinds just incidentally while rendering down chicken fat for schmaltz. They're called gribenes in Yiddish and they're not half bad.) These are deep-fried chicken nuggets common all through South America and the Philippines too (at least according to the commentary on the recipes I found. I really ought to go on a culinary tour of someplace someday and see these things for myself). They kind of look like pork rinds, at least the good sort you can get some places here in Miami, not the puffed up industrial ones in the supermarket.

Unsurprisingly, there's a good bit of variation in the recipes; I went with something on the Filipino end of things.

You can cut up a whole chicken, bones and all, but I just used two chicken thighs and saved the bones for stock. The marinade is made of equal parts soy sauce, rum and lime juice--one ounce each for that much chicken--a little sugar and, optionally, garlic, a couple dashes of hot sauce and/or cilantro. Marinate for an hour on the counter or overnight in the refrigerator (so long as you bring it back up to room temperature before cooking).

For the breading, mix 1/2 cup finely ground flour--corn flour (which is something distinct from corn starch I just learned) in South America typically or rice flour for the Filipino version. Into that half cup mix a half teaspoon of salt and a half teaspoon of whatever flavorings you want that didn't use in the marinade. I used garlic in the marinade so I added cayenne pepper and finely chopped cilantro to the flour.

Fish the chicken out of the marinade, shake and/or pat it dry, dredge it in the flour and fry it in the hot oil until golden brown. Some recipes call for shallow frying, some deep frying. There's also a pretty big range in cooking times--from six to twelve minutes. It all depends on how small you cut your pieces of chicken. I did mine no more than a couple inches across so I couldn't get them out of the oil fast enough. I slightly burnt most of them, but the last batch with the heat on low and only cooked for three minutes total came out OK.


As for the squash, I had both the marinade and the plenty of leftover flour mix and I wanted some vegetation with my dinner. I had chopped and frozen the squash a few weeks ago and I decided, given my problems controlling my oil temperature, it would be best to cook it without defrosting. I took a handful of squash pieces from the freezer, gave them a couple minutes in the marinade and then into the bag of flour for tossing without drying them off since I wanted a bit more of a batter than I was getting for the chicken. They got three minutes in the oil too and they came out looking pretty nice.



Both the chicken and the squash taste pretty good too, particularly finished with a squeeze of lime. The central ingredient and the breading are fairly equal partners with the seasonings present but not overbearing. There's a nice crunch when they're hot, but the flavors better when they've cooled off a bit. Cooking the squash from frozen was a good idea; it would have been mush if I had defrosted it first. As is, it's still got a little bite to it and a nice burst of flavor captured inside the breading. These aren't giant flavors that wow you with bite, but they're good bar food and I think that's all chicharrones of any sort are meant to be.

That said, there's a similar recipe for Bancock street fried chicken that looks like it might step things up a bit, but I need to get ahold of some coriander root to do it right. Have any of you seen that for sale?

Pork Estofado

This is a pretty simple (and very tasty) Filipino dish. I did look around for ways to complicate it, as is my wont, but I couldn't find any variants. Or rather, there were a lot of recipes by the same name--the term "estofado" is actually pretty generic--but the biggest variation of pork braised in sugar I found added a garnish of scallions to the recipe I had. I ended up making the cooking process more exciting by knocking my glass measuring cup over (with a quarter cup of soy sauce in it) to smash on the floor and then, rattled by the first mistake, over-adjusting my adjustable measuring cup and splooshing out half the sauce ingredients all over my kitchen counter.

The recipe I'm working from is Reynaldo Alejandro's The Flavor of Asia, a cookbook I have mixed emotions about. It has a great range of recipes from China in the North all the way down to Indonesia and it was my first introduction to many of the cuisines in between, but as I learned more about cooking and about those cuisines I discovered that many of the recipes have been over-simplified and there are a lot of areas of confusing vagueness. In this particular recipe Alejandro doesn't specify if the plantain garnish is supposed to be ripe or green. His previous cookbook was Filipino; He knows what it's supposed to be, he just doesn't say. In my research I think I found that it's supposed to be ripe and that it's substituting for saba bananas, whatever they are. I've used ripe before and it turned out well, but I'm using green today to compare and contrast. Luckily, the same skills that let me notice the cookbook's shortcomings also allow me to compensate for them so it's still usable. Here's how I figure this recipe ought to go.

* 1/4 cup vegetable or corn oil
* 2 tablespoons minced garlic (or 2 Tablespoons crushed)
* 1 pound lean pork, cut however you like (the low slow cooking will tenderize any meat. If the pieces are over an inch and a half cube add an extra half hour cooking time)
* 1/2 cup apple cider vinegar
* 1/4 cup soy sauce
* 1/3 cup sugar
* 1/2 cup water
* 1 bay leaf
* 8 peppercorns, crushed
* 1 carrot, cut into 1-inch strips (It's not really a strip if it's 1 inch thick so I think this means 1/8-inch thick strips, 1-inch long)
* 2 ripe plantains, cut 1/2 inch thick diagonally and fried at medium high until cooked through and browned
* 2 pieces French bread, cut into 1-inch squares and fried at medium high until browned and crisp (that seems like a lot more plantain than bread so I think saba bananas must be smaller than the plantains you can get around here. Or maybe they cut their French bread into larger pieces. I use equal amounts of bread and plantain for each serving.)
2 scallions, shredded

1. Preheat oven to 300 degrees.

2. Add garlic and oil to cold dutch oven. Turn on medium heat, cook until garlic starts to brown. Remove.

3. Add pork cubes and brown in batches, about 3 minutes on each side.

4. Remove from heat. Let cool briefly and carefully add vinegar, soy sauce, sugar, water, bay leaf and peppercorns.

5. Cover. Place in oven. Cook for 1 hour.

6. Add carrots. Cook for another hour.

7. Remove dutch oven from oven. Remove pork and carrots from sauce. Reduce sauce on stovetop over high heat until it's reduced in volume by 3/4 and starts to get syrupy. Return pork and carrots and heat through.

8. Meanwhile, fry plantains and bread (a sprinkling of salt boosts the flavors nicely here) until crisp and brown.

9. Serve garnished with plantains, bread and scallions possibly over rice depending on just how much starch you want with your meal. But if you do make sure the croûtons have a chance to absorb some sauce before the rice sucks it all up.


At the end the meat should be fork tender, the carrots about to fall apart and the sauce richly sweet and vinegarly tart. The croûtons and plantains (Definitely go with ripe. The plantain chips I ended up making this time weren't nearly as good.) add extra flavors and crunch as well as bursts of the sauce as they release what they soaked up. It's an unusual combination of flavors and textures for many American palates, but very accessible so I've found it a good introduction to Filipino cuisine for the folks I've fed it to.

CSA week 18 - Filipino caimito-banana sherbet

If you Googled for "caimito recipe" you couldn't miss this one as it dominates the first page of results. Well, just because it's popular doesn't mean it isn't good (assuming it actually is popular as it's not evident that anyone who posted the recipe actually made it) and I did find the idea of a sherbet made with evaporated milk an interesting one so I decided to give it a try.

I started by cutting the recipe by two thirds to make it a reasonable amount to fit in my ice cream churn. My calculations were a bit off as it turns out and I could have just cut it in half. Second, the meat of both my star apples amounted to something under a full cup so I added a chunk of frozen banana to fill it out. I intended to do that anyway as banana would serve to add extra flavor elements and improve the texture of the final result. I was also concerned about texture problems from just dumping in the sugar without dissolving it so I made a simple syrup with the sugar and water before adding it to the other ingredients in the blender. The rest of the changes are just little flavor tweaks: I added a pinch of salt, a few drops of vanilla, and a few grates of nutmeg. So here's what I actually made:

1 scant cup ripe caimito, seeded and mashed
sufficient banana to complete the cup (I'd add more next time and increase the water a little)
85% of a small can of Evaporated Milk (125 ml)
1/3 cup sugar
2/3 cups water

1 pinch salt
1/4 teaspoon vanilla
1/8 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg

Boil sugar and water until sugar dissolves. Blend all until smooth. Chill overnight. Churn. Ripen.


The mixture solidified in a rather unpleasant way in refrigerator. That doesn't necessarily bode ill for the final result after churning, but with the already questionable sapote-family texture of the caimito I was concerned. I ended up thinning the mixture out with another quarter cup or so of water during churning which seemed to help.

After churning, the final texture isn't as bad as I feared; It's a bit crumbly in the bowl, but it melts nicely in the mouth with only a hit of that custardy sapote texture. It has a lovely violet color which is nice. The flavor is interesting as it is straightforwardly and pleasantly tropical, but not immediately identifiable as caimito. The fruits and the other flavors I added have blended seamlessly.

That's kind of interesting. Pina colada and strawberry/pineapple/banana do that blending thing too. I wonder if there's something in particular about tropical fruits that allows their flavors to combine so well.