pork adobo with garlic fried rice

For my third and last day on tableside I decided to do pork adobo, because I have never cooked anything Filipino and I thought that would be a good entry level dish.

I pretty much followed this recipe, marinating cubed pork shoulder with soy sauce, garlic, bay leaves and black peppercorn over two nights.

As I was to discover, this was way too long. When you have a soy-based marinade, anything over a couple of hours is too long because the item gets too salty. After simmering it for an hour with water and vinegar, I added more sugar (which mellows salt and acid) and vinegar until it tasted... still salty, but acceptably so.



I decided to pair the adobo with sinangag, or garlic fried rice. I myself was fortunate to have tried an exquisite example of sinangag one day when Clarisse brought breakfast to school from a place called Tselogs. It was delicious, and I wanted to recreate it (or something like it). I found this recipe, but decided to forgo the egg pancake for the Tselogs sunnyside up egg. When you dig into this dish your fork is used to pierce the egg yolk so it can run all over everything, serving as a natural hollandaise sauce.



Before lunch service I plated up this sample dish so the Filipinos in our class could try it and give me "authentic" feedback. Clarisse suggested that I add some slices of tomato. That was brilliant.

Here was how my cart looked like pre-service:



Much like the tuna poke salad, I had orders rolling in one right after the other and it wasn't until my last order (split between two people because I ran out of pork) that I was able to get a picture.



Proud of my first Filipino food attempt :)