I’m just going to give a spoiler now: It went terribly.
Before I started living on my own, my mom made sure I knew how to cook… or, at least, know the recipes. The first meal she taught me how to cook was adobo because of its simplicity. There are four main ingredients: vinegar, soy sauce, bay leaves, and choice of meat. In my case, my mom used chicken for our lesson. The extra ingredients vary between families, but my mom likes to add coconut milk and pineapple juice to make the sauce sweeter. If you’ve ever met any Filipina mother, you’d know they don’t use measurements. They just tell you to “pour how much you feel is right.” That’s exactly what my mom told me and it didn’t help me whatsoever because 1) I’d never cooked anything more extravagant than cup ramen and 2) My only experience with adobo before this point was eating it. To make matters worse, she basically kicked me out of our kitchen for the actual cooking portion of our lesson, because “it’s hard to teach, you just have to know when the taste is right.” So honestly, I didn’t retain anything from our cooking lesson.
Luckily, I took all this information with me back to San Jose and attempted to make adobo on my own for the first time. My first mistake in the kitchen was using sweet soy sauce instead of the regular one. Secondly, I forgot to buy bay leaves. Bay leaves are an integral part of Filipino cuisine; without it, your meal just tastes off. I don’t know how to explain it, but there’s no seasoning like a bay leaf. You just need it. At this point, I was standing in the kitchen with my meat defrosted so I couldn’t go back. I had to keep pushing through and make my dinner. I added all my ingredients–or lack thereof–into a pot and let it boil. When I first tried it, it was terrible. My friend and I literally spit it out. The sweet soy sauce taste was so strong and didn’t mix well with the vinegar (This was a lesson learned for me). To fix it, I tried adding coconut milk to level out the soy sauce taste. It worked, the soy sauce taste had lessened, but at this point it tasted really plain. The rest of my time cooking was spent pouring between coconut milk and water to try and dilute the strong taste of the soy sauce. At the end, my adobo was sad and flavorless.
YUMTHOUGHTS 