comment icon 94 more comments For the Filipino newbies, Pork Adobo is a traditional Filipino dish with pork marinated and cooked in a soy sauce/vinegar sauce until it’s super tender and completely saturated with flavor. The whole thing is usually scooped over a plateful of hot steaming white rice and if you’re me, you add an extra scoop so the rice gets really saucy. I crave that saucy rice. In the name of full disclosure, I don’t think Pork Adobo traditionally has, uhh, beans. But mine has beans because I saw the aunties making a similar dish (humba) with black beans at one of the houses at the orphanage and couldn’t get the idea out of my head. Stuck. On food. On BEANS. Typical. And traditional pork adobo isn’t made in the crockpot, either. I think I might be the only person in the one mile radius around our apartment who owns a crockpot. What a weird contraption anyways. Usually Filipinos cook this in a big ol’ regular pot, just boiling or simmering for a while it instead of crock-ing it all day long. Either way works. I love the crockpot and I love black beans, so this is Lindsay’s version of Pork Adobo. This is the gateway recipe that started me driving the black bean train into the wild blue yonder, forever and ever amen. Because since this recipe, I cannot stop thinking about black bean recipes. Part of it is my compulsion to get rid of leftover ingredients (there’s a half bag of dry black beans sitting in the fake fridge right now and it’s making me crazy) and part of it is my complete and utter devotion to this gorgeous little bean. Healthy Mexican Sweet Potato Skins are haunting my dreams in the most chipotle black bean wonderful way right now. PS. The fake fridge is our actual fridge that doesn’t work, so we use it like a pantry and just keep regular food in there. Even though it’s not cold. Fake fridge. We keep our real fridge food in the freezer. Cause you were dying to know the details of our scrappy kitchen, right? As of this recipe, I realized how delicious is it to cook black beans all the way from dry little things with one pretty white spot on them, to soft, squishy, nutritionally-dense yummies that go perfectly with almost any kind of food. I use canned beans in lots of recipes, too, but the more I use dried beans and cook them myself, the more I want to eat them, everyday, always. If that’s even possible. I know I’m asking a lot of you here, telling you that this plate of what sort of looks a little bit like rice and beans garbage is really one of the best dishes I’ve made all year, but you’re gonna have to trust me. This is worth dusting off the crockpot and going soy sauce shopping. Think about what flavors are going on here: garlic, brown sugar, soy sauce, bay leaves, vinegar, peppercorns, and pork. That garlic gets cooked ALL DAY LONG. It’s almost sweet when it’s all said and done. Now imagine the texture of the melt-in-your-mouth shredded pork with the softness of the black beans, and the tangy, salty sauce, and how perfectly it gets soaked up by the rice. You love it. I knew you would. Final thought of the day relating to health: I know pork isn’t exactly fat free, and no one believes in white rice anymore (FYI – brown rice is a complete and utter mystery to my Filipino friends) but because so much of this is made up of the black beans, it’s actually got a decent nutritional profile for the average eater. If you wanted to make this with less pork, or less fatty pork, you could try that. I guess. But… don’t. Cause pork rules. 4.3 from 20 reviews
