Peruvian Highlands · Main
Adobo Arequipeño
- Intermediate
- 25 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, acid holding everything up to the light, opening aromatic and staying there.
Ingredients
- 1.2 kg pork shoulder, in 4 cm chunks, fat left on
- 750 ml chicha de jora, or 500 ml dark beer with 3 tbsp red wine vinegar
- 4 tbsp ají panca paste
- 8 garlic cloves, crushed
- 2 tsp ground cumin
- 1 tbsp dried oregano
- 2 red onions (300 g), in thick wedges
- 1 rocoto, seeded and sliced
- 30 g lard
- 2 tsp salt
- black pepper
The skills inside
Marinating: acid, salt and time
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · alcohol
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Mix the pork with the chicha, panca, garlic, cumin, oregano, salt and pepper and leave it covered in the cold overnight; the meat should come out stained red through the outer centimetre.
- Lift the pork out, pat it dry, and brown it hard in the lard in batches until each face is crusted; a wet piece will only grey.
- Return everything with the marinade, add the onion wedges and rocoto, and bring it to the point where one bubble breaks at a time.
- Hold it there with the lid ajar for about 2 hours, until a spoon parts the meat without pressure and the onion has gone to threads. 120 min
- Rest off the heat for 10 minutes, taste for salt and serve in bowls with the red fat still floating and bread to drag through it. 10 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Marinating: acid, salt and time 70 recipes
- Contact is total: every surface is wetted, and the pieces are not welded into a clump with dry faces where they pressed together.
- The stated time was kept and kept cold, read against a clock, because this is the one technique where longer is a different result rather than a safer one.
- It worked at the surface and no further: cut a piece and the marinade’s colour stops a few millimetres in. A protein gone opaque and chalky to the centre before any heat reached it has been cooked by the acid.
- The texture is still springy and whole, not mushy, mealy, or fraying at the surface when it is lifted.
- Where the next step browns it, the surface was patted dry first: a wet surface cannot brown, and the marinade’s sugars will scorch before the food colours.
Where it goes wrong It was left well beyond the stated time on the assumption that more is better, so acid and salt worked through the thin edges: those cook to cotton and read grainy while the thick centre tastes of nothing at all.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Riesling or Grenache
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais
- From the Taps
- Farmhouse saison
- Zero-Proof
- Cloudy apple juice, chilled
Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.
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