How I cook: Slow Cooker Chicken Adobo

[daidoji_gisei]

This recipe is my variation of the Chicken Adobo recipe in Extending the Table: A World Community Cookbook. This is one of my favorite cookbooks ever, as it gathers together recipes from all over the world. Not just any recipes: recipes for ordinary foods that ordinary people eat, not the haut cuisine of a culture. Yummy! I have given away several copies of it as gifts, and if you have any interest in cooking I recommend it highly.
The ingredients may look strange, but I promise you the end result is spectacular. I served it once to Karin and Ami (who are themselves great cooks) and Karin proclaimed it to be "the way God intended chicken to be cooked". I'm not sure that I'd go that far (I love me some good fried chicken), but it is tasty and mindlessly simple to make.

Slow Cooker Chicken Adobo
3-4 pound package of bone-in chicken thighs*
1/2 cup Kikkoman low-sodium soy sauce**
2/3 cup vinegar
1-2 cloves of garlic, crushed
2 bay leaves
1 teaspoon peppercorns or coarsely ground black pepper

1. If you are feeling virtuous, pull the skins off of the chicken thighs, along with any large clumps of fat. Otherwise, just dump them into a slow cooker***.
2. Add the soy sauce, vinegar, garlic, and bay leaves to the pot. If you are using whole peppercorns add them now; otherwise add the ground black pepper in the last hour (or so) of cooking.
3. Plug the pot in, turn on to Low, and ignore it for 6-8 hours.
4. Serve. There will be a fair amount of pot juices, which you can serve as with with the meat, or save it to cook veggies in later. You could, I suppose, thicken it with cornstarch or something similar but I have never seen the point.

*You could use a random cut-up chicken, or some other kind of parts, but this is my favorite. Thighs are meaty and flavorful, and are the perfect size for one serving of meat. Also, bone-in always taste best, imho.
**You could use some other soy sauce, but Kikkoman's soy sauce is a high-quality, naturally-brewed product, and their low-sodium version is flavorful and better for your health. I realize I sound like a company spokesman, but I really am happy with it.
***This recipe is scaled for a 3-4 quart slow cooker. If you have a larger or smaller model you will have to adjust the quantities to make it fit in your pot.

Comments

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

Oooh, must try sometime this week! Thank you for posting.

[ironhand.livejournal.com]

Maybe it was just stale from the restauraunts I've tried it in, but Kikkoman Soy has always put me off my feed, personally.

That said, this recipe calls to me. Must try soon...

[daidoji-gisei.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I generally don't use any soy sauce at Chinese restaurants, as the food is already plenty salty. My favorite Japanese place uses Kikkoman, and I've never noted a problem with it when I was sushi-dipping.

It might be stale, as you say, or it might be that you don't like the Japanese style of soy sauce. I went through a period of trying different brands of soy sauce at my favorite Asian grocery and did see variations in styles. My favorite was a brand from the Phillipenes, but its sodium content was simply horrifying. (I suspect a connection between these two observations.)