Adobo is the Spanish word for seasoning or marinade. The noun form is used to describe the actual marinade or seasoning mix, and the term used for a meat which has been marinated or seasoned with an adobo is referred to having been adobada.

The word is the first-person singular present indicative form of adobar, a Spanish verb meaning "to marinate."

General

Adobo is also the name of a common and very popular dish in the Philippines; indeed it is considered a national dish. Typically made from pork or chicken or a combination of both, it is slowly cooked in soy sauce, vinegar, crushed garlic, bay leaf, and black peppercorns, and often browned in the oven or pan-fried afterwards to get the desirable crisped edges. This dish originates from the northern region of the Philippines. It is commonly packed for Filipino mountaineers and travelers. Its relatively long shelf-life is due to one of its primary ingredients, vinegar, which inhibits the growth of bacteria.

The standard accompaniments to adobo is white rice

Outside the home-cooked dish, the essence of adobo has been developed commercially and adapted to other foods. A number of successful local Philippine snack products usually mark their items "Adobo-flavored." This assortment includes, but is not limited to nuts, chips, noodle soups, and corn crackers.

Ingredients

Traditionally adobo is one of the first dishes Filipinos learn to cook, it is simple and requires just a handful of ingredients. In good-tasting adobo, none of the spice flavors dominates but rather the taste is a delicate balance of all the ingredients. The most widely preferred type has been traditionally pork adobo, followed by chicken adobo which is generally considered somewhat healthier.

Other ingredients such as squid, beef, lamb, game fowl like quail and snipe, catfish, okra, eggplant, string beans, and water spinach (kangkong) are also made into adobo, with appropriate changes in the basic recipe. Squid adobo (adobong pusit), for instance, is quite different. While most adobo preparations have a brownish sauce, squid adobo has a deep, purplish-black sauce not unlike the Spanish dish calamares en su tinta due to the inclusion of squid ink.

In addition, there are other varieties of adobo that use the following ingredients: milk giving the sauce a creamy pastel color and a milky thickness; distinctly Chinese ingredients such as star anise, rock sugar, and rice wine typically found in the Chinese-Filipino community; a Mexican ingredient, the earthy red-coloured spice achiote (achuete in the Philippines), also known as annatto, as found in a beef variety from Batangas province in the Philippines; sugar, or sweet orange juice or pineapple juice yielding a sweet-sour variety; and hot chili peppers (often Thai peppers) to produce a spicy variant.