Gather your spoons, forks, and mounds of steaming white rice (or garlic rice, if you prefer): Google just featured mouthwatering chicken adobo on its front page.
The adorable doodle is now live on the search engine, featuring its most common and popular ingredients: vinegar, soy sauce, garlic, bay leaves, and chicken.
On its website, Google writes:
“Today’s animated Doodle celebrates adobo, a way of cooking and a favorite Filipino dish! Adobo can be found far and wide, whether it’s at a five-star restaurant in Manila or inside the homes of Filipino families around the world. The word ‘adobo’ was first added to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in December 2006, and was included on the word list of the next OED quarterly update, released on this day in 2007.”
“There are many different kinds of adobo in the Philippines but they all share the same basic elements: marinated meat or vegetables braised into a stew. Common ingredients include vinegar, soy sauce, garlic, bay leaves, and black pepper. The local flavors make Filipino adobo much sweeter, sourer, and saltier in taste compared to other versions,” it explained.
The doodle was illustrated by Anthony Irwin, whose mother immigrated from the Philippines to the United States.
“I can claim Filipino food as a part of my culture and celebrate the connection it creates between my mother’s identity and my own,” he wrote, adding that he ordered “some southern-style chicken adobo from a local restaurant” to stir up memories while working on the Doodle art. “The first thing that hit me was the smell. It was so bright and nostalgic, and instantly filled my apartment with that familiar feeling: this is exactly how things are supposed to be. So I tried to capture that simple childhood joy of leaning in and savoring the kind of food that makes home feel like home,” he added.
While the Philippines does not have an official dish, adobo is certainly one of the most recognizable dishes in the country’s cuisine. There are various iterations of adobo in the Philippines, made in different ways in various regions — as evidenced by the brouhaha caused by the country’s Department of Trade and Industry in 2021 when it made an ill-informed attempt to standardize the Philippine dish was met with ire by chefs, restaurateurs, and Filipino cuisine-loving netizens.
Those in the Visayas region eschew soy sauce altogether in their adobong puti, for example, claiming theirs to be the most indigenous version as soy sauce was introduced by Chinese traders. Meanwhile, the Bicol region is well known for its adobo sa gata, which introduced coconut milk for a richer taste and more velvety mouthfeel.
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