Prep: 10

Cook: 12

Marinating 30

Total: 52

Servings: 6 pieces

Course: Appetizer

Cuisine: Modern Filipino

Label: Chicken fillet, Filipino adobo

Print recipe Subscribe

Connie’s notes

It starts with chicken thigh fillets with the skin on. I wouldn’t recommend skinless fillets and especially NOT breast fillets. The chicken has to be marinated in a mixture of vinegar and soy sauce; since vinegar dries out meat, you need the fatty skin to make up for whatever effect the vinegar’s acid may have on the meat.

The marinated chicken thigh fillets can be fried or grilled. I fried mine. To make sure that the fillets wouldn’t turn too dark (the soy sauce, you see) before the meat was cooked through, I opted for the double-frying technique which is described in more detail in the instructions section below.

To make them truly modern Filipino, I chose home baked pan de sal as the base for the chicken adobo and quail eggs canapé. And because traditional Filipino adobo includes liver, I smeared the lightly toasted pan de sal halves with liver pâté.

But why quail eggs? Because these arecanapés. Chicken eggs would be too large and they would have fully covered the chicken adobo. Quail eggs, on the other hand, were just the right size.

Ingredients

3 to 6 skin on chicken thigh fillets halved if large
1 tablespoon minced garlic
2 to 4 bay leaves
¼ to ½ teaspoon ground black pepper
4 tablespoons rice vinegar if using a stronger vinegar, reduce the amount
6 tablespoons soy sauce
1 ½ cups cooking oil for frying
6 teaspoons liver pâté or substitute canned liver spread
3 small pan de sal halved and toasted
6 quail eggs fried sunny side up
fried garlic
finely sliced scallions

Instructions

Marinate the chicken

Arrange the chicken thigh fillets between two sheets of cling film. Using a kitchen mallet, pound to a uniform thickness of no more than a quarter of an inch thick.
Make the adobo sauce. In a bowl, stir the minced garlic, bay leaves, pepper, rice vinegar and soy sauce.
Place the pounded chicken thigh fillets in a shallow bowl and pour the adobo sauce over them. Cover the bowl and leave to marinate in the fridge for 30 minutes.

Fry the chicken adobo

Pour the cooking oil into a frying pan. Set the heat to medium (if using a thermometer, about 320F).
Strain the chicken thigh fillets and fry (in two batches, if the frying pan cannot hold all of them in a single layer) for about two minutes per side. Scoop out and move to a rack. Cool for five minutes.
Reheat the cooking oil; this time turn up the heat to high (about 375F). Fry the chicken fillets a second time. A minute per side should create a nice caramelized crust if the oil is hot enough. Scoop the chicken out of the oil and move to a rack.