Chicken and Pork Adobo Flakes (meal prep)

I don't think I need to post yet another adobo recipe in this site (I can think of at least 2 adobo recipes that I have already posted previously), but what I would like to point out is that adobo is one of those recipes that lends well with meal planning and food prep (i.e. cooking a huge batch and freezing single portions into blocks for later reheating without losing any flavor or impacting texture). Turning it into adobo flakes is trivial and is just a matter of shredding everything with a fork in each hand and placing the shredded meat back into the simmering adobo sauce to further intensify the flavors. I personally like my adobo flakes fried to a crisp, and you can easily achieve that final step when you are thawing out and reheating the individual portions.

I have decided to make half and half pork and chicken adobo, adding up to a kilo. I'd suggest not to shy away from fatty cuts for the pork since the chicken part tends to be on the leaner side. For this particular batch, I refrained from adding as much soy sauce as I would normally and opted to go for that lighter adobo instead. For vinegar, I used tuba vinegar (coconut toddy vinegar) for that signature intensely sour tang. For the soy sauce, I just used a tablespoon of Knorr Liquid Seasoning and just rounded out the flavor with fish sauce to even out the sourness with the salty punch.

I kept the garlic cloves whole and just mashed them later during cooking. I have also added some annatto powder, so when the fat renders out during cooking, most of the fat-soluble flavor and pigment compounds present in annatto which are fat-soluble will result in a flavorful, red-orange colored adobo oil, which is great when mixed with freshly cooked rice.

An interesting culinary linguistic trivia: there is a term in Filipino called "iniga" which means to braise meat until the fat renders out and then fry the meat in its own rendered fat. There isn't any single English word equivalent I can think of, but this concept is quite common in Filipino cooking (examples are when cooking longanisa, tocino, and inigang adobo, just to name a few).

To achieve the extreme crunch of individual strands, you can fry in oil or air-fry while tossing or shaking the basket occasionally, so the strands get maximum exposure to the hot air.