Date Cooked: June 22, 2025
I didn’t have a clear understanding of what Adobo cooking is but somehow I found this Mark and Abby’s World YouTube video for Adobo Chicken that looked delicious. Mark is a Filipino and calls his recipe Adobo. There is a spectrum of cooks ranging from those who measure every item exactly to those who go for a little of this, a lot of that. I’m definitely closer to the first side of the range – especially when cooking something for the first time. Mark is way over on the other horizon; he has a big bin of chicken and pours a few slugs of soy sauce and some garlic and some oyster sauce. He says that you can’t do Adobo wrong. Using both oyster sauce and hoisin sauce really called to me – it’s something in our pantry on the regular – but just pour “some” in? I need more direction than that. But, again, that’s me; I’m not saying I’m right. I needed some specifics for so went searching for Adobo Grilled Chicken recipes.
My first stop was to see exactly what Adobo cooking is. Wikipedia says this about the style of cooking
Adobo or adobar (Spanish: marinade, sauce, or seasoning) is the immersion of food in a stock (or sauce) composed variously of paprika, oregano, salt, garlic, and vinegar to preserve and enhance its flavor. The Portuguese variant is known as carne de vinha d’alhos.
Mark’s recipe has the vinegar, salt and garlic, but no paprika. And most Adobo recipes I found were cooked on a stove top or braised in the oven; I wanted to grill! Based I that it seemed I wouldn’t find what I wanted when searching for “Adobo Grilled Chicken” As I said above, I was intrigued by the oyster and hoisin sauces so searched for “grilled chicken with soy sauce, oyster sauce, and hoisin sauce”. After some searching I found Lean Bella’s post on “Asian Inspired Grilled Chicken”. There was no hoisin sauce but I could work around that. I used Bella’s recipe as a short cut substituting hoisin sauce for some of the honey and brown sugar. Enough blah, blah, blaming; let’s cook.
I measured, pressed, grated and produced this wonderful smelling marinade.
Another thing I liked about Mark and Abby’s recipe is how they cut some lines into the chicken thighs. It provides more surface area for the marinade and flattens them out which may speed up cooking (more on that later). Prepare yourself, here is a picture of raw chicken – a subject I rarely publish, cause yuck. But it shows the extra slices.
I trimmed the chicken and put them in a 1 gallon sealable plastic bag, poured the marinade over, pressed out the air, sealed the bag and put it in the refrigerator for an hour. Forty minutes later I fired up the gas grill to high, scraped and oiled the grates then turned off the middle two burners in order to create a two-zone cooking space; aiming for 350°.
Here is the chicken out of the marinade and ready to grill.
The chicken goes skin side down over indirect heat.
It was a beautiful day to watch the grill.
After the first 20 minutes I brushed on some of the marinade left in the pan. If you do this, only baste early so it will have time to cook off; we don’t want those raw-chicken germs on chicken we are about to eat.
Cooking bone-in skin-on chicken thighs usually takes about 40 minutes when cooking indirectly. Slicing the grooves into the meat side flattens the thighs and I thought it would speed up the process; not so much. The chicken had only reached 135° after half an hour. (I probably could have bumped up the gas a bit). But it looked good.
Finally after about 45 minutes the thighs got up to 150°; so, I turned all the burners on in order to get a bit of color on them.
The chicken needs just a short time over direct heat; there is plenty of sugar in the marinade that will burn on the chicken if it gets a chance. Finally, chicken has reached 165° and is ready to eat. I lost a bit of skin on two of the thighs.
Dinner is served: grilled Asian style chicken with rice and smashed cucumbers with sesame oil and garlic
Excellent; definitely going into the summer rotation. 4 Stars ★★★★
Just for kicks here is an extreme close-up of the cotton glove liners I use while BBQing (I wear nitrile gloves over them). It was an accidental picture but I like it.
