This is a little off-model for this thread, but I made an adobo a couple months back for a duck dish that, honestly, turned out better than the meal itself.
There is an excellent and exciting cookbook by the Cuban chef and scholar of medieval Spain Maricel E. Presilla, covering the broad swath of Latin cuisine in Central and South America. (So, everything south of the Rio Bravo/Grande; no Florida, Texas, California, or Southwest to be found.)
It's a heck of a work, which I've only scratched the surface of, but this one might be of interest to some of you.
Here's the recipe for the sauce, with footnotes to follow:
*As Presilla writes, "An adobo can be either a marinade for meats or a liquid for braising them that contains the key elements of hotness and sourness tempered with other flavors. In Old Spain, the hot and sour players would have been black pepper and vinegar. Here in the New World, native hot peppers got in on the adobo act, and in some regions (for example, the Yucatán) they are often combined with citrus juices, a lot of garlic, and various herbs and spices. I use the term adobo mostly to refer either to hot-sour-garlicky mixtures, some thick enough to be rubs and some thin enough to be basting sauces, or to stews or soup-stews where the meat is cooked in a sauce (thick or thin) that provides a foundation of acidity and heat that still endures."
**The mirasol pepper, or <I>ají mirasol</I> (<I>ají</I> meaning pepper), was pretty hard to come by, and, from the best that I can tell, <I>may</I> come in both large and small sizes. Frankly, I had to order mine from Amazon. The mirasol is the dried form of the
ají amarillo, which is yellow, befitting its name. Presilla writes: "The color of old copper, it has a lovely sweetness and fruitiness with winey, slightly smoky notes. You can buy it pre-ground to a powder." The
ones I ordered...well, frankly, I'm not 100% persuaded that they were the right ones, based on some of the reviews on the product page and some lack of clarity online about how large they should be. That said, they did seem to have the requisite sweetness and smokiness, so I'm confident enough in the outcome. Oh, and these pictures which come up are just like what I ordered, about half-a-foot long.
***The cumin is the real star. Presilla has a couple of other sauce recipes in here involving the mirasol, none of which I have tried yet, but they don't include the cumin.
****In brief form, remove the stem, butterfly it (cutting down one send to open it up), and remove the seeds, scraping them out, essentially.
*****You'll have a decently spicy smell going in your kitchen at this point, so be warned. It'll get in your nostrils.
So, that's the process. I reserved some from marinade purposes, and tried it with some chips. <I>Excellent</I>. Not super-spicy, but that could be adjusted readily enough, perhaps with the addition of some spicier pepper powder like cayenne. And it's possibly worth trying the basic principle with a more readily available dried pepper than the mirasol, retaining the rest of the recipe.