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Nope. This vegan torta adobada is not a very calm experience. It's smoky. It's spicy. It's messy, but a messy torta is sorta the pinnacle of the sandwich lifestyle, in my opinion, at least. Juicy adobo jackfruit piled into a warm bolillo with crisp lettuce, avocado, and pickled jalapeños. Oh, mommy.
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What makes this recipe especially next level, is that you are going to hook up your own fresh adobo for it. Toast the chiles, and char the garlic onion and tomato until your kitchen smells ridiculous. Blend the adobo then ladle it onto your pan fried jackfruit and let it simmer.
If you've never messed with jackfruit as a meat, you are going to be so psyched. There's a damn good reason I rock it in place of pork in my vegan tamales, vegan carnitas, black bean tortas, and even in Filipino adobo cooking like adobong sitaw.
Let's get your sandwich lifestyle the upgrade it's been crying out in the night for already!
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🥰 Why you'll adore thisTorta Adobada recipe
✊ Vegan AF: Like all my vegan Mexican recipes, this jackfruit torta is proof positive you don't need animal products standing nearby like training wheels to make food taste insanely good.
🌶️ Adobo That Actually Delivers: Toasted dried chiles, charred aromatics, and lime come together fast and loud. You taste smoke, heat, and tang immediately instead of waiting around like "okay but when does it start."
🥪 Textural Chaos in a Good Way: Soft bread, juicy jackfruit, crispy lettuce, and melt in your mouth pickled jalapeños keep switching it up every bite. Nothing in this bad boy feels filler-y.
✅ Tested and Approved Worldwide: All my vegan recipes have been tweaked and perfected with feedback from hundreds of recipe testers who absolutely would've roasted me if it wasn't great.
💣 Learn the bomb vegan Mexican recipes
This guide to my most popular vegan Mexican recipes is 100% FREE, & you'll love the actual heck out of it 🥰
🌮 Adobo Jackfruit Torta Ingredients
Roma Tomato
Roma tomatoes are less watery than the big juicy slicers, which is exactly why I grab them for salsa roja, chile de árbol salsa, and salsa ranchera too. You get acidity and body without your adobo ending up with tomato sauce soup consistency, which is frankly a public service.
The Chiles
These two chiles in this recipe do very different jobs. Guajillos give color, body and warmth and I always have them on hand in my pantry to rock out salsa macha and salsa verde. If you must, you can swap them out for one ancho chile at a 2 guajillos to 1 ancho ratio.
Arbol chiles are sharper, hotter, and are the main source of spiciness in my salsa roja and chipotle peppers in adobo sauce recipes. Dried Thai chiles are the closest stand-in for arbols, but you can also leave them out entirely if you want to tame this sandwich.
Cumin Seeds
I'm obsessed with Wild Mountain cumin seeds from Burlap and Barrel because they are slender and smell absolutely bonkers. Regular cumin seeds are of course fine to use if they are what you have on hand. If ground cumin is all you've got, use it and carry on.
Get my fave cumin seeds for free!
Using this link, add the wild mountain cumin to your cart, spend at least $15 on some of the other absurdly good spices from Burlap & Barrel (they all seriously slap) and the bottle of this bangin' wild mountain cumin becomes FREE, and you will love it so much.
Young Green Jackfruit
Whatever you do, do not accidentally grab the sweet ripe yellow jackfruit. That's a different thing entirely. Canned young green jackfruit is easy to find at any Asian grocery store, and many Whole Foods carry them too.
Bolillo or Telera Rolls
Be careful to read the ingredients, as some of these traditional torta rolls contain lard, which is dumb, makes me mad, and has me shaking my fists into the night sky as tears roll down my tender vegan face.
If you don't have a nearby Mexican grocery store, a soft hoagie roll or French roll (like what you'd make a vegan banh mi on) will work fine.
Pickled Jalapeños
Pickled jalapeños add acidity, heat, and crunch that cut through the richness of the adobo. Fresh jalapeños can be used, or if you hate all things spicy, just use regular ol' cucumber pickles and make your life suck less.
Vegan Mayo
Veganaise from Follow Your Heart is my store-bought safety blanket, but my vegan kewpie mayo recipe exists for days when you love making your own spreads.
*See the recipe card at the bottom of the page for exact quantities, nutritional info, and detailed cooking directions.
📖 How to make Vegan Torta Adobada
Deep breaths, m'love. You can jump down to the recipe card and absolutely wing this Mexican sandwich… or you can follow these step-by-step instructions and come out looking wildly competent on the other side. I recommend the second option, but no presh.
Step One
Char Wars:
Set a comal or dry frying pan over medium high heat and add the garlic, onion, and tomatoes. Cook for 6-8 minutes, turning occasionally, until the veggies soften slightly and develop charred spots on their surfaces.
Step Two
Sweet Chile of Mine:
Add the guajillo chiles, arbol chiles, cumin seeds, bay leaf, black pepper, and coriander to the pan. Continue to cook for 30-60 seconds, stirring constantly, until fragrant, then remove the pan from the heat immediately to prevent scorching.
✅ Even though this is a short time, make sure both sides of the dried chilies get toasted in the pan.
Step Three
Blend It Like Beckham:
Transfer everything from the pan to a blender and add the oregano, lime juice, and salt. Blend until completely smooth, stopping to scrape down the sides as needed, then set aside.
Step Four
Shreddy Kreuger:
Drain and rinse the jackfruit under cold water, then firmly squeeze out as much excess liquid as possible. Shred the jackfruit into bite-size strands.
Step Five
Sautérday Night Live:
Heat the olive oil in a wide skillet over medium-high heat. After 90 seconds, add the shredded jackfruit, spread it into an even layer, and cook for 6-7 minutes, stirring occasionally, until lightly golden brown throughout.
Step Six
Adobo Photoshop:
Pour the blended adobo sauce into the large skillet and stir until the jackfruit is evenly coated. Reduce the heat to medium-low and cook for 10-12 minutes, stirring every few minutes, until the sauce thickens and absorbs into the jackfruit.
Step Seven
Telera Mockingbird:
Slice the rolls horizontally, leaving one side attached if desired. Warm them briefly over medium heat in a dry skillet or in a 350°F (175°C) oven until softened and heated through.
✅ Optionally, you can use a small amount of vegan butter or olive oil in the pan if you want to give the insides of your rolls a more evenly golden color.
Step Eight
Mayo'll Your Dreams Come True:
Spread mayo on the cut sides of each crusty roll, then layer lettuce on the bottom halves of the sandwich buns followed by the adobo jackfruit, tomato slices, red onion, smashed avocado slices, and a little bit of pickled jalapeños. Close the top bun and serve immediately.
50+ of my own family's fave recipes. Carefully concocted to win over even your most anti-vegan friends.
💡Serving Ideas
This vegan torta adobada goes real nice with a few friends on the plate.
A plate of vegan chilaquiles verdes on the side turns this into a brunchy feast, while vegan tostadas with refried beans and tofu chorizo add the massive crunch-on-crunch energy and we're all here for it.
Vegan fajitas with lion's mane mushrooms or a nice bowl of vegan picadillo over vegan Mexican rice make it a proper meal instead of just a very aggressive sandwich sitch.
👉 Top tips
- Squeeze the Jackfruit Until Nearly Dry: After rinsing, press out as much liquid as possible until the jackfruit feels spongy rather than wet. Too much moisture prevents browning and causes the jackfruit to splatter as it cooks, making an avoidable mess of your stovetop.
- Dried-Out Rolls Suck: Heat the rolls just until soft and pliable, but not dry and lifeless. Warm, soft bread absorbs sauce better and holds the vegan sandwich together more cleanly.
🤷♀️ Recipe FAQs
The original recipe of torta adobada happens when you take pork, drown it in a deeply spiced, tangy adobo sauce made from dried chilies, vinegar (or lime juice), and aromatics, cook it until it's completely tender, and then stack it into a crusty telera or bolillo roll with avocado, tomato, onion, lettuce, and sometimes refried beans.
The adobo cooking method traces back to Spanish colonial influence in Mexico, where preserving meat in vinegar, salt, and spices was a survival move before refrigeration existed.
It became a Mexican favorite so they took that concept and ran with it, swapping in local dried chilies like guajillo and ancho, adding spices and oregano, and turning it into something that tastes way better than its "let's not let this pork go bad" origins would suggest.
These vegan tortas are huge in northern Mexico, especially in states like Sonora and Sinaloa, where street vendors and loncheras have been slinging tortas adobadas for over 100 years.
Now, you've got your hands on their BOMB but healthy vegan torta recipe that helps you nail it without messing up some poor pig's day.
This vegan Mexican food has just a wee bit of heat, but it's balanced rather than overwhelming. You control the spice level by adjusting the arbol chiles (or leaving them out entirely), so it can land anywhere from gently warm to downright assertive.
A blender is strongly recommended to get a smooth adobo sauce. You can get away with using a molcajete, or food processor if you have one though.
✌️You'll also love these vegan Mexican recipes:
Master the art of vegan Mexican cooking in a super-fun recorded cooking class with Chef Adam Sobel!
Vegan Torta Adobada Recipe
Ingredients
For the Adobo Jackfruit:
- 6 cloves garlic peeled
- 1 medium onion peeled and quartered
- 1 Roma tomato cut in half
- 5 dried guajillo chiles stems and seeds removed
- 3 dried arbol chiles stems and seeds removed
- ½ teaspoon cumin seeds
- 1 bay leaf
- ½ teaspoon ground black pepper
- ½ teaspoon ground coriander
- 1 teaspoon oregano
- ¼ cup lime juice
- ¾ teaspoon salt or to taste
- 2 X 14 oz. cans young green jackfruit
- 3 tablespoons olive oil
For the Tortas:
- 4 bolillo or telera rolls 6-7 inches long
- ½ cup pickled jalapeños
- 1 ripe avocado sliced
- ½ cup vegan mayo
- 8 leaves Boston Bibb lettuce or iceberg
- 1 medium tomato sliced thinly
- ¼ cup red onion very thinly sliced
Instructions
- Place the garlic, onion, and tomato in a comal or dry frying pan set over medium-high heat. Cook, turning occasionally, for 6-8 minutes, until the surfaces are well charred in spots and the vegetables have softened slightly.
- Add the guajillo chiles, arbol chiles, cumin seeds, bay leaf, black pepper, and coriander to the pan. Cook for 30-60 seconds, stirring constantly, until the spices are fragrant. Remove the pan from the heat immediately to prevent scorching.
- Transfer the contents of the pan to a blender. Add the oregano, lime juice, and salt. Blend until completely smooth, stopping to scrape the sides as needed. Set aside.
- Drain the jackfruit and rinse it under cold water. Use your hands to firmly squeeze out as much excess liquid as possible. Then shred the jackfruit into bite-size strands.
- Heat the olive oil in a wide skillet over medium-high heat. After 90 seconds, when the oil is hot, add the shredded jackfruit and spread it into an even layer. Cook for 6-7 minutes, stirring occasionally, until lightly browned all over.
- Pour the blended adobo sauce into the skillet and stir to coat the jackfruit evenly. Reduce to medium-low heat and cook for 10-12 minutes, stirring every few minutes, until the sauce thickens and absorbs into the jackfruit. Remove from the heat.
- Slice the rolls horizontally, leaving one side attached if desired. Warm them briefly over medium heat in a dry skillet or in a 350°F (175°C) oven just until warmed and soft.
- Spread the mayo on the cut sides of each roll. Layer the lettuce on the bottom half, followed by the adobo jackfruit, tomato slices, red onion, avocado, and pickled jalapeños. Close the sandwiches and serve immediately.
Notes
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