Brazilian Recipes: Baião de Dois

A few of the things you’ll be needing for today’s recipe for Baião de Dois.

Today I am stepping into dangerous territory – I’m going to tell you about one of the classic recipes of Northeast Brazil. Why dangerous? Well try to imagine a beloved recipe from your hometown/region. Now imagine that some idiot from another country comes bumbling along and tries to tell everyone how to make it, but of course the bumbling idiot gets it so, so wrong. So before I get myself into trouble, I will quickly attempt to pre-empt outraged complaints by saying that this is just my way of doing it and I accept that true Nordestinos may do it differently.

OK, so with that pusillanimous pre-emptive apology out of the way, let’s get on with it shall we? Baião (sounds a bit like ‘buy-OHWN’) is a style of music and dance from Northeast Brazil (if you’d like some extra Nordestino atmosphere, why not have Luiz Gonzaga sing Baião in the background while you read the rest of the post?). So if “Baião de Dois” is a dance for two, then who are the principal protagonists in this culinary caper? You guessed it – Mr Rice and Mrs Beans:

Will you join me for this dance good lady? Why certainly sir!

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Ingredients

250g white rice

300g feijão fradinho (black-eye peas)

30g butter

1 onion, chopped

4 cloves of garlic, finely chopped

1 red pepper, chopped into smallish pieces

2 large ripe tomatoes, skinned and chopped

6 scallions (spring onions), roughly chopped

150g bacon, chopped into small chunks

150g linguiça defumada (smoked sausage), chopped into thinnish disks

300g carne seca, soaked, cooked and roughly shredded

100g queijo coalho (substitute mozzarella if necessary)

A good handful of cilantro (coriander leaves), roughly chopped

In case you were wondering, this is the kind of linguiça and bacon you should be looking for.

Steps

• Prep 1: Cook the black-eye peas until cooked through but not mushy.
• Prep 2: (Optional) Fry the bacon chunks and linguiça in a dry pan for 5 or 10 minutes until they are nicely browned and crisped up. This will render out a lot of fat which you can chuck out or use for something else. The authentic recipe would skip this step so that all that lovely fat is incorporated into the finished dish, but I’d like to live past 50.

Carne seca (top), bacon and linguiça (bottom). This is after the frying step which removes a scary amount of fat.

• Prep 3: (Optional) Cook the rice. A bit controversial this one – most recipes I’ve seen call for the uncooked rice to added to all the other ingredients and then cooked, presumably so the rice grains soak up all the tasty flavours, but from my experiments you can just cook the rice on its own at the beginning and then mix it in later.
• Melt the butter In a large saucepan, then fry the onions and garlic over a medium-high heat for a few minutes until softened. Add the red peppers and continue frying for another few minutes.
• Once the peppers have started to soften, add in the bacon and linguiça. If you did Prep Step 2 you can just give everything a good stir and then continue – otherwise turn the heat up and move everything around in the pan until the bacon and linguiça are well browned.

• Add the chopped tomatoes and carne seca, stir well and reduce the heat to medium-low. Mix in the spring onions.
• Now add a few tablespoons of the cooked rice, mixing it in and adding more and more until it seems like you have the right amount (your call).

I added the rice gradually until it looked right. Remember to leave room for the beans!

• Next, do the same with the beans, mixing in a few spoons at a time until you like the look of things.
• Finally, add some chunks of queijo coalho (or other cheese), turn the heat up to medium-high, give everything a good stir, put the lid on and turn the heat off.

Mmmm, cheese.

• Wait a couple of minutes for the cheese chunks to semi-melt and then serve, topped with a good sprinkling of cilantro.

The finished dish complete with a melty chunk of cheese – proper comfort food.

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So there it is – my recipe for Baião de Dois, a classic dish from Northeast Brazil. I’m hoping that those of you from the Northeast won’t berate me too harshly for the liberties I took with the recipe. The end result is pure comfort food indulgence. I ended up making a huge pot of the stuff as I worked on this post, so quite a lot of it will go into the freezer until some rainy day when I’m too lazy to cook – as ‘lazy-day meals’ go, it beats hell out of 2 minute noodles or cheese on toast!