Food and drink Archives - Page 19 of 39

Pig Parts and Feijoada

03/06/2013/20 Comments/in Food and drink

Every decent sized supermarket in Brazil has one – an aisle containing all the salted meats and pig parts. In the image below you can see (from the left) pigs ears, salted pork, pigs trotters, vertebrae, pigs tails, more unidentified salted meat and finally sausages!

All the items are just piled up in the open air – there’s no need for refrigeration when the meat is salted like this.

Cuts such as these are traditionally used in feijoada, Brazil’s ‘national dish‘. The commonly told story is that feijoada was invented by slaves and made with the offcuts (ears, trotters, tails, etc) that the masters didn’t want. Although almost everyone believes and retells this story, according to various culinary historians it is almost certainly apocryphal: back in the early days of Brazil’s colonisation, not even the slave owners were rich enough to turn their noses up at certain parts of the animal.

Brazil Nuts!

30/05/2013/8 Comments/in Food and drink

Hemmer call it Moho Inglês but with the fancy subtitle “Tipo Worcestershire”.

As someone who enjoys the spicy, tomatoey goodness of a Bloody Mary, I learned pretty soon after I arrived in Brazil that Worcestershire Sauce is sold here under a different name: Molho Inglês. This translates as ‘English Sauce’ which strikes me as an utterly sensible name considering:

1. “Worcestershire” is a bit of an awkward mouthful, even for native speakers. For anyone who doesn’t know, the proper pronunciation is: ‘WUSS-ter-sha’ – that final syllable does not rhyme with “hire”!

2. Why should anyone in Brazil care if this sauce originated in Worcestershire, Leicestershire or Westward Ho!? For people living more than 5,000 miles away, “England” seems accurate enough.

Well, not long after I made the Molho Inglês discovery, I made another one, but this time the shoe was on the other foot! On my first visit to a Brazilian street market I saw that the nuts I had been calling “Brazil” all my life were in fact named after one of the large states in the Amazon region, Pará.

The enormous northern state of Pará – second largest in Brazil.

The full name is Castanha do Pará, which, from a Carioca at least, sounds like ‘cash-TAN-ya doh pa-RAH’ – (“Castanha” means chestnut).

“Interesting” I thought, “so while the rest of the world just calls them Brazil nuts, the Brazilians get a little more specific and name them after the state of their origin”. That seemed like a reasonable conclusion at the time, but I’ve since learned there is a little more to it than that.

Milho Verde – Brazilian Sweetcorn

09/05/2013/36 Comments/in Food and drink

Some time ago I was browsing the Brazil section of Reddit when I saw someone asking for advice: “I’m moving from the US to Rio in a few months – is there anything I should bring with me that is hard to get over there?”.

This caught my interest, so I had a look at the responses – most of them seemed pretty sensible, but then I saw one reply which struck me as odd. It said something like “You should bring can openers – they don’t have them here. Also bring good ballpoint pens, gem clips, file folders and sweetcorn”.

Items apparently not found in Brazil…

The whole list just made me go “Urgh?”. First off, there was the can opener thing. I bought a can opener here in Rio when we moved into our apartment so I couldn’t understand what the guy was talking about (did he think Brazilians opened cans with their teeth?). I was also perplexed by the items of stationery – I had picked up all those things and more at a stationers in Botafogo.

But what really got me was the sweetcorn. Sweetcorn?! Sweetcorn accounts for a whole category of street vendor here and what’s more, it’s delicious! I couldn’t let that go – I replied, saying that sweetcorn is common in Brazil and also very tasty.

At this point someone else got involved and asked if I had “ever lived in North USA – the corn there is delicious. The corn in Brazil is so bad that they wouldn’t feed it to the cattle”. Woah! [deep breath, count to 10] Now I haven’t lived in any part of the US, so I can’t compare, but if you think the corn in Brazil is bad, you need to change the place you’re buying your corn!

Comida di Buteco 2013

30/04/2013/3 Comments/in Food and drink

What a busy weekend we had! We managed to visit no less than four of the bars participating in this year’s Comida di Buteco competition. I like this competition for a few reasons: it stimulates creativity and competition between bars; it encourages people to support these local small businesses; it’s a great way to discover new bars; it gives me an excuse to go out and eat, drink and be merry with Mrs Eat Rio in the name of ‘research’.

As I understand it, bars don’t just choose to participate in Comida di Buteco – they are invited – and it looks like it gives a serious boost to business. All the bars we visited were packed full of happy customers enthusiastically evaluating the petiscos, cervejas and caipirinhas on offer. Here’s a little taste of how things went…

=====

Botero

Bar: This must be the perfect example of the ‘CdB Effect’ in terms of discovering new places. Botero opened last August but none of my fellow drinking companions had heard of it until it was listed in the competition. Clearly this place is no secret though as it was packed on Friday night. Even though it was really busy, the waitress brought our drinks quickly and even pulled over a beer crate so we had somewhere to put them while we waited for a table.

Dish: Three pairs of bruschettas, one topped with shredded beef rib, one with linguiça and herbs and one with a tiny fried quail egg. Seriously delicious, I scored it 9 (out of 10).

Overall: I really liked this place – we tried a couple of other things from the menu and they were seriously good. This could be my new favourite local bar!

Brazilian Brands: Diamante Negro

26/04/2013/0 Comments/in Food and drink

What is it about chocolate that inspires such adoration? I’m sure you’ve all seen those articles in which “scientists say” all kinds of things about chocolate (it releases endorphins, is good for your heart, etc). But on top of all that science stuff, I think many of us are more than a little sentimental about chocolate aren’t we? I for one could talk for hours about the various chocolate bars and confectionery of my youth (don’t get me started on the infamous case of the shrinking Curly Wurly).

You can gauge the amount of love there is for a product by the intensity of longing that exists among expats who can’t get hold of it anymore (personally I obsess over Marmite, HP Sauce and Cadbury’s Dairy Milk). I wonder how many Brazilians living abroad have saudade for today’s Brazilian Brand.

=================

Diamante Negro

Name: Diamante Negro.

Product: Chocolate.

Description: This chocolate bar goes back a long way and (surprise surprise, this being Brazil!) it has a football connection. In 1938, the World Cup was being held in France. Germany had just invaded Austria (the Anschluss even extended to the football teams, leaving the tournament one team short!), but for French journalist Raymondo Thourmagem, the story of the tournament was a Brazilian player, Leônidas da Silva. Thourmagem was so impressed with Leônidas that he dubbed him the Diamante Negro (Black Diamond) and the name stuck.

Lacta, a Brazilian chocolate manufacturer, opportunistically decided to rename their chocolate bar after the great player and again, the name stuck. They came up with a rather nice slogan too: “Viver é bom, com Diamante Negro é melhor” (To live is good, with Black Diamond it’s better).

Archive for category: Food and drink

Botero