The Carne Seca Experiment
One ingredient that you’ll find on almost every Brazilian restaurant menu is Carne seca. When the menu includes English translations this is often translated literally as ‘dry meat’ – I can’t imagine many people would pick that from the menu! A better translation that you also see used is ‘Jerked Beef’. Before I got to Brazil I thought jerked beef was just beef jerky – dry, salty strips chewed by cowboys in the olden days.
Happily, since those early days I have been enlightened. Rather like that dubious story that Eskimos have 50 words for snow, so Brazilians have several terms for dried, salted meat. Not all the accounts I have found agree, but I will try to explain the differences between the main types.
Carne de Sol
Also known as Jabá, this is a speciality of Northeastern Brazil – a region that for most of the year is hot and very dry. Meat (usually beef) is salted and then dried over the space of a couple of days. Originally the drying process was carried out in the sun (hence then name ‘carne de sol’, which translates literally as ‘Sun Meat’), but today it is more commonly dried in a covered location as the drying process is driven mostly by exposure to wind and low humidity rather than sunshine.
The end result is meat with a dry, salty surface that protects the soft, succulent interior – the meat doesn’t require refrigeration and will keep for weeks. When it is ready to be used, the carne de sol is soaked in water for a few hours to reduce the levels of salt – then it is ready to be fried or stewed and used in a variety of classic Northeastern recipes.
Not to be confused with the peanut sweet of the same name, Paçoca (pa-SOCK-a) is a dish from the Northeast, made with shredded carne de sol, manioc flour and red onions and garlic.
Carne Seca
Carne Seca is common throughout South America where it goes by a variety of different names. Originally it was given the name charqui (sounds like ‘sharky’) by the Quechua people and referred to dried, salted llama meat. The word charqui is where the word ‘jerky’ comes from. Carne seca is more heavily salted than carne de sol and dried for longer.
The first time I saw carne seca I was in Bolivia and the meat was drying on a washing line next to laundry. As you can see on faces of my friends, we weren’t exactly filled with a desire to eat the stuff.