Let Me Tell You About Brazilian Food

The topic often comes up on Skype or even on the lil' chat here, and it's really entertaining, so I thought I'd make a thread for it. Warning: this thread will make you hungry. Also, it's picture-heavy! Proceed with care.

Brazil is a very privileged place as far as food is concerned, because we produce such an abundance of it. At the same time, most people are poor (such are the incongruities of capitalism!) which means that while we have a wide variety of ingredients available to us, we often do the typical poor-region thing of "throw this all together any way you can to make it taste nice and eat it". See for example, the traditional feijoada: rice, beans, pork scraps (like feet, ears, the kind of thing you'd generally throw out), collard greens fried in oil or butter, slices of orange. It's all fresh, natural ingredients, but at the same time it's a mishmash of the kind of stuff you have a lot of when you're running a plantation, so, for us, this is very cheap food with a great nutritional value.

I'm not gonna focus on "traditional" cuisine, though, but rather on the kind of stuff Brazilians eat when they go out for lunch or dinner. Traditional stuff varies from region to region and I don't claim to know too much of it outside of the stuff that's traditional in my own state. Brazil is a huge country and out food availability changes from state to state - for example, fish is expensive in the South and most traditional dishes don't include it, but in the Northeast shore it's dirt-cheap and a staple of cooking. So...

I. EVERYDAY LUNCHES

Brazilians eat a lot. In my university we get foreign students from all over the world coming to participate in our renowned Portuguese As a Foreign Language Program, and they're constantly amazed by just how cheap and easy it is to find a buffet executivo, that is, an all-you-can-eat buffet geared towards people who don't have fortunes to spend and who have only a quick lunch break, and which often have upwards of 20 different dishes including fresh salads, rice and beans, pastas, grilled meats of all sorts and a "dessert buffet" with puddings, mousses, sagu, ambrosia and jell-o. A good buffet executivo costs around 17-20 reais. At the time of writing, this equals 5.20 to 6.30 dollars.


This is the Prato Verde, a popular vegetarian buffet in my city. There's more food off to the left side of the picture, plus a dessert buffet and, as you can see in the back and to the left, fruit juices and water. Everything is made from fresh ingredients, you can help yourself as much as you want to whatever you like, and this place costs 17 reais on weekdays and a little more on weekends.



Another popular choice - and one that's even cheaper - is the above: Ala Minuta, a made to order dish of white rice, tomato, lettuce, fries, a fried egg and some sort of meat - usually chicken breasts or cheap cuts of steak. Some "fancier" Ala Minutas (like the ones served in my campus diner) include options for potato salad, bread crusting, extra eggs, different sauces accompanying the meat, different salads etc. This is good because it's hearty but you also get a bit of everything for an affordable price. Comparatively, when I traveled to Montevideo with friends, restaurants usually only served meat and carbohydrates, and we almost cried for joy when, after a week, we returned to our country and were able to eat some overpriced Ala Minuta.


This right here is a bife à Parmegiana and it's the reason my attempt to be a vegetarian failed. It's steak with a crispy bread crusting, filled with ham and cheese and covered with tomato sauce. It's usually one of the fancier options in places that serve Ala Minutas.

II. JUNK FOOD AND STREET FOOD

And we are also masters in putting anything inside a thing, and in taking foreign dishes and making them weird. Consider the following:


Chocolate and strawberry pizza. This is very common, I had one this week.


Banana and eggnog pizza. My bro loves this.


Brazilian temakis. Temaki stores are a contemporary craze, especially among young Brazilians, being a relatively cheap way to eat normally expensive Japanese food - with a Brazilian twist, of course, as our food tends to be a bit spicier and saltier than would be expected in an Actual Japanese Restaurant. Aside from Japanese food, which is a current craze, we also have lots of Chinese restaurants and some Arab (esp. Lebanese) ones as well.


These are pastéis (singular: "pastel"), a dish derived from the Chinese gyoza, only completely bastardized into an authenthic Brazilian street food. It's a thin crispy fried dough with savory or sweet fillings. The most traditional filling is the "meat pastel": ground beef, olives, a cooked egg and parsley. Almost equally popular are chicken (pulled chicken with tomato sauce and cream cheese) and cheese (just... just a fuckton of melted cheese... what even are arteries). But depending on where you go, people get fancy:


Shrimp pastel with tomato sauce and cream cheese.


Chocolate pastel with strawberries.


Don't think American food doesn't get bastardized too! Here we have a "complete hot dog": two sausages, tomato sauce, mustard, ketchup, mayo, olive oil, parsley, corn, peas, grated cheese, straw potatos and, in some cases, mashed potato as well.


This is a "xis" (pronounced "sheez"), inspired by the American cheeseburger - I shit you not. This one is a xis-carne, with beef, but you can easily find it filled with poultry, pork, strogonoff or whole chicken hearts instead.

There's an incoming part III and IV, but this post is already huge as it is! Imma ping fellow Brazilian @witchknights to see if there's anything she'd like to add.

 

<= trying to explain flailing with joy in a textual mediun

 

Oh damn everything looks so delicious and I'm hungry again even though I just ate dinner

 

III. SWEETS

We tend to be heavy on the salt and sugar in our foods. Our sweets are sickeningly sweet and many of them require a lot of condensed milk - which is extremely popular here, thanks in great part to a widespread Nestlé campaign in the early 20th century, which promoted condensed milk as a cheap and easy way to make "difficult" confections such as puddings and mousses, and thus as something women could have in their man-catching arsenal.

This is the brigadeiro and branquinho, commonly served during children's birthdays.



This presentation where they're all rolled up and covered with grated chocolate (brigadeiro) or sugar (branquinho) is for parties. When we cook this for ourselves at home - which we do quite a lot, because it's a quick and easy dish - we don't roll it up, instead just eating it from the pot with a spoon.


Another common, traditional sweet is the pudim de leite (condensed milk pudding). The orange stuff is liquid caramel. You find this in the "dessert buffet" of most buffets executivos (see above).


Another frequent buffet dish is the sagu. This is cornstarch cooked in red wine, usually accompanied by vanilla cream. I personally think it's gross, but most of my friends like it.


A quick google search tells me that what you guys call "ambrosia" is very different from ours! Thisi s Brazilian ambrosia. It's condensed milk, sugar and eggs, spiced with lemon juice, cinnamon and cloves.


Another thing that is very different - carrot cake. Brazilian carrot cake is floofy, smooth and has a delicate flavor. It's usually topped with a chocolate glaze, as shown above, and is very common at birthday parties.

 

Oh god, that chocolate and strawberry pastel (are pastéis similar to the English 'pasty' or is it an etymological coincidence?). I have a mighty need.

 

@Witch of Empty What I do know is that the name comes from European Portuguese, in which it means tiny pies made with pastry dough - which here we'd call "empada". And in Spanish, "pastel" actually means "cake", esp. cake with multiple layers. It is probably all connected, but I'm not too sure of the etimology in this case.

 

IV: ALCOHOL

Trigger warning for alcohol, obviously.



The most common alcoholic beverage made in Brazil is the cachaça, a distilled, aromatic and very fucking strong beverage made from sugarcane. You find cheapass cachaças which are just made to get people as drunk as possible, as fast as possible, but there are also very nice ones scented with all sorts of different ingredients.


From the cachaça we make the Brazilian classic "caipirinha": cachaça, sugar and lemons for a refreshing drink that also gets you very drunk. A large glass of caipirinha is usually supposed to be passed around a group of people. I've met foreigners who didn't realize that, just took the caipirinha and attempted to drink the whole thing themselves, which not only is a social faux-passe, it's also pretty impossible, haha.


Caipirinha variations made with vodka instead of cachaça (it's called "caipiroska" then, and is a bit weaker) and with strawberry or kiwi instead of lemon. Strawberry caipiroska is my personal fave.



With winter in Brazil, I've been drinking a fair share of quentão, or Brazilian mulled wine. It's made with red wine, brown sugar, anise, cinnamon, cloves and orange peel, and served smoking hot as a winter dish.

 

Note to self: update with V: FESTA JUNINA and VI: GAUCHO FOOD when I feel like it, not right now though.

 

Can I marry brazil's food?
Because wow
yum
wow

 

*0* I want all of it

 

uh, so who wants to field trip to brazil now and steal all the recipes

 

i'm so concerned
also this all looks amazing *_*

 

@bluefox YOU SHOULD BE >:D

Fun fact: once, me, my dad and bro were vacationing in the Northeast and we saw a guy go up to a bar and buy a 500ml can of cachaça (we don't have cans of cachaça here at all, it's weird, imagine a can of vodka) to drink on his own... at 10am... on a Wednesday. To this day we remember that incident and go "??????"

 

...what is your story, random stranger
who hurt you



(pfft but ten am on a wednesday omg)

 

.... Well I mean I am bad at guessing sizes from pictures but that glass of caipirinha looks like somethign some of the more... alcohol acquainted tweens around here would slaughter all on their own. Good to know that customs regarding drinks do not actually transfer when someone steals recipes because I like caipirinhas lots I just can never finish even a small one on my own without ending up the drunkest white girl/enby person on planet earth.
(psst. Most cocktails taste way better 'virgin', aka with non-alcoholic fakey fake recipes. Virgin Caiprinhas are made with ginger ale (around here at least? Lol) and they make me happy!)

But wow the need to go on a 'Brazillian Food Roadtrip' is strong that all looks so tasty

 

I visited Brasil (specifically, Rio and Salvador) about six years ago and it was wonderful. I am also currently learning portuguese (Hoje nós aprendimos como falar em voz passiva) so this is perfect for me. Perfect.

1) I don't know where it is from, but the bobo de camarão is amazing and I love it
2) I have this cilantro + coconut milk + shrimp + garlic recipe that my mom says is Brasilian and I love it so much
3) Caipirinha is one of my favourite drinks ever. I love it. I can drink the entire glass on my own :D Granted it takes me an hour because I sip and savour cuz I'm not there to get crunk.
4) Your post makes me want to make a Bolivian and Peruvian food post TuT

 

Please do! I love looking at food from countries I haven't been to and comparing it to my home cuisine!

speaking off, anyone interested in talking about German fastfood/streetfood? we only invented the two best ones :P

 

I'm going to do it :D

 

Nossa, que legal! Jo hablo poco español (en verdad hablo el auténtico "Portuñol" de los brasileños) pero he viajado a Uruguay y Argentina muchas veces y me ha servido razoavelmente, entonces...

1) Bobó de camarão is from Bahia! I'm not sure I've ever had that, but my mom has made camarão na moranga (warning: picture looks delicious) a couple of times.
2) I think that's pirão de camarão! Again, northeastern. It can be made from fish too.
3) Yeah, drinking it slowly works. Thing with caipirinha is not only is cachaça really alcoholic, the lemon and sugar both potentialize alcohol absorption so you get drunk faster.
4) Dooooooooo eeeeeeet

 

shit son. i'm so hungry now. I love shrimp, and I love cilantro, and I love coconut shrimp, and and and ...

imma die