Brazilian Fruit Blogging — Sapoti

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Fruit Blogging, Sapoti, Tropical Fruit

I had always assumed that the Sapoti (apparently called “sapodilla” in English, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it in any English speaking country, except maybe Singapore and Malaysia, where I believe it is called sapote or chiku/chikoo) originated in Asia, since it is so common in Indonesia and Malaysia, but, at least according to Brazilian Fruits & Cultivated Exotics — the Bible of Brazilian fruit — it is from the Americas.  If you bite into it before it is totally ripe, you will be rewarded with a twisted puckered mouth, full of tannin and latex — absolutely disgusting.  If you wait until it is totally ripe, you might not like it much better — my wife and kids detest it — but I think it has merit.  The ones in Asia can be quite gritty tasting, but the Brazilian ones have a much smoother medium firm (pear like) texture and very sweet flesh, that tends towards molasses.  There is a bit of “grit” in the texture, which gives the impression of biting unmelted sugar.

Palmer Mango and Crème Fraîche Streusel Tart

Your cooking techniques can travel around the world with you, but the ingredients you use need to be adapted to where you happen to be.  This is especially true in Brazil, where many of the everyday ingredients that one becomes accumstomed to using in Europe or North America — and even more so in Asia — are unavailable here.  Most people returning to Brazil after a trip abroad return with suitcases filled with electronic gadgets — which eye popping tariffs make very expensive here — but my own bags are generally filled with cooking equipment, and foreign (especially Chinese and Indian) condiments, spices, and so forth that are simply can’t be purchased locally.  But many things can’t be brought from abroad, and a cook needs to become a bit of a sleuth to search them out, or to find ready replacements when necessary.  Thoughts of peach pie developed into Mango and Crème Fraîche Streusel Tart.

Tart Shell
100 grams butter (add two pinches of salt if unsalted)
1 Tablespoon of oil
2-3 Tablespoons of water (see notes)
1 Tablespoon of sugar
175 grams of flour

Streusel Crumb Topping
75 grams sugar (preferably glazing or confectioners
1/4 teaspoon of baking powder
6 Tablespoons of flour
75 grams of very cold butter

Tart Filling
1-2 Mangoes (about 350 grams of flesh)
200 grams of crème fraîche
1 pinch of salt
1 Lime/Lemon (about 1 Tablespoon)

Lots of missing ingredients come up when baking in Brazil.  A friend who knows that I am always searching for special ingredients to cook with, and knows that I love to make ice cream, told me about some special fresh cream (most of the local milk and cream has been pasteurized half to death) that she found at the Cobal do Humaíta and that she would bring it over for me — with a tacit understanding that it would be returned as ice cream.  When she dropped the “cream” off, I immediately saw that it wasn’t cream at all, but instead was something much rarer in this part of the world — and even better — Creme de Leite in Portuguese, or “Crème Fraîche” as its called in English (and obviously in French).  Crème fraîche and the related cultured dairy product “buttermilk” are things cooks in Europe or North America take essentially for granted, but finding these things here is almost impossible.

My immediate plans to make ice cream were foiled, but I needed to make something special with the creme fraiche to show my gratitude and have something nice to return to my friend.  My first thought for a crème fraîche recipe was the excellent Peach and Creme Fraîche Pie from Smitten Kitchen, one of my favorite baking sites, and one of the best riffs on the Peaches n’ Cream genre.  The peaches and cream concept appealed to me, but I would need to Brazilian-ize the recipe a bit.

The first (major) problem . . . no peaches.  Brazil has some of the most magnificent fruit in the world, but the peaches are just not great.  They grow some here, and fly most in from Chile or Washington State, USA, but they are super expensive and nothing special, and certainly not as good as summer peaches in North America.  Brazilian mangoes though, are certainly the world’s best, and plentiful even though its winter here and not the height of mango season, I had been to the market and had some good Manga Palmer on hand — my favorite variety — and thought that these would deliver the right note in place of the peaches.

The second problem was pie crust, and my not being in the mood to make any at that particular moment.  North American style pie crust, particularly an all-butter crust, can be a bit of an effort, and though I usually add some chicken fat to my recipe to make it easier to handle, and flakier, I had none on hand at the moment.  I did have some nice Danish butter though, so decided to make a French/Belgian style brown butter tart shell — much less fussy.

In North America, people usually make tarts a lot like they make pie pastry, beginning with cold butter that too quickly turns to room temperature and becomes a melty mess that is difficult to roll out and work with.  Instead of tilting at the windmill of thermodynamics, the European way simply bypasses the melting butter problem by . . . using butter that is already melted.  This technique provides the bonus of a nutty brown butter pastry, and is almost foolproof.

Just take a bowl and weigh out 100 grams of butter cut into a few pieces (if its unsalted add a few pinches of salt), a tablespoon of sugar, a tablespoon of oil — corn or canola is good for a dessert like this, although peanut or olive is better in a savory recipe — and two or three tablespoons of water — three if using European butter, and two if using North or South American butter (which already has plenty of water in it).  Stick the bowl in a hot 210º C (410º F) oven, and leave it for 15 minutes.

While you are waiting for your butter to melt and brown, measure out 175 grams of flour.  In North America you can use pastry flour if you have it, or “All-Purpose” flour will work fine.  In Europe you want Type 45/00 if you have it, or 55/0 will do.  In Brazil, Tipo 1 will work — I use Dona Benta Reserva Especial which comes in a vacuum pack — unless you are lucky to have access to something with less protein — I don’t, so I’m using the all purpose Tipo 1.  Its always best to use pastry flour for pastry applications like this, and bread flour for bread.  The specific varieties almost always have higher and more consistent quality, while the “All Purpose” varieties can be composed of whatever that particular manufacturer wants it to be on that particular day — and sometimes its whatever the manufacturer has left over.

After 15 minutes, you will see that your butter is nicely browned — let it go a bit longer if you want more nuttiness — and bubbling away.

Take your bowl out of the oven — be careful, that bowl is going to be hot! — and use a wooden spoon to mix the flour into it.  

The hot liquid will incorporate with the flour and you will be left with a nice blob of brown butter pastry dough.  Now the best part: no resting, rolling, or other complications — dump your dough blob directly into your tart shell form and press it out with your fingers until you have brought it up the sides (but don’t make the bottom too thin).

 

If you have some dough leftover, put it aside to patch any problem areas that develop in the oven.  Take a fork and press the edges against the mold, and poke holes in the bottom with the fork tines.

Now partially bake the shell at 210°C (410°F) for 12 minutes until the bottom is brown — the sides will get time to finish browning later.

Once its cool, you are ready to construct your tart.  While the tart shell is cooling, you can make your streusel topping.  Just combine 75 grams of sugar and 1/2 teaspoon of baking soda with 6 tablespoons of flour, and mix well.  Then take a fork or pastry blender and work in 125 grams of cold butter (add a pinch of salt if you are using unsalted butter).  Don’t work it too much, and don’t let your crumbs break up to too small or they will melt into the tart.

Now put your tart together.  Take a few dollops of crème fraîche and coat the bottom of the shell.  This will keep the bottom from getting soggy from the melting mango juices.

Cut up your mango into wedges.  I used pretty big Palmer Mangoes, but you might need two (or more) if using smaller ones.  Fit in as many wedges of mango into the tart as will comfortably fit, and top and surround them with dollops of crème fraîche.  

Squeeze the juice of a quarter lemon/lime on top to balance the sweetness from Palmer Mangoes — the sweetest, and best mangoes in the world in my opinion — but omit if you are using a more sour variety.  Now top with the streusel crumb mixture, and its ready for the oven.

Bake for about 35 minutes at 205C (400F), or until your crumb topping turns brown and your crème fraîche is bubbling.  

Try to wait until it cools before cutting into it.

If you are in a temperate climate, and don’t have access to nice mangoes, you can use whatever fruit you have available locally.  Peaches or nectarines would obviously work, and strawberries n’ cream is a classic combination.  If you are in the tropics, jackfruit or durian should match beautifully with the cream — though I know from experience that the best durians seem to appear in places with the worst access to crème fraîche.  If you are using fruit that isn’t quite ripe or already sweet, you can macerate it for a few moments by sprinkling some sugar and lemon juice on top to soften it a bit.

If you make this, please let me know how it turned out, what sort of fruit you used, and where you made it.

Restaurante Barsa, CADEG, Benfica, Rio de Janeiro

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Barsa, Benfica, Brazil, CADEG, Rio de Janeiro, Zona Norte

Thanks to Tony Bourdain, and his great No Reservations TV show (“Sem Reservas” in Brazil) many people outside of Brazil are familiar with the famous Mercado Municipal in São Paulo, and its renowned Sanduíche Mortadella at Bar do Mané.  Few visitors to Rio though have any idea that the Cidade Maravilhosa also has a great city market, known as CADEG –  Centro de Abastecimento do Estado da Guanabara, located in the Zone Norte neighborhood of Benfica.  CADEG (pronounced Kah-Day-Gee) however is all business, and while larger and filled with a wide variety of excellent and well priced foodstuffs, and cooking equipment, is not as beautiful or tourist friendly as the Mercado.  While it does not have a famous mortadella sandwich or beautiful architecture, it is loaded with excellent restaurants, serving market workers, shoppers, and locals looking for a good lunch.  These are extremely discerning consumers, and there are many excellent dining options here, but Barsa is widely accepted to be the best of the lot.

Barsa is an unpretentious place — pretensions don’t sell well in informal Rio — especially given its high gastronomic ambitions, with tables lined up along the hallway of the market.  The food is simply magnificent.  The cooking at Barsa is more akin to what you might be served in somebody’s home — somebody who knows how to cook really well — than in a restaurant.  The Luso-Brazilian food is served in big dishes to be shared, family style.

My favorite dish is the Paleta de Cordeiro Assada ao Molho Vinho Porto, a beautiful roast shoulder of lamb in red wine sauce, with potatoes and red onions.

Also excellent is the Bacalhau Rei, large pieces of salt cod sautéed in garlic with potatoes, onions, olives, hard boiled eggs, and capers.

Also on the menu is Rabbit Casserole, Roast Duck, and the hard to find Galinha ao Molho Pardo, chicken stew in a sauce thickened with its blood.

To drink is excellent Choppe Brahma, draft beer, served ice cold in frozen glasses, or you can buy a bottle at one of the wine stores in the market and the staff will open it for you for a small charge.

The food here is special, and for me one of the best illustrations of what cooking can and should properly be — but no longer is in much of North America and Europe — and what is still available in pockets of the world for those willing to look for it.  Especially in North America, and increasingly in Europe, it is no longer sufficient for cooks to be skilled craftsman, but instead they seek to convince their patrons that they are inventive and innovative artists.  For this new generation, the state of cooking as they have found it is too simple and unworthy of their participation and perpetuation, and furthermore is subject to great improvement through their own creativity and inventiveness.

What these “contemporary” cooks don’t realize however, is that traditional food such as this is not at all simple, but in fact is the exact opposite.  The reality is that cooking traditions such as these are part of a spontaneously developed order created through the extensive interactions of innumerable persons, throughout multiple generations, spanning centuries and various geographic locations.  This is a far more complicated product than any modernist’s conception of so-called “molecular cuisine,” “cozinha contemporânea,” or the like.  It is so complicated that no one person working alone, in one spot, at one time, could possible invent it.

This is, incidentally, why Barsa calls their cooking “cozinha colonial.”  The Paleta de Cordeiro  and Bacalhau above for example, are the collective products of no fewer than six centuries of cooks, combining the collective knowledge and products of no fewer than three (and arguably four) Continents through which the Portuguese Empire once spanned, brought together as the result of small tweaks and improvements over long periods of time.  It is highly unlikely for any one person at any one period of time, to be able to improve such carefully honed traditions developed through such spontaneous order, and much mischief has ensued as a result of such conceits.  I understand that such thinking is the fashion in much of the world — including increasingly in Brazil — but I am not going along with it, and have started this blog to point out those fighting these trends by continuing traditional forms of cooking.

If you feel similarly, you should make the trip to Barsa.  Benfica is a bit out of the way for visitors who typically stay in Zona Sul, but a trip to Barsa is a good excuse to see what lies on the other side of the mountains, through the Rebouças Tunnel.  A taxi from Zona Sul would probably cost around R$40-50 or so (offset by the much more reasonable food prices on this side of Corcovado), and you can combine a trip to CADEG with a visit to Quinta da Boa Vista, the home of Dom João VI, the King of Portugal who ruled his empire — including Goa, Macão, and of course Portugal — from Rio after Napoleon conquered Lisbon.  (For an excellent English language history of the Portuguese Court in Rio, and Rio’s time as the Metropole of the entire Portuguese Empire, you might want to take a look at Patrick Wilcken’s “Empire Adrift — the Portuguese Court in Rio de Janeiro.”

Keep in mind that the shops of CADEG mostly close by lunchtime, so get there early to look around, before settling in for a leisurely lunch.  Barsa is a true gastronomic destination, well worth the trip, and a good excuse to get off of the tourist track.

Rua Capitão Félix 110, rua 4, lojas 4 e 6, Benfica. Open every day from Noon to 16h. Tel: 2585-3743.

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Brahma Padrão Original – The Best Beer in the Americas

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Ambev, anheuser busch, Astor, Beer, Brahma, brazilian beer, Bráz, Chopp, InBev, Ipanema, Jardim Botanico

Rio de Janeiro is a cafe society, where people routinely get out of their homes to meet over a drink.  But this climate is too hot to linger over a hot cup of coffee, and as such the preferred beverage is lager beer, served ice cold.

The importance of the role of beer in Rio is difficult to overstate, as it lubricates peoples’ most common social interactions.  Like Eskimos have multiple words for “ice,” Brazilians have multiple words for beer.  Cerveja is beer that is in a bottle, most often served in large 600ml bottles to be shared. Many places will leave the empty bottles to pile up on the table, to eventually be counted to calculate the bill.

Unpasteurized draft “beer” is not called cerveja, but is known as “Chopp” (pronounced show-pee in Rio).  While anyplace with a refrigerator can serve cerveja, it is a significant commitment of resources to serve chopp, requiring a walk-in refrigerator to store it, and trained personnel to keep the lines clean, and to tap and dispense the beer. Once a keg is finished, nobody can drink any beer for the 10 minutes it takes to change it. Chopp is considered to be a separate product from beer, and if you ask for “cerveja” at a place that only has Chopp, you will simply be told that they don’t have any, as if they are not in any way substitute products. All the effort is well worth it though, because the draft product really is so much better than the bottled.

Its probably fair to say that I enjoy a good beer more than most, but I don’t waste my time with the lousy stuff. I have gone through the trouble of brewing my own beer when living in places where good beer was not readily available, but rarely partake when in places with mediocre beer. So for me, the ready access to well brewed, well served chopp, is amongst the greatest simple pleasures of living here. Only when I lived in Belgium during my University days did I have such excellent beer at my disposal as I have now in Brazil — although the brewing styles of high gravity Belgian ales could not be much more different.

The simple quality of brazilian beer can be a bit difficult to discern at first.  In many other places, like North America, brewers are anything but subtle in trying to demonstrate their beers’ quality and uniqueness from the ordinary by loading them up with overwhelming amounts of hops or alcohol, but generally without the balance that they manage to preserve in the heavy beers of Belgium.  But the charms of Brazilian beer, like the great lager beers of Czech or Germany, are more sophisticated and ethereal.

The beer industry has a long history in Brazil — uninterrupted by the insanity of Prohibition which destroyed the brewing culture in the United States — aided by large numbers of German and Swiss immigrants. The Swiss were one of the first ethnic groups to settle in Rio after Dom João opened the Colony to non-Portuguese, and it was a Swiss who founded Brahma in Rio in the late 1800s to try to re-create a european style beer here.  “Brahma” is said to be an homage to the Englishman Joseph Bramah, who invented the modern apparatus to serve draft beer.  In 1999, Brahma merged with Antarctica to form Ambev, which has now become the global beer juggernaut ABInBev, after subsuming Belgian Interbrew and US Anheuser-Busch to dominate the international beer market.  Those interested in the business of brewing and mergers and acquisitions, or simply how these Brazilian entrepreneur’s managed this, can read about it in the excellent book Dethroning the King. AmBev/InBev/ABInBev is one of the great Brazilian success stories, having created the most dynamic and most dominant brewing company in the history of the world, and its principals are amongst the most important business leaders in the Country.

If you order a chopp at a boteco in Rio, you are extremely likely to receive a AmBev’s Brahma brand, and given the pride most places take in their chopp you are equally likely to get a cold glass from a fresh keg.  But for those looking for the pinnacle of beers in the Americas, Brahma has made available its Padrão Original — chopp of the exacting quality standards available at the Bar Original in São Paulo. Only the best lagers of Bohemia and Bavaria reach these heights, and I know of nothing else in the Americas — and I have spent a lot of time looking — can compare.  Padrão Original is made available only to a very small handful of establishments, which take the time and care necessary to treat and serve the beer properly.  Aside from whatever special standards are followed by AmBev, standards are also set for allowing the beer to settle after delivery, cleaning the draft lines, cooling the product and serving glasses, and most importantly in pouring the beer in two stages, the first consisting of liquid, and the second consisting of three full fingers of creamy “colarinho,” foam, which traps the very light effervescence and fragrance, and gives the chope the consistency of liquid velvet.  In my opinion, this beer can stand with the best lagers of Europe, with an extraordinary mouthfeel, and an easy body as appropriate both for the local climate, and the long hours which are often spent slowly drinking one after the other. You will also notice that chope is served in much smaller portions in Brazil than elsewhere — usually less than 200ml — so that it doesn’t warm up from the ambient heat before being consumed and replaced with a fresh cold glass.

Most of the places where Padrão Original is available are in São Paulo, but a few are in Rio, with two that I am aware of in Zona Sul.  One is Astor, an upscale boteco with a lovely setting on the beach in Ipanema at Av. Vieira Souto, 110, and Pizza Bráz, one of Rio’s better pizzarias, with a location in  Jardim Botânico at Rua Maria Angélica, 129.