RECIPE - Tapioca with Sun-dried Beef (Tapioca com Carne de Sol)

Yesterday Flavors of Brazil featured a recipe from northeastern Brazil for tapioca filled with a sweet guava paste mixture. (The recipe is here). Although tapioca is made from manioc starch and not wheat flour, its culinary use in Brazil is not restricted to sweet presentations and recipes. Like the crepes of France, tapioca is just as likely to have a savory filling as it is a sweet one. In fact, people here are so crazy for tapioca in all its forms that they might just buy one tapioca, a savory one, at a tapioca cart, eat it as their main course, and then order a second, sweet one, for dessert.

This recipe is for one of the most loved tapiocas - filled with carne de sol, which is the sun-dried beef of northeastern Brazil, and with Catupiry cheese, Brazil's favorite cream cheese. Since readers of this blog who live outside Brazil aren't likely to find carne de sol at the market, here's a link to a post from last year showing how to make your own carne de sol at home. And any good quality cream cheese can be substituted for Catupiry.

The method used for making the actual tapioca (the crepe) doesn't differ depending on whether it will be savory or sweet, we haven't repeated instructions for making the crepe. They can be found here. This recipe will require two crepes, so you'll need to double all the quantities in yesterday's recipe.
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RECIPE - Tapioca with Sun-dried Beef (Tapioca com Carne de Sol)
Makes 2

2 freshly made tapioca crepes (see above)
1/4 lb (100 gr) carne de sol (defrosted if frozen)
1/3 cup good quality cream cheese, deli-style if possible
1 small onion, finely chopped
softened butter
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Cut the carne de sol into small cubes, about 1/2 inch (1 cm) on a side. In a medium saucepan, bring about 1 quart (1 liter) of water to a boil. Add the meat, reduce heat to low, and simmer for about 10 minutes to draw out excess salt. Drain the meat and let it cool slightly. Reserve.

In a medium frying pan, melt a few tablespoons of butter. Add the onions and saute for a few minutes, or until transparent. Add the reserved carne de sol and continue to cook for about five minutes, or until the meat is cooked through. Remove from heat.

In a blender or food processor combine the cream cheese and the reserved meat-and-onions mixture. Blend until the mixture is homogenous.

Using the method described h , make one tapioca crepe. Remove it from the pan and when it is still hot spread about one tablespoon of softened butter over it. Then spread half of the meat/cream cheese mixture  over it and roll or fold it in half.

Serve immediately, while still hot.

Happy Birthday, Catupiry!

The year 2011 marks a significant milestone in the extremely successful career of a Brazilian brand of cream cheese (requeijão) called Catupiry. It was 100 years ago, in 1911, that Mário and Isaíra Silvestrini, an Italian immigrant couple living in the state of Minas Gerais created Catupiry and launched it into the Brazilian marketplace, where it has flourished ever since.

As detailed in a post from last year here on Flavors of Brazil many Brazilians aren't even aware that Catupiry is a brand name - they assume that it's the name of a type of cheese - like mozzarella or ricotta. The word can be found on thousands of restaurant menus and in the recipes of untold numbers of cookbooks without capitalization or note that the word is trademarked.

Catupiry is used to stuff pastéis (the plural of pastel), esfirras, spread on pizzas, put into sandwiches, melted into cream sauces for shrimp, chicken and fish. It's even simply spread on a freshly-opened baguette and enjoyed unadorned.

Currently headquartered in São Paulo, Catupiry produces an enormous quantity to fulfill Brazilian's taste for this low-acid cream cheese. Really enormous. According to the company's website, each day they receive 200,000 liters of whole milk from up to 1500 individual dairies, and each day they turn that milk into 50 tons of cheese. That's a mountain of cream cheese - in their hundredth year, the folks at Catupiry are set to produce over 18,000 tons of cheese.

Catupiry cheese is pleasant, there's no question. And it's bland - something no one can object to. But the Brazilian adoration of Catupiry is a bit of a mystery to us at Flavors of Brazil - maybe you have to have been weaned on the stuff to love it the way most Brazilians do. Whatever the reason, Catupiry is likely to be celebrating a very successful 200th birthday in 2111. In the meantime, Happy 100th Birthday, Catupiry!

Is That Catupiry in My Sushi? or What's a Hot Filadelfia??

Brazil is crazy for sushi. And when I say crazy, I mean it literally. Due to the presence of a large population of Japanese-Brazilians, descendants of immigrants from Japan in the early 20th century, even smaller cities in Brazil are likely to have a Japanese restaurant or snack-bar selling sushi. Supermarkets have fresh take-out sushi counters, and most self-service buffet restaurants will have a large selection of sushi. And this is in a country that is not accustomed to eating much "ethnic" food - apart from Italian and Japanese cuisine, most Brazilians are unfamiliar with the cooking of other cultures.

The reason I used the word crazy when describing how Brazilians are about sushi is that they have taken the traditional Japanese style of food called sushi and made it something entirely their own. There are kinds of sushi eaten in Brazil that would shock most Japanese and probably cause the most discriminating Japanese sushi purists to have an apoplexy.

In the most recent posts of Flavors of Brazil, I've been discussing Brazilian cream cheeses, and in particular one called Catupiry. You wouldn't think this would segue naturally into a discussion of sushi, but it does when you're talking about Brazil. For one of the most popular things to put into sushi is cream cheese, either the generic product which goes under the name of requeijão, or the more distinctive Catupiry. Some of the most popular sushis, rolls in particular, showcase cream cheese along with expected sushi ingredients like salmon, shrimp and tuna, and less expected ones, like strawberries and mangoes. Since the entire idea of dairy products is unfamiliar in Japanese cuisine, these sushis are oddities indeed.

The Brazilian sushi which strays the farthest from its roots in Japan is something called the "hot filadelfia" ("hot" here being pronounced ah-chee). Since we're talking cream cheese in this posting, maybe you've been able to figure out the "filadelfia" part of the name - it's the Portuguese spelling of Philadelphia, as in cream cheese! As for the "hot" they are talking temperature, not spice, as these sushi rolls are deep fried to a crispy brown prior to being served. (Deep frying gives them a nice crunch, and melts the cream cheese inside).

If you think about it, Chicago Deep Dish pizza is as far away from the original Neopolitan pizza as "hot filadelfia" is from it's Japanese roots, so there's nothing to sneer at when faced with a plate of "hot filadelfia". Try one if you're ever offered one - perhaps, like me, you'll be surprised how delicious they are, and will grow to like them. Millions of Brazilians do - websites and blogs by and for the Brazilian diaspora are full of plaints about missing the taste of a nice, piping hot, "hot filadelfia" like you can find back home in Brazil.

RECIPE - Shrimp with Catupiry (Camarão ao Catupiry)

This shrimp dish, which comes from the state of Espírito Santo, makes a rich and satisfying main course, served with white rice and a green salad. Because of the amount of Catupiry cheese in the dish, adding anything more to the meal would be overkill.

Although Catupiry cheese is exported from Brazil to the USA, its distribution there is primarily limited to markets in Brazilian neighborhoods and communities. If you live near one of these, it's worth searching out Catupiry for this dish - if not, you can substitute 8 oz. Philadelphia cream cheese and 8 oz. Brie.
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RECIPE - Shrimp with Catupiry (Camarão ao Catupiry)
Serves 2

1 lb. medium or large shrimp, shelled and deveined
1/2 tsp. salt
Juice of one lime
1 tsp. extra-virgin olive oil
6 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 cup peeled, seeded and diced fresh tomato (or drained canned tomato)
1 cup finely chopped onion
1/2 cup finely chopped cilantro
2 tsp. annatto oil or annatto paste (can substitute sweet paprika)
2 cups Catupiry cheese (see above for substitutions)
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Season the shrimp with the salt, lime juice, olive oil and garlic. Reserve.

In a large, heavy saucepan, place the shrimp with all the juice from the marinade. Add the chopped tomato, onion and cilantro, plus the annatto or paprika. Cook over medium heat for 10 minutes, adding up to 1/2 cup boiling water if necessary to avoid drying out. Bring to boil, add the cheese, turn off heat, and stir until the cheese melts into the cooked marinaded shrimp. Serve immediately.

Recipe translated and adapted from Cozinha Regional Brasileira by Abril Editora

INGREDIENTS - Catupiry Cheese

One of the perils of creating a product that is tremendously successful is that the trademarked name of the product becomes a generic name for anything that resembles or imitates the product, and the trademark is lost. That is exactly what happened to Cellophane (which became cellophane), Thermos (which became thermos) and what is currently happening to Google and FedEx.

I've just discovered that this same process happens in Brazil, and that a type of cheese that I often see in recipes and on restaurant menus is not, in fact, a type of cheese at all, but rather a trademarked product name the use of which is legally restricted in theory to the owner of the trademark. The cheese is called Catupiry® , a rich and smooth cream cheese with a flavor that recalls Brie or Camembert. Brazilian cookbooks and online recipe sites are full of recipes for dishes such as "frango ao catupiry" or "carne de sol ao catupiry", none of which capitalize the word catupiry nor acknowledge that catupiry is a brand of cheese, not a type of cheese.

Catupiry, the trademarked brand that is, was developed in 1911 by  Mário e Isaíra Silvestrini, an Italian immigrant couple, in Lambari, Minas Gerais. They chose the name Catupiry because it means "excellent" in the Tupi-Guarani language of certain Brazilian Indian tribes. In 1934 production was moved to the city of São Paulo. Up to the present the exact recipe for Catupiry has remained a secret, though it is clear that Catupiry cheese is a processed cheese, like all cream cheeses.

Catupiry was traditionally packaged in round, wooden boxes, very similar to the boxes in which one buys Brie or Camembert cheese, but in the 1990s the wooden box was replaced by plastic, and today Catupiry is available not only in these plastic boxes, but in everything from squeeze tubes to gallon buckets.

Although a commercial product, Catupiry has been taken to heart by the Brazilian public, and a dish or recipe that contains Catupiry has a certain cachet that other cream cheeses can't duplicate. São Paulo, which considers its pizzas better than anywhere else in the world, considers "pizza ao catupiry" one of the summits of the pizza-making art.