Maria Izabel's Artisanal Cachaça

The small city of Paraty (also spelled Parati) sits on the shore of a lovely bay in Rio de Janeiro state, 235 km from the capital,  and enjoys a reputation as one of the most beautiful, relaxing and hip towns on the entire Brazilian coast. Home to a number of well-preserved historic buildings, Paraty also has a collection of small boutique hotels and a burgeoning culinary scene that makes it a weekend destination of choice for tourists from around the world.

Among those visitors who come to Paraty in search of good food and drink, it's obligatory to experience the city's most famous artisanal beverage - Maria Izabel Gibrail Costa's home-made cachaça. In Paraty's most elegant pousada (traditional boutique-style inn), Casa Turchesa, guests find a bottle of Cachaça Maria Izabel awaiting them in their room when they arrive, and in sophisticated restaurants the waiters proudly proclaim that their caipirinhas are made with Cachaça Maria Izabel.

Maria Izabel's cachaça surely merits the name artisanal for the entire annual production of approximately 7500 liters is distilled on Maria Izabel's property and is made from sugar cane grown on the same land. In fact, the entire production process from the planting of sugar cane to the final bottling takes place on Maria Izabel's property, located on the seafront near town. Maria Izabel, born in Paraty 61 years ago, claims that the distinctive flavor of her cachaça is due to her property's seafront location, saying that the sea air increases the salinity of the sugar cane and thus affects the final taste of the drink.

Maria Izabel Costa

Maria Izabel comes by her cachaça-making prowess honestly. Municipal records show that her paternal great-great-grandfather, Francisco Lopes da Costa, produced cachaça in Paraty in 1800. Although her name is recognized everywhere in Paraty, Maria Izabel doesn't court fame. She prefers to stay at home, tending to her production. She usually spends the day barefoot, and still bathes daily in the sea.

With such a limited production and local demand, it's almost impossible to find Maria Izabel's cachaça anywhere besides Paraty. Even in the town, a bottle of her liquor costs about as much as a good bottle of Scotch, an impressive feat in a country where decent cachaças often sell for less than USD $5 a liter.

All of which is fine with Maria Izabel, who just wants to continue making cachaça. She calls herself "a última das moicanas" (the last of the Mohicans). There are few left who do the work Maria Izabel does, but one does hope that one of her children, or some other younger person who loves cachaça, will take over from Mariz Izabel when the time comes and ensure that she isn't, in fact, the last of the Mohicans.

With material from Estado de S. Paulo newspaper, written by Nana Tucci.

A Cheese Map of Minas Gerais

Charles de Gaulle once quipped when asked how he enjoyed governing France, "Comment voulez-vous gouverner un pays où il existe 246 variétés de fromage?" ("How would you like to govern a country which has 246 types of cheese?") Well, if there are 246 types of French cheese, there are probably an equal number of different types of cheese come from the interior Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. Which stands to good reason because that state is just about the same size, only slightly larger, than France.

Just as the sheer number of French cheeses can overwhelm all but the professional turophile (look it up here), the nomenclature of cheeses from Minas Gerais is equally confusing. Some of the best artisanal cheeses are produced only in small quantities and remain virtually unknown outside their area of production. And to complicate matters, many of the cheeses have similar sounding names, or identical names.

In an effort to relieve some of this confusion and to create a systematic naming and cataloguing of the many mineiro (from Minas Gerais) cheeses, the central market of Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais, has produced a cheese map of the state, indicating the four principal areas of cheese production in Minas Gerais and detailing within those four areas the names of the municipalities that make cheese. The four main areas of production are called Cerrado, Araxá, Canastra and Serro. Each of these areas gives its name to cheeses produced locally, but each is also split into small units which can further define a cheese's origins. The map is below. (Note that the map is high resolution - if you wish to read the detail, simply click on the map).

In order to systematize the geographical names for these cheeses, the Instituto Nacional da Propriedade Industrial of Brazil has begun to grant indicação geográfica status (geographical indication) to mineiro cheeses, starting with artisanal cheese from the Serro region. This IG status, as its known, is similar to European schemes to preserve and protect the geographical integrity of a number of food products, such as cheese, processed meats and wines. France has had a system called AOC in place to safeguard wines for many years, and Italy grants DOC status to many food products. Brazil's IG status is intended to serve the same purpose. Combining protected name status with promotional activities and products like the cheese map will, it is hoped, preserve and protect those artisanal cheeses which are an important part of the gastronomic heritage of Minas Gerais.

White Honey from the Canyonlands

The highlands of southern Brazil stretch along the border between two states, Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina. These highlands are known for being the coldest region in the entire country and are loved by outdoorsmen and hikers for their dense forests and deep canyons. In the heart of this absolutely beautiful and relatively pristine landscape sits the small town of Cambará do Sul.

Cambará do Sul

Cambará do Sul is a popular regional center for eco-tourism and for a town of only seven thousand souls hosts a surprising number of small inns and a couple of simple, good restaurants. But the town's main claim to fame has nothing to do with hikes, treks or tramps. Cambará do Sul is the home of the rare, expensive and sought-after product of an animal popularly called guaripo (scientific name of Melipona bicolor schenckis.)

Guaripos are a species of stingless bees, found only in the forests of these canyonlands, and the product which brings them, and Cambará do Sul, such fame is the white honey that they produce. Because this honey is produced in such small quantities and because of its itense floral flavor - the honey preserves more than 90% of the perfume of the flowers from which it's derived - white honey has achieved cult-like status in Brazil and consequently commands a very high price. Whereas standard commercial honey sells in Brazil for about R$10 per kilo (USD$2.70 per pound), white guaripo honey sells for seven times that amount - R$70/kg or USD$19/lb.

Guaripos collect nectar from only two species of bushes, both of which have white, highly-perfumed flowers. The lack of pigment in these flowers causes the whiteness of the honey the guaripos produce. One of the bushes they feed on has a strange name in Portuguese, carne-de-vaca, meaning "cow meat." It is a member of the Clethra genus, and bears the common name sweet pepper bush in the USA. The other source of nectar is the gramimunha bush (scientific name Weinmannia paulliniifolia Pohl) which exists only in this region and which doesn't have a common name in English.

Among the seven thousand residents of Cambará do Sul are 100 apiculturalists. They produce more than 200 tons of honey each year, but only one-quarter of that, 50 tons, is white honey. It is the star attraction at Cambará do Sul's annual Honey Festival, held at the end of April or in early May. If you want to try Brazilian white honey you just might have to make a journey to Cambará do Sul - most of the year's production is sold during the festival. We here at Flavors of Brazil are most curious to try it, but haven't been able to source it here in Fortaleza, nearly 2000 miles as the guaripo flies, from Cambará do Sul.

American TV Discovers Rio de Janeiro's Food Scene

This week popular American TV show Bizarre Foods, starring Andrew Zimmern, cast its eye on Brazil's number-one tourist destination, Rio de Janeiro. The episode aired in the USA on June 14, and information about it and video clips from the show can be found here. The complete episode can easily be found on various download and torrent sites around the Internet, which is how Flavors of Brazil came across its own copy, since this series is not aired in Brazil.

For those not familiar with  Bizarre Foods, the premise of the show is that the host travels the world looking for unusual, unfamiliar foods and food cultures, with an emphasis on the outrageous and the disgusting. Zimmern happily chomps down on live animals, a variety of insects and worms, inner organs of all descriptions as well as toxic fruits and vegetables.

Pork face and ears for feijoada

In the Rio episode, Zimmern does manage to find some "bizarre" foods in a number of neighborhoods of the cidade maravilhosa - pork faces and tails in the feijoada served at the Imperio Serrano samba school, chicken in a sauce of its own blook (frango ao molho pardo) in a boteco, a gigantic hermit crab caught just off famed Copacana beach, and strawberry calves' foot jelly at the São Cristóvão market.

In spite of the show's focus on the exotic and bizarre, the episode does manage to show some of the city's many faces, including some that aren't highlighted in tourist board publicity or airline commercial. He visits two of the city's infamous favelas, vertical slums that climb the sides of local mountains and which are often under the control of drug gangs. A look at the culture of Rio's samba schools includes the gritty reality that exists behind the glitter and lithe bodies of Carnaval's samba parades. Yet he doesn't exclude the other end of the economic scale, A segment on churrascaria restaurants provides a good how-to guide to eating in these establishments, and a chat with a upmarket celebrity chef opens up the world of fruits and vegetables from the Amazonian rain forest.

Frango ao molho pardo

Flavors of Brazil started watching the episode with trepidation, as it's all too easy to turn foreign cultures, especially foreign food cultures, into nothing more than show-off moments of the host's culinary machismo. Zimmern avoids that trap, and though clearly the show is tilted to serve its audience a portion of the outrageous, Zimmern allows his affection for the city, its food and especially its people to come through. Worth tracking down for an insight into Carioca food culture.

Don't Tell Coca-Cola about Cocada Cearense!

When Flavors of Brazil is out shopping for food, whether in a supermarket, a traditional outdoor market, or gourmet shop, we're always on the outlook for interesting, locally-produced artisanal foods. There's a number of reasons for this - first, they are often wonderfully delicious products; second, they're sometimes quirky and unusual, and finally, they just might provide subject matter for a posting here at the blog.

Yesterday, a group of friends had a late lunch at a neighborhood casual dining spot called Budega do Poço, famous for its oil-and-garlic shrimps. Attached to the restaurant is a small shop that sells local food products. Browsing the selection, on the outlook for something new and untried, we spotted a plastic carton containing a dozen round cakes of cocada, a sweet made from a simple mixture of grated fresh coconut, whole milk and sugar. (Click here to read more about cocada.) Plain, natural and traditional, cocada is a Brazilian sweet with a long history and something found all around the country. These were made by a local company, and were branded Cocada Cearense - that is "cocada from Ceará", the state of which Fortaleza is the capital.

What brought a smile to our faces, and what made us buy a carton was the Cocada Cearense label. Here's a photo of it.

Does it remind you of something you've seen before? The colors, the typeface? Perhaps the world's most famous soft drink?

I certainly hope that Coca-Cola's in-house lawyers have better things to do than hassle this obviously miniscule company over trademarked fonts and logos. But I know that multinational giants often go to ridiculous lengths to protect their trademarks. So Flavors of Brazil asks all its readers - Please, don't tell Coca-Cola about Cocada Cearense!

On the Road - Maranhão (Pt. 12) - Santo Antonio do Lopes Cachaça

When Flavors of Brazil was in São Luís, Maranhão on its recent gastronomic road trip, one of the obligatory stops was the local central food market - in Sao Luis it's called Mercado do Praia Grande. It's a typical Brazilian market with some stalls selling fruits and vegetables, others selling meat or fish, still others selling prepared foods or arts and crafts. In addition there are a number of small stands selling cooked foods and meals. Almost anywhere else in the world, a local market, I think, is the fastest way into the culture of a new city or region, and the Mercado do Praia Grande market was one of our first stops on this visit.

I'm frankly not much of a shopper for arts and crafts or other souvenirs when travelling, but I can't resist poking around food shops in the search of an ingredient, a sauce, or a beverage that I can cart home as a gustatory memory of my travels. In the Mercado do Praia Grande, I ran across a stall that was full of local and artisanally produced foodstuffs. And there I did my souvenir shopping. Besides jellies and preserves of obscure local fruits, I purchased two bottles to bring home with me. One survived the trip and the other didn't. My treasured bottle of hot chili pepper sauce made with coconut milk was confiscated by security at São Luís' airport. The Brazilian air system doesn't have the "no-liquid" rule that is the norm in North America and Europe, but there is a regulation I'd never heard of that bottles that don't have labels on them cannot be carried on board. My hot sauce had no label, so there it went, into the trash. My other bottle fortunately had a label so it made it all the way home.

The label on this bottle was a piece of white paper, printed on a computer and glued to the bottle that simply said the following:

Superior aguardente de cana (Superior sugar-cane liquor)

Santo Antonio do Lopes

Facricada e Engarrafada em: (Manufactured and bottled in:)

Santo Antonio do Lopes, Maranhão

What I had was a bottle of artisanally produced cachaça from a small village in the interior of the state of Maranhão. The bottle itself was a recycled beer bottle, and it was stopped with a cork. There was no information on the label as to the quantity or alcoholic strength of the liquid, nor the persons responsible for the cachaça. However, I knew that these small-batch distilled cachaças, made in the traditional way, are often good and sometimes excellent, so I bought one to bring home - at R$5 (USD $3) a bottle, it was not not a big financial risk.

Last night, I decided that it was time to give Santo Antonio do Lopes' cachaça a try. But before actually drinking it, I spent a bit of time on the internet to find out a bit more about the village of Santo Antonio, about which I knew precisely nothing. Using the usual online search tools, I discovered that it's a small community of about 15,000 souls in the central interior of Maranhão, that its altitude is 129 meters (425 feet) and that its annual per capita income is R$1247 (USD $736). That's right - average income is $736 per year.

The photos of Santo Antonio do Lopes I was able to find on the internet were few, and most showed the center of the city, which was surprisingly new, neat and tidy. Two photos, however, showed another side of life in the small villages of northern Brazil. The first showed a few locals holding up a snake they'd captured in Santo Antonio - it was a 5 meter (16 foot) sucuri (known in English as an anaconda). They seemd remarkably non-plussed in the photo, but I can't imagine it's an everyday occurence.

The other photo was from a newpaper and accompanied an article which described the capture of a local gang of bank robbers, who'd been robbing banks in the region for the past few years. The photo showed them after capture, along with their arsenal, which was extremely impressive. These were some serious, not to mention well-dressed bank-robbers and I, for one, am quite pleased they're no longer going about their business in Santo Antonio, or anywhere else for that matter.

As for the cachaça , it was delicious. There's something that the village of Santo Antonio does completely right, and that's distill cachaça. Obviously meant for drinking straight up, the cachaça had clearly been aged in wood for some time. Its color and woody notes gave that away. It was moderately smoky, smooth on the palate, and surprisingly light in feel. It was completely distilled, with no residual sweetness. Just the way moonshine should be.

This'll be a bottle to savor slowly, one sip at a time. It had better last, because if I want to replenish my supply, I'm sure I'll have to go back to Maranhão. When the time comes, maybe that will be the excuse I need to revisit São Luís.

Artisanal Food - The Bride's Big Thigh

When I'm at farmers' markets, or in artisanal craft shops anywhere in Brazil, I'm always on the lookout for home-made food products. They are usually delicious, usually unknown to me, and often have interesting histories or traditions associated with them.

This week, in Fortaleza's Mercado Central, I came across a small package labeled "Coxão de Noiva". It appeared to be some sort of sweet at first glance, and I have to admit I was initially intrigued by the name, which can be translated into English as "The Bride's Big Thigh."  On the label were the words "doce caseiro" which means home-made sweet, and a list of ingredients. There were only three ingredients on the label - coconut, sugar and condensed milk.

I bought a package to sample Coxão de Noiva at home, and perhaps to add a post to Flavors of Brazil. When I got home an unwrapped the package, I noticed the interesting shape or form of the sweet - sliced like a piece of terrine or pate, the Coxão de Noiva was formed by stacking alternate layers of coconut candy and doce de leite, a mixture of condensed milk and sugar, more commonly known in North America by its Spanish name, dulce de leche. As the layers were hard at the time they were stacked, the slice was not solid. The effect was more like an airy or lacy layer-cake, sliced thinly. I tasted it, and though it was extremely sweet for my tastes, it was simple and tasty, with flavors of burnt coconut, and butterscotch.

I talked to several friends here in Fortaleza who told me this sweet was well-known as a traditional candy from the interior of Ceará state. Some remembered it from childhood. Being curious to know a bit more about the history of this food, I decided to do some research on the internet on Coxão de Noiva. To my surprise there was not one reference to it in Google, nor in any other search engine. Every time I searched, the search engine suggested that perhaps I meant Colchão de Noiva. This translates as The Bride's Mattress, and is a popular cake in Brazil, of Portuguese origins, made with flour, sugar, eggs. etc.

Because the words coxão and colchão have almost identical pronunciations in Portuguese, I'm wondering if somehow, somewhere along the line someone misunderstood one word for the other, and what was originally The Bride's Mattress suddenly became The Bride's Big Thigh. Or perhaps, there was once a linguistic joker who just couldn't resist the opportunity to change the name. It will probably remain a mystery, unless someone decides to post something on the internet to explain it. No one I know here in Brazil can.

Food of the Gods - Acarajé

In my previous post about Brazilian certification of the selling of acarajé as a national treasure, I mentioned that there were strong links between the custom of baianas selling acarajé on the streets and in the squares of Salvador, Bahia, and the Afro-Brazilian religious traditions of  candomblé. Ubiratan Castro de Araújo, ex-director of the Center of Afro-Oriental Studies at the Universidade Federal da Bahia said in 2001, "The market of acarajé is a great market given by the orixás (gods and goddesses of candomblé) to the holy women of Bahia."

The tradition of public sales of acarajé has its origin in the universe of candomblé : the "obligation of acarajé" in which the priests and priestesses of candomblé authorized the production and public sale of acarajé by women initiated in the ritual traditions of candomblé , with the objective of covering the costs of their initiation. Following a ritual practice,  acarajé was traditionally sold from rounded wooden bowls, similar to those used in the rituals of candomblé to offer to the orixás and their followers this very same food.

Acarajé  is specifically connected to the cult of the goddess Iansã in the pantheon of the orixás. She is the goddess of wind, of hurricanes, of calming breezes and of storms, of things that pass with the wind, of ephemeral love, of anything that does not last forever. She is also identified with the River Niger in Africa. Her day is Wednesday, her number is nine, her colors are red, pink and brown, and her food, of course, is acarajé.

Today, many of the women selling acarajé in public are not connected with the world of  candomblé , nor are most of their clientele. However, even if they might be unaware, the clothes they wear, the utensils they use, the cooking techniques they employ, the arrangement of their selling table, and the food itself, are all intimately connected to the religious traditions carried to Brazil in centuries past by the slaves brought from Africa to work in Brazil's fields and mines.

Artisanal Products - Mamão com Coco

The local, seasonal and sustainable food philosophy of the Slow Food Movement is not as developed in Brazil as it might be in Europe, North America or Australia, but Slow Food, and its philosophy, are present and expanding in the Brazilian consciousness. Slow Food Brasil has a number of local chapters throughout Brazil, and its website is a good guide to its activities and pursuits.

In Fortaleza, where I live, supermarkets are filled with industrially-manufactured foods, just as they are in most of the rest of the world. In some smaller food shops and markets, however, I'm beginning to notice that artisanal products are starting to become available. As I'm a long-time subscriber to the philosophy of Slow Food, and was an active member for many years in Canada, I search out these products, and purchase them - first, because I'm always curious to try out new foods and food products, and second, because I want to support the local food producing community by purchasing its products.

Today, while I was out doing some food shopping, I discovered a local food producer that was unknown to me. I was immediately attracted to it, as it was from a line of jams and preserves called "Sabores", which if you look at the title banner of this blog, means "Flavors" as in "Flavors of Brazil." I purchased a jar of a fruit compote labelled "Mamão com Coco" which translates to English as "Papaya with Coconut." The label indicates that the product only has three ingredients - papaya, coconut and sugar. It was made without any sort of preservative on August 21, 2009 and has a shelf life of 6 months. It claims to be 100% artisanal. The name of the producer is Joacy Lima Sales, and she lives at Rancho Dourado (Golden Ranch) in the city of Horizonte, about 40 kms. outside Fortaleza. With that sort of information on the label, I don't think any product could be more Slow Food than Sra. Lima Sales' Mamão com Coco.

After taking the photos in this post, I opened the jar just to sample the conserve. It's marvelous. The consistency is like a soft fruit spread, without pectin, and the taste combines the buttery tones of ripe papaya with the tropical creaminess of cocunut. Softened flakes of dried coconut give the spread some textural variety. It would be perfect as a flavoring agent for plain yogurt, served with white cheese for dessert, or spread between layers of a sponge cake. I'm looking forward to the remainder of the jar, and to more products from my neighbor at Sabores.