RECIPE - Watermelon Caipirinha (Caipifruta de Melancia)

It's been a rough start to winter in Europe and North America recently, but Brazil is currently suffering one of its hottest and driest summers on record. This past Wednesday (26 December), Rio de Janeiro experienced its hottest day in almost a hundred years - since 1915 to be precise. The official temperature, as measured by the municipal weather department was 43.2 degrees celsius, which translates to 110 degrees fahrenheit. A friend of ours who lives in Rio reported that one of the large time-temperature signs on Rio's beachfront was reading 51F (or 124F) though he did say that the sign was in the sun. Whatever the official numbers were, it was a scorcher, and though the temperatures have moderated slightly in the past few days, these are Brazil's dog days.

At such extreme temperatures, nothing really relieves the heat, though air conditioning, fans, a dip in the sea and a cold drink all help. Brazilians love icy cold fruit drinks in the summer, and although alcohol doesn't really aid in heat relief, a splash of cachaça, Brazil's national spirit, is a traditional addition to fruit drinks.

The most traditional fruit employed is lime, and the most traditional cocktail is the caipirinha, which Flavors of Brazil has covered extensively in the past. But, increasingly, Brazilians are mixing up their fruits and creating new variations on the caipirinha theme. This one, from one of Brazil's best-selling food and wine magazines, swaps cubes of chilled watermelon (melancia in Portuguese) for the traditional lime.

One of the unique things about the caipirinha is that the whole fruit is used in the drink, not just juice. In this case, though the watermelon rind, thankfully, is not included, the cubes of watermelon are crushed in the glass and are not strained. The seeds make for a beautiful drink, and the pulp of the watermelon makes this a cooler that you can chew.

The drink requires a very ripe watermelon, so those readers of the blog who live in the Northern Hemisphere should probably wait until their summer arrives. Brazilians, Australians and other Southern Hemisphere residents can try one now, when the days are hottest and watermelons are ripest.
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RECIPE - Watermelon Caipirinha (Caipifruta de Melancia)
Makes one drink

1/2 cup cubed ripe watermelon, chilled
2 oz. cachaça (can substitute vodka or white rum)
1 Tbsp granulated white sugar
1 tsp fresh-squeezed lime juice
cubed ice
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In a cocktail shaker or large tumbler, combined the watermelon, cachaça, sugar and lime juice. Using a mortar or the handle of a large wooden spoon, cruch the watermelon cubes to release their juice, but don't completely liquify them - leave some small chunks of pulp.

Fill a large old-fashioned glass with ice, then pour the drink over. Do not strain the drink, leave the seeds and chunks of pulp in the drink.

Serve immediately.

RECIPE - Tangerine Caipirinha with Biquinho Peppers (Caipirinha de Tangerina com Pimenta-Biquinho)

Following last Friday's article about the unusual biquinho chili pepper, our plans were to publish a typical recipe which uses the pepper not for its spiciness (for it has no hotness) but for its fruity and pepperish flavor, then to move on to something else.

When we were researching recipes for the biquinho on the Internet, we came across a very informative site from a nursery and seed source from the coastal town of Ilhéus, Brazil in southern Bahia state. Yesterday, we published their recipe for preserving whole biquinho peppers.

On their site there was also a recipe for a cocktail which caught our eye. It was one more variation on the Brazilian national cocktail, the caipirinha, and though Flavors of Brazil has already published various caipirinha recipes, we couldn't resist this one. We're publishing it untested, but it looks so good and so unusual that we'll be testing it out this weekend, and promise to report back on it next week. Meantime, here's how to make one:
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RECIPE - Tangerine Caipirinha with Biquinho Peppers (Caipirinha de Tangerina com Pimenta-Biquinho)
Makes 2 drinks

3 fresh biquinho peppers
2 - 4 Tbsp granulated white sugar, to taste
3 oz. (200 ml) cachaça (can substitute tequila or vodka)
2 medium tangerines, peeled and seeded
cubed ice
2 tangerine segments, for garnish (optional)
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In each of two old-fashioned glass, add one-half of the tangerine segments (reserving two segments for garnish if desired), the sugar and 1/2 of a biquinho pepper. Using a pestle or the end of a wooden spoon, crush the mixture to extract all the juice and mix the ingredients.

Add 1 1/2 oz. cachaça to each glass, mix well, then fill the glass with ice. Add one whole biquinho pepper and an optional tangerine segment to garnish and serve immediately.

RECIPE - Tamarind Batida (Batida de Tamarindo)

If you ask almost anyknowledgeable cocktail enthusiast to free associate the words "Brazil" and "cocktail", chances are almost certain that the word that will pop out of his or her mouth will be "caipirinha." This combination of crushed whole limes, cachaça (a liquor distilled from sugar cane), sugar and ice is Brazil's most famous cocktail export and can be found on bar menus around the world.

But the caipirinha is not Brazil's only cachaça cocktail. There's a whole other family of cachaça plus fruit juice drinks that are enjoyed throught Brazil - drinks called batidas (prounced bah-CHEE-das). What distinguished a batida from a caipirinha is the addition of a touch of sweetened condensed milk. There are as many flavors of batidas as there are fruits in Brazil, which means there are theoretically thousands of possible batidas. The most popular are probably lime (limão) and passion fruit (maracujá) but any fruit that strikes one's fancy is suitable. Flavors of Brazil recently tried a cashew fruit (caju) batida and it was wonderful.

Since we've been publishing tamarind recipes this week, we thought we might as well post a recipe for tamarind batida. But please don't limit yourself to this one fruit if you decide you like batidas. Try any fruit that you can blend, whether tropical or not. As they say, "It's all good."
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RECIPE - Tamarind Batida (Batida de Tamarindo)
Makes 1 drink

2 oz (50 ml) cachaça
1 1/2 oz (35 ml) tamarind juice (or any other fruit juice)
1 oz (25 ml) canned sweetened condensed milk
ice cubes
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Put all the ingredients in a cocktail shaker with a tight lid. Shake vigorously for two minutes. Pour through a strainer into a chilled cocktail glass - martini or similar. Serve immediately.

If desired you can pour the drink over fresh ice cubes in an old-fashioned glass.

Margaritinha? Caipirita?? What IS This Drink to Be Called?

Flavors of Brazil might just have invented a new cocktail. Hard to say if we have or if we've only reinvented the wheel, but we think not, based on some simple searches of the Internet. So we're boldly going to claim the invention, just as the first Portuguese explorers claimed Brazil for the king of Portugal without bothering to check with the people who already lived there.

The whole creation process began with a simple economic problem for cocktail aficionados here in Brazil - tequila is VERY expensive. Up until fairly recently, tequila was a relatively low-cost spirit worldwide, but that's no longer the case. The cost of a bottle of tequila now ranks up there with the premium vodkas and single malt scotches. To make matters worse, there is a very high import duty on imported spirits in Brazil, all of which means that a buying a bottle of tequila in Brazil is a significant investment. A simple bottle of unaged José Cuervo costs almost USD $45.00.

What's not expensive in Brazil is cachaça. A decent bottle, not a great one but a decent one, can be purchased for about one-tenth of the price of that bottle of José Cuervo that sits near it on the shelf. So when a friend of ours was complaining about what it was going to cost him to make margaritas at the bar he's opening shortly, we began to wonder what a margarita made with cachaça would taste like. After all, the taste of the two spirits isn't all that different - they're both clear spirits, neither is sweet, and they share a roughness and a hint of smoke. If a margarita could successfully be duplicated, or at least approximated, with cachaça, it could be sold at a relatively decent price at our friend's bar.

There was only one way to find out - make one and see. So we bought a bottle of curaçau, the Brazilian name for triple sec, and a few limes. The cachaça and salt were already on the shelves at home. Using the classic recipe we made a margarita that only differed from the original in the substitution of liquors. Our guinea pigs, a group of friends who'd come over to try out this new drink, were all unanimous in their evaluation of the result - it was uma delícia!. We agreed, and were surprised how much it tasted like a normal margarita. There was very little to distinguish the difference between cachaça and tequila.

Our friend has decided to add the new cocktail to his drinks menu at the new bar. Only one problem remains to be resolved - how should be it baptized? A name that gives some clue as to what it contains is probably best, and so we thought that a name that blended margarita and caipirinha was the way to go. Mixing the two names results in either margaritinha or caipirita. We prefer caipirita - it's less unwieldy - but it appears that someone, somewhere has used that name to describe a caipirinha made with tequila. Our drink is just the opposite, though, and there's nothing legally preventing our friend from using the name caipirita.

What do you think? We're asking readers of this blog to leave a comment if they have a preference between these two names, or if they think there's another name that's better than either one. Thanks in advance for your suggestions and comments.

RECIPE - Seriguela Caipiroska (Caipriroska de Seriguela)

The first few times I returned to North America from a visit to Brazil my raves about the cocktail called caipirinha drew blank stares - and when I explained that the caipirinha was a drink made with crushed whole limes, sugar and cachaça the stares grew even blanker. No one had heard of the cocktail, or even of the sugar-cane liquor that fueled it, except for others who had been to Brazil, and who raved along with me.

Now, of course, the increasing fame of the caipirinha and the world-wide availability of cachaça means that I usually don't have to explain what a caipirinha is. Almost any upmarket bar in North America or Europe will serve you a caipirinha, and cachaça can be found in many liquor stores (although at astronomic prices, by Brazilian standards).

What isn't so well known outside Brazil is that the caipirinha has engendered a whole family of cocktails, all based on the same formula of crushed whole fruit + juice, sugar and distilled liquor. In Brazilian Portuguese, if the fruit used in not the original lime, but the drink still includes cachaça, then it's called a caipifruta. However, when the liquor used changes, so does the name. The two most popular variations on the caipirinha are the caipiroska, which substitutes vodka for the cachaça, and the caipirissima, which employs white rum. If neither the fruit juice nor the liquor is the one used in the caipirinha, then the name changes, as in the recipe below, to something else - caipiroska de tangerina, caipiroska de caju, caipirissima de manga.

This recipe is one that I found on the website Petitchef, a great source of recipes from the blogosphere. As the name caipiroroska de seriguela would indicate, it's made with vodka not cachaça and the fruit used is seriguela. I've not yet tried it, but since it's currently seriguela season here, and my fridge is full of them, I'll have to give it a try. From the photo on the site (above) it looks wonderful.
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RECIPE - Seriguela Caipiroska (Caipriroska de Seriguela)
Makes one drink

2 oz. (60 ml) good-quality vodka
1-2 Tbsp. granulated sugar, to taste
4-6 fresh seriguelas
roughly smashed ice cubes
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In an old-fashioned glass, put the skin and pulp of 4-6 feshly washed seriguelas, discarding the central seed. Add sugar to taste, then using a mortar or the end of the handle of a wooden spoon, crush the pulp until the juice has released and the sugar has dissolved. Add the vodka, then fill the glass with ice. Stir thoroughly to chill the drink and serve immediately.

(Note, this recipe can easily be turned into a caipirinha de seriguela or a caipirissima de seriguela by substituting cachaça or rum, respectively, for the vodka.)

RECIPE - For a Holiday Hangover - Maria Sangrenta, the Brazilian Bloody Mary

In parts of the world, notably the UK and members of the British Commonwealth, like Canada and Australia, today, December 26, is Boxing Day. For many many more countries, this day is nameless, but whether you call it Boxing Day or nothing at all, it's often a day to recuperate from the festive rigors of Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Too many presents, too much food, too much drink, and too much celebrating - a universal after-effects of Christmas cheer.

One of the time-tested aids to recuperation from this excess is a cocktail made with vodka and some form of tomato-based juice. In the USA and the UK, it's normally called a Bloody Mary and consists of vodka and tomato juice spiced to taste with a squeeze of fresh lemon or lime, some Tabasco Sauce, Worcestershire Sauce and often horseradish. The Canadian cure-all, the Bloody Caesar, is quite similar but with the substitution of Clamato Juice for tomato juice.

Thoughts of these "hair-of-the-dog" drinks got me wondering what a Brazilian version might be and what it might be called. Tomato juice, although not commonly drunk in Brazil, is available in better supermarkets and gourmet shops (at exorbitantly high prices). Obviously, to make the drink truly Brazilian you'd have to shelve the vodka and reach for a bottle of cachaça. Spicing the drink would be quite straighforward, although you'd have to give it a good dose of hot sauce to make it Brazilian. And to name it, why not just translate Bloody Mary - it could be called a Maria Sangrenta. I thought I'd come up with something quite cool, and possibly quite delicious.

However, a quick online search quickly disabused me of any notion of being original. In fact, in the 2010 Brazilian Championship of Cachaça-based Cocktails sponsored by the ABB (Associação Brasileira de Bartenders), the vice-champion drink, concocted by bartender Jairo Alvin de Gama from the state of São Paulo, was none other than my own Maria Sagrenta. Oh well, as they say, there's nothing new under the sun. Sr. de Gama beat me to it. Had I been a bit faster on the draw, I could have been the vice-champion bartender of Brazil.

Sr. de Gama's drink recipe is a slight variation on the standard Bloody Mary. Here it is should you wish to give it a try - on Boxing Day or at any other time. I'm sure it's good for what ails ya.
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RECIPE - Maria Sangrenta
Makes 1 drink


1 1/2 oz. (5 cl) cachaça
1/2 oz. (2 cl) Cointreau
2 dashes Tabasco sauce (or to taste)
2 dashes Angostura bitters
tomato juice to fill

Put a few ice cubes in a tumbler or old-fashioned glass. Add the two liquors and the spices. Fill with tomato juice, and stir with a spoon to thoroughly blend.

Decorate with a slice of star fruit and a cherry tomato.

RECIPE - Caipifruta de cajá

Brazil's most famous cocktail is, of course, the caipirinha, made with pulped limes and their juice, ice and cachaça, a sugar-cane distilled liquor. It's a ritual for tourists from around the world to sit on a beach in Brazil, or in a corner bar, and slowly "become" more Brazilian as they imbibe these powerful cocktails.

The basic caipirinha has developed into a whole family of drinks. When another tropical fruit is substitute for limes, the resulting drink is usually known as a caipifruta. Here's the recipe for a Caipifruta de cajá made with Brazil's cajá fruit. Saúde! (that's "cheers" in Portuguese)

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RECIPE - Caipifruta de cajá

Makes 1 drink

2 oz. cachaça

2 oz.  cajá juice

ice

slice of lime (optional)

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Combine cachaça and the fruit juice is a lowball cocktail glass. Add ice cubes to fill the glass. Garnish with a slice of lime (optional). Serve.