On The Road - Belém (Pt.5) - Manioc, Let Me Count the Ways

As we mentioned in last Friday's post about the three cornerstones of the cuisine of Belém, the staple carbohydrate upon which the cuisine in built is the tropical tuber manioc (Manihot esculenta), alternatively known in English as cassava or sometimes yuca. Manioc is to Belenense cooking what rice is to Chinese, wheat is to Italian cooking and the potatoes is to Irish - the supplier of the major portion of the population's daily nutritional intake. In the Amazonian region of Brazil, where Belém is located, up to 33% of the daily caloric intake comes from manioc in some form or another.

Bitter manioc tuber

What is most astonishing about this tuber, first domesticated in the southwestern portion of the Amazonian basin as long as ten thousand years ago, is its chameleon-like nature. Manioc shows up in all kinds of shapes, forms and consistencies in Belém and it's hard to imagine that two dishes as different as the soupy broth called tacacá and the crunchy, gritty flour called farinha that is sprinkled on top of grilled meats share a common ingredient. And that ingredient could only be manioc. Manioc can look like mashed potatoes, as when it tops arrumadinho, the Brazilian take on shepherd's pie. It can look just like french fries. Or it can be an airy, light form of bread - as in Brazilian  pão de queijo. It even makes an appearance at North American dessert tables, disguised as tapioca pudding. Those pearly balls in the pudding are manioc, as are the "bubbles" in Asian bubble tea. It's an infinitely versatile food, and the cooking of Belém would be radically different without it.

Producers, vendors and cooks of manioc in Belém sort manioc plants into two types, normally called sweet (doce) or bitter (amargo). It's a good thing that they do, too, for bitter manioc is highly poisonous in its natural, uncooked form. Both types of manioc contain cyanide poison in their tubers, roots and leaves, but the quantity is much less in sweet manioc. A kilogram of sweet manioc contains approximately 20 mg. of hydrogen cyanide, but the same quantity of bitter manioc can contain 50 times as much. Since as little as 40 mg. of this chemical can be fatal, bitter manioc is toxic indeed.

Fortunately, the toxins present in bitter manioc can be removed by processing and cooking the plant, something that Amerindians discovered at the time they first domesticated manioc. This detoxification can be accomplished by long cooking - the technique that's used when cooking manioc leaves, which must be cooked for an entire week without stopping before they are served. Tubers are processed by mashing or milling the root, then squeezing out the liquid which contains most of the toxins, and cooking the remainder.

Ground manioc leaves, Ver-o-peso market, Belém

Brazilian Portuguese makes it easy to differentiate between sweet manioc and bitter, though there are regional dialectical differences which cloud the picture. The bitter type is called mandioca, from a Tupi word that is also the basis for English manioc. Sweet manioc is called mandioca-doce, mandionca-mansa, macaxeira, or aipim depending on region. In English, dangerously, both bitter and sweet are called manioc or cassava.

Tucupi, Ver-o-peso market, Belém

As we explore the gastronomy of Belém in this series of On The Road posts, we'll run into manioc again and again. It already showed up in a liquid form in yesterday's recipe for pato no tucupi (duck in tucupi). Tucupi is made by squeezing the liquid from bitter manioc tubers, then letting the liquid sit until the starch settles out and can be removed. The remaining liquid is cooked to rid it of poisons, resulting in  tucupi. That settled starch, by the way, is later dried and becomes tapioca. Just one more transformation of this remarkable plant.

Tapioca - What it is depends on where you are

If you ask someone from North America what the word tapioca means to them, they'd be likely to tell you that it's a pudding-type dessert, white and creamy and full of little transparent gelatinous balls. They are also likely to either love it or hate it; there's really no neutral ground when it comes to this dessert. For those who hate it, those little transparent balls bear a all-too-close resemblance to fish eyes.

If you asked someone from Singapore or Hong Kong the same question - what is tapioca? - they'd tell you instead that it's  the "bubbles" in bubble tea. These bubbles can be teensy or enormous, they can be highly-flavored or just sweet, they can be green, blue, pink or violet, but they are what makes bubble tea bubble tea.

For people in northeastern Brazil, tapioca is something entirely different. It's a flat griddle-cake similar to a pancake or better yet a crepe, white, chewy and without much flavor, which is rolled or folded and filled with any number of sweet or savory fillings, like crepes are. Some favorite fillings are grated coconut and grated cheese, carne de sol, banana and cheese, or simply butter.

At the end of all that questioning, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the confusion is probably just some sort of linguistic mixup - that these different foods really have nothing to do with each other except similar names. But you'd be wrong - in all these food cultures, and many more around the world that use tapioca, it is essentially the same ingredient, just formed and handled in different ways.

Manioc plant

Tapioca is one of the end-products that are extracted from a tropical tuber, native to Brazil, called manioc, cassava or yuca in English and many other things in other languages. (See earlier Flavors of Brazil post "Manioc's Many Names" for more manioc nomenclature). Depending on what part of the manioc plant is used and how it is treated it can resemble a potato, a thick, floury paste, or a gritty yellow grain. Tapioca is just one more of the many shapes and forms of manioc.

There are essentially two kinds of manioc - one which is poisonous in its natural state due to the presence of cyanide and one which is not toxic (more information here). Tapioca is one of the products that results from the process of detoxificaiton of poisonous manioc - a process that dates back to pre-Columbian Indian cultures in the region of the Amazon River Basin.

Before poisonous manioc can be safely eaten, its cyanide must be removed. This is done by peeling and grating a manioc tuber, and then squeezing all the liquid out of it using a type of wicker basket designed specifically for this purpose. The liquid that is extracted from the root is allowed to stand for a day or so until all the starch settles to the bottom of the container. That starch is tapioca, which is now safe to eat. The liquid, however, it still toxic and must be boiled for a very long time, up to several days, before it is comestible. In Brazil's Amazon region, that liquid is called tucupi and it plays a vital role in the cuisine of that area.

But it's the starch that's left behind that we're concerned with here. It can be spread out and dried to make a starchy powder, or it can be processed into those balls of tapioca put in pudding or in bubble tea. It can be used as a flour in all sorts of baked products, and since it has no gluten is commonly used in baked goods for people who are gluten-intolerant.

Here in northeastern Brazil the word tapioca is used to refer to the starchy flour itself and also to the crepes which are made from it and which are a popular snack and street food. In our next post, we'll take a look at the tapioca of Brazil's northeast.

RECIPE - Rooster's Head (Cabeça do Galo)

No, this isn't a recipe for a real rooster's head, we promise! There are no beaks, eyes or combs anywhere in the ingredient list, and this is not one of those strange-verging-on-disgusting ethnic foods that are the mainstay of TV shows such as Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, or Andrew Zimmern's Bizarre Foods. The Brazilian dish cabeça do galo can be translated into English as rooster's head, but there isn't a gram of animal meat in it.

Cabeça do galo is rather a  thick and nourishing manioc flour (farinha) soup, made richer with the addition of whole eggs. It is known in Brazil as a restorative food, as soups everywhere are known , but it's particular claim to fame is as a hangover cure. In most cultures where drinking alcohol is encouraged, permitted or even just tolerated there are foods that are thought to alleviate the pain of excess alcohol consumption if not to cure it. University students in the USA often swear by left-over pizza, and McDonald's Egg McMuffins are touted as a wonder cure by many. Mexican indulge in a tripe stew called menudo in the attempt to clear their head, while the Dutch tip their heads back to swallow raw baby herring covered in onions. In Brazil, after a night of too many caipirinhas, or too much cerveja, the way to get back on the road to sobriety is with a bowl of cabeça do galo.

The thing about cabeça do galo, though, is that it isn't only suitable for curing hangovers (unlike day-old congealed pizza slices, or Egg McMuffins). It's a perfect main-course soup for a cool evening, accompanied by a green salad. Satisfying without being overly rich, it hits the spot.

For this recipe you'll need manioc flour, called farinha in Portuguese. In most metropolitan areas, and in areas with a significant Latin American population, you can find it in Brazilian or Latin markets. Look for the name farinha de mandioca on the bag.
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RECIPE - Rooster's Head (Cabeça do Galo)
Serves 4

5 Tbsp. neutral vegetable oil
1 medium onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, peeled and minced
1 large tomato, peeled, seeded and chopped
1 medium green bell pepper, seeded and chopped
salt and black pepper to taste
4 cups (1 liter) boiling water
1 Tbsp. powdered annatto (sweet paprika can be substituted)
3 large whole eggs, lightly beaten
1/2 cup (125 ml) manioc flour (farinha de mandioca)
1/4 cup chopped cilantro
a few whole cilantro leaves for garnish
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En a large saucepan, heat the oil then add the onion. Cook until the onion just begins to brown, then add the garlic, chopped tomato and and green pepper and cook, stirring regularly, for five more minutes. Season for salt, then add the black pepper to taste, the annatto or paprika  and the cilantro while continuing to stir. Finally, stir in the beaten eggs.

Remove the pan from the heat, then immediately pour the boiling water over the ingredients. Stirring constantly, add the manioc flour in a thin steady stream. When the manioc flour has been thorough mixed in, return the pan to the heat for about 5 minutes, or until it just begins to boil.

Serve immediately in deep bowls, decorated with a few whole cilantro leaves.


Recipe translated and adapted from Cozinha Regional Brazileira by Abril Editora.

RECIPE - A 19th Century Brazilian Dinner

In yesterday's post on Flavors of Brazil, I let a 19th Century English author, Henry Koster, describe the dinner he was served in the great house of a sugar plantation in northeastern Brazil sometime in the early part of that century. I commented that the dinner was not that different from what one often finds on the plate in today's Brazil - carne de sol and pirão.

For a lark, I googled recipes looking for exactly this meal, and on one of Brazil's most contemporary websites - Mais Você - I located a recipe for the dinner that Koster was served. The website belongs to a very popular TV show in Brazil - a morning show about cooking, celebrity interviews, heartwarming stories of ordinary Brazilians, sort of a combination of Oprah and Martha Stewart. It's been on the air forever, and its host, Ana Maria Braga, is one of the most recognizable media celebrities in the country. If something's featured on Mais Você then it matters to Brazilians, particularly Brazilian women.

So here is Mais Você 's 21st Century version of that dinner that was served nearly 200 years ago in the great house of a sugar plantation to Henry Koster.
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Carne de Sol com Pirao de Leite
Serves 8

2 lbs (1 kg) carne de sol (click here for instructions on how to make your own)
4 cups (1 litre) whole milk
1 cup clarified butter
1 large onion, sliced
2 cups (500 ml) manioc flour (farinha)
salt to taste
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Desalt the meat in the refrigerator, in several changes of cold water, for at least 6 hours. In a large heavy saucepan with a lid, bring the milk slowly to the boil, then add the meat, reduce the heat to low and simmer until the meat is tender, about one hour. Remove the meat from the milk, reserving both.

In a medium saucepan, heat the clarified butter, then add the sliced onions. Fry until the onions until they are lightly golden, the remove them, reserve. Add the reserved meat to the butter and fry until the meat develops a nice crust. Remove the meat, reserving the meat and the butter.

Off heat, mix together the butter used for frying and the reserved milk. Bring them to the boil over medium heat. Remove from heat, then add the manioc flour in small quantities, stirring and mixing each addition before adding another. When it reaches the stage of a loose, moist paste, stop adding flour. Season for salt.

Pour the manioc flour mixture into a large serving bowl, cut the meat into serving-size pieces and put it on a platter, then cover with the reserved onions. Pass both for family-style serving.

Recipe translated and adapted from Mais Você Culinária.

RECIPE - Fish Pirão (Pirão de Peixe)

This traditional recipe from the coastal state of Espírito Santo is pirão at its most basic. A flavorful broth made using fish heads combined with manioc flour to thicken it and give it the proper consistency, and you've got a dish that goes back to prehistoric times. These kinds of pirão were the basic dietary item of the native indigenous populations of Brazil and today accompany fish stews everywhere in the country. Every family has its own recipe, and everyone thinks that their mother is the only person in the world capable of making a proper pirão, but as is the case with turkey stuffings, almost every pirão is delicious.

Manioc flour is available in Brazilian and Latin American markets in North America and Europe. Just look for farinha de mandioca or even just plain farinha written on the package. Farinha comes in white and yellow varieties and either is suitable for making pirão.
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RECIPE - Fish Pirão (Pirão de Peixe)
Serves 4

2 Tbsp. extravirgin olive oil
1 Tbsp. ground annatto (can substitute sweet red paprika)
2 crushed cloves garlic
3 medium tomatoes, seeded and chopped
1 medium onion, chopped
1/2 cup finely chopped cilantro
1 fish head, about 1 lb (400 gr) (or two smaller heads), well washed
2 cups hot water
salt to taste
1 1/2 cup manioc flour (farinha)
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Heat the olive oil in a deep pan. Add the annatto and the garlic and cook for a few minutes. Then add the tomatoes, onion, cilantro, fish head(s) and the hot water. Salt to taste. Simmer for 15 minutes, then remove from heat and let cool completely. Remove the fish heads, then separate the meat from the bones. Shred the meat and return it to the broth, discarding the bones.

Reheat the broth to the simmering point (not boiling) then sprinkle the surface with manioc flour, stirring constantly and slowly adding more manioc. Stir vigorously so that lumps do not form. Reduce the heat to low and cook for approximately 10 minutes or until the pirão has thickened. Serve immediately as a side dish for any fish or seafood dish.

Recipe translated and adapted from Cozinha Regional Brasileira by Abril Editora.

Pirão - At the roots of Brazilian cuisine

In traditional gastronomy, in every corner of the globe, you'll find classic combinations of a protein-based main course with an obligatory carbohydrate-based side dish. In the minds (and stomachs) of those who consume these dishes, one dish without the other is unthinkable. For example, classic Lombardian osso buco is always served with risotto alla milanese. And what is the Parisian bistro standard steak without its frites? Or a proper English roast of beef without a light and airy Yorkshire pudding standing proudly at its side? Equally unimaginable for Brazilians is the idea of eating any one of the numerous regional variations of a fish or seafood stew unaccompanied by a serving of pirão. "It's just not done" as Brazilian cooks and eaters would all agree.

Pirão is uniquely Brazilian, and has been an integral part of the Brazilian way of eating for a very long time - how long no one knows. However, it is known that the indigenous population of what is now Brazil was eating pirão-like dishes long before Europeans arrived on these shores. Basically, pirão is nothing more than a gruel made by stirring manioc flour into a fish- or meat-based broth (in times of dire need, it can even be made with manioc flour and water alone). The manioc flour thickens the broth and provides the bulk and the nutrition that only carbohydrates can give.

Manioc is the staple food on which native Brazilian cuisine depended (and depends). Potatoes and corn (maize), two other New World staple crops were known to the native populations in Brazil, but didn't have the importance in native cuisine that manioc did.

Production of manioc flour (farinha de mandioca) was a long and arduous task, and in indigenous cultures was primarily women's work. After harvesting the roots of the manioc plant, the women would grate them on graters fashioned from wooden boards studded with sharp stones. The grated manioc had to be soaked first, then wrung dry in plaited nets called tipiti to rid it of its poisonous cyanide, dried over an open fire and finally ground into flour. When completely dried, manioc flour could be stored for up to one year, and thus provided stability and certainty to the nutritional requirements of the natives.

Manioc flour (like our Western wheat flour) can be used to create a great number of dishes and food products. One of the simplest is to add flour to a heated liquid, be it water or something more flavorful, then let the flour expand in the liquid to create a pap. It can be an thin as a light gruel, or as thick as a sturdy Scottish oatmeal. The thinner versions can be drunk, while the thicker varieties can be eaten with the fingers, or even with a spoon.

Today's standard-variety Brazilian pirão is neither thin enough to drink, nor thick enough to eat with the fingers - it's somewhere in the middle. It's a consistency that isn't common in European cuisines (at least not in the ones I'm familiar with). If you are familiar with Italian wet polenta and can imagine it even wetter, you have an idea of how a well-prepared pirão should appear. When poured onto a plate from a serving spoon, it should spread out, but not so much that it covers the plate. Getting the proportions of manioc flour and broth just right is something that only comes with time and practice.

In the next couple of posts here on Flavors of Brazil, I'll provide a recipe for basic, traditional pirão and another for a contemporary re-imagining of this dish that sits right at the base, the very beginnings, of Brazilian gastronomy.

RECIPE - Maniçoba

Have you got a week with nothing to do? Or do you have to feed a crowd of 30-35 persons next week? Want to risk poisoning all those guests if you don't follow the recipe properly?

If your answer to those questions is YES, then Flavors of Brazil would like to present for your consideration a dish from the Brazilian state of Pará called Maniçoba.

This dish, which is one of the most famous festival and holiday dishes of Pará is made with the leaves of the cassava plant, or mandioca as it's known in Brazil. Because of the poisonous cyanides in these leaves, the dish requires a week's cooking time, and isn't worth the time or effort to make a small quantity. Thus, even in its home territory, maniçoba is a dish that's generally only consumed at festival and religious celebrations, where the numbers of people make all the effort that goes into cooking maniçoba worth while.

Since main ingredient of maniçoba is 33 lbs (15 kg) of fresh cassava leaves, I'm not worried that someone will read the recipe that follows, rushing it, and kill off their entire neighborhood, extended family or parish. But I think it's such an interesting recipe, and one that has such a long and colorful history, that it deserves a place in this blog.

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RECIPE - Maniçoba
 Prep time: 1 week
Serves 35-40

35 lbs (15 kg) fresh cassava (mandioca) leaves
4.5 lbs (2 kg) lard
4.5 lbs (2 kg) smoked bacon, whole
4.5 lbs (2 kg) pig's feet, salted
4.5 lbs (2 kg)  pig's ears, salted
4.5 lbs (2 kg) pig's tongue, salted
4.5 lbs (2 kg)  pig's tail, salted
4.5 lbs (2 kg) pork loin, salted
4.5 lbs (2 kg)  pork ribs, salted
9 lbs (4 kg) carne de sol
3 lbs (1.5 kg) kielbasa-type sausage
3 lbs (1.5 kg) chorizo sausage
3 lbs (1.5 kg) linguiças sausage
9 lbs (4.5 kg) beef tripe
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Remove stalks and central vein from cassava leaves, then thoroughly wash in cold water. In handfuls, grind the leaves using the finest blade of a meat grinder. You should have approximate 14 kb (6 kgs) of pulped leaves. Put the cassava leaves in a 40-50 quart industrial stockpot, add water to cover, and simmer for 72 hours (3 days). Thoroughly mix 8-12 times a day, making sure that the leaves don't stick to the bottom of the pot. When necessary to avoid drying out, add water to the mixture.

After 3 days, add the lard and the smoked bacon, whole. Continue to cook for 24 hours. On the fourth day, in another large stockpot add all the meats with the exception of the sausages and tripe and cover with cold water. Soak for 24 hours, changing the water several times.

On the fifth day, coarsely chop the tripe, pour boiling water over it to scald it, and let it cool in the water. Remove the salted meats from their soaking water, wash them thoroughly and boil them for 1 hours. Add the salted meats and the tripe to the cassava leaf mixture and cook for another 48 hours (2 days) removing the pot from the heat while sleeping.

On the sixth day, cut all the sausages into thick rounds, then add them to the stockpot. Continue to cook for 24 hours (again removing the pot from the heat while sleeping).

On the seventh day, you can rest, as the maniçoba is ready to serve, with white rice.

Recipe translated and adapted from Cozinha Regional Brazileira by Abril Editora

The Case of the Two Maniocs

Yesterday, there was a post here on Flavors of Brazil about the confusing nomenclature for the staple food plant cassava (or manioc, or yuca, etc. etc.) Let's hope that faithful readers of this blog will have already studied and memorized that post to avoid further confusion.

The situation, however, it's quite as clear as it was made out to be in that post, because there is not just one plant that carries all those names, there are two. And the difference between the two of them is not insignificant by any means - because one is poisonous if not detoxified and the other is safe to eat in its natural state. Consequently, being able to correct distinguish between the two maniocs is a serious business, as an incorrect choice may be fatal.

Both plants have the same botanical genus - Manihot. The species that carries toxins is Manihot esculenta and that innocuous one is Manihot utilissima. In English, the two species are generally called bitter cassava and sweet cassava, respectively, and in Brazil, the toxic Manihot esculenta is generally known as mandioca and the non-toxic Manihot utilissima is called mandioca doce, macaxeira, or aipim.

The toxic properties of some members of this plant genus were long known to native American populations, who learned how to remove the toxins from the plant before consuming it. Variations of these techniques are still used today worldwide. Whatever treatment is used, the important thing is to remove cyanide from the plant, as ingestion of raw roots or leaves can cause severe and chronic illness, or even death. Toxins are removed naturally from the plant when it undergoes soaking in water, cooking or fermentation. Variations on all three of these techniques are used both at home and in industrial processing.

One of the most intriguing techniques for detoxifying cassava is one that native Indians used for fermenting cassava into a drink. It was described by anthropologist and shamanism scholar Michael J. Harner this way:

The sweet manioc beer (nihamanci or nijiamanchi), is prepared by first peeling and washing the tubers in the stream near the garden. Then the water and manioc are brought to the house, where the tubers are cut up and put in a pot to boil. … The manioc is then mashed and stirred to a soft consistency with the aid of a special wooden paddle. While the woman stirs the mash, she chews handfuls of and spits them back into the pot, a process that may take half an hour or longer. After the mash has been prepared it is transferred to a beer storage jar and left to ferment. … The resultant liquid tastes somewhat like a pleasingly alcoholic buttermilk and is most refreshing. The Jivarosw consider it to be far superior to plain water, which they drink only in emergencies.

This technique of masticating food to initiate fermentation is one used throughout the world from Asia and Africa as far north as the Arctic, where it was known to the Inuit.

In the next post on this blog, I'll provide a traditional recipe for a dish that used cassava leaves, which shows just how much care, effort and time are required to make cassava safe to eat.

Manioc's Many Names

For a long time I have been wanted to post some articles here on Flavors of Brazil about the plant that was the staple food of Brazil's Indians prior to the arrival of Europeans, and which today is still a daily source of nutrition for millions of Brazilians, and billions more residing in tropical areas of the planet. The botanical name for the genus is Manihot, a name derived from the name of the plant in the Tupi language, a native American language spoken in many areas of South America. In Tupi, the plant is called mandioca.

This plant goes by an incredible number of names throughout the world, and much of the taxonomy is confusing, with one name referring to possibly two or more varieties in differing locations, and with countless regional or linguistic variations for the name of one single botanical species. In order to begin to discuss mandioca on this blog, some sense will have to be made out of this linguistic and botanical bowl of spaghetti - some untangling of the plant's many names.

In English, three names are commonly given to the plant - cassava, yuca and manioc (note that cassava is sometimes spelled cassaba or cassada). The second of these names, yuca, is shared with most of the Spanish-speaking cultures of the Americas, such as Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, Panama, Cuba, and The Dominican Republic. In Brazil, there are rather more than three common names - just to list a few: aipi, aipim, castelinha, macaxeira, mandioca-doce, mandioca-mansa, maniva, maniveira, pão-de-pobre. In Africa and Asia, where the plant is widely consumed, it has many, many more names.

Besides this overabundance of names denominating the plant itself, there are many more for each of the constituent edible parts of the plant - leaves, roots, etc. - and for the products derived from the plant, such as starches, flours, gums, saps. These will all have to be dealt with in due course, but will be left for later postings.