FISH OF BRAZIL - Ray or Skate (Arraia)

There are at least 500 species of fish in the zoological superorder Batoidea, and the vast majority of them are edible, or at least certain parts of them are edible. This family of fish is commonly known as ray or skate in English and arraia (pronounced a-HIGH-a) in Portuguese, and is distinguished by its cartilaginous skeleton, flattened body and enlarged pectoral fins, commonly called "wings". The rays are close relatives of the sharks, and one of the oldest surviving families of fish.

Rays are an under-appeciated food fish in many parts of the world, although much use is made of them in Asian and African cultures. Sophisticated diners in Europe and North America know that skate is a wonderfully delicious fish, but the commercial market for the fish is not large. Some food historians posit the fact that some rays are poisonous (sting-rays) for reluctance of many in the USA and other parts of the world to eat ray, even though the venom of poisonous rays is restricted to the tail, which is not edible.

Uncooked skate wing

The part of the fish that is commonly considered edible is the large pectoral fin, the wing. In fish markets which sell ray or skate, it is often labeled skate wings. In the wings, the white, fibrous flesh lies between parallel rows of cartilage, and can easily be separated from the cartilage once the fish is cooked.

In some parts of the world, the wings are cooked and served whole and the flesh is separated from the cartilage by the diner. In Brazil, though, most recipes for arraia are soups or stews, and the fibrous flesh is separated and flaked during the cooking process, leaving the final dish without any cartilaginous bones to be removed.

Pastel de arraia

Arraia, flaked and seasoned, is also a favorite filling for the savory deep-fried pastries Brazilians call pastel. It also pops up on bar-snack menus in the form of a bolinho, a small round ball of arraia mixed with mashed potato or mashed manioc which is deep-fried and served hot. Because the flavor and texture of arraia in a bolinho closely resembles the popular bolinho de bacalhau, made with much more expensive salt cod, arraia is sometimes called "poor man's bacalhau."

Portugal's Culinary Heritage - Pastel de Nata (Pastel de Belém)

The original

How can a simple pastry be both enjoyed in all corners of the world where there's a significant Portuguese cultural heritage AND have a recipe that's known to only three people in the world?? This seemingly impossible-to-revolve dichotomy has been successfully been bridged by a small Portuguese egg-custard tart called either Pastel de Nata (cream tart) or Pastel de Belém (Belém tart).

The tart's origins are in the epicenter of the former Portguese empire - the city of Lisbon. More specifically, they lie behind the enclosing walls of the Jerónimos Monastery in the city's Belém district. During the imperial epoque, monasteries and convents throughout Portugal made cakes and sweets, which they sold to the public to raise funds. The bakers of the Jerónimos Monastery were famed for making a small tart with a puff-pastry crust and a sweet, rich eggy custard filling. These were the original pastéis de Belém and their recipe was a closely guarded secret.

At the beginning of the 19th Century, many of these monasteries closed or folded up their pastry operation, including that of the Jerónimos Monastery. An enterprising Brazilian baker named Domingo Rafael Alves who lived in Lisbon finagled the recipe out of one of the monastery's former bakers and in 1837 opened a pastry shop called Antiga Confeitaria de Belém. Today the shop is owned by descendents of Sr. Alves and still specializes in the tarts that made it famous almost two hundred years ago and that have made it prosperous up til today.

At the Antiga Confeitaria de Belém three master bakers (the only three who are privy to the recipe) make the dough and the filling in a locked, alarmed and guarded room, passing them to assistants outside who form the tarts, fill them and cook them. Every day thousands of customers, many of them tourists, but tens of thousands of these treats, and eat many of them in the bake shop itself, served with a demitasse of strong Portuguese coffee.

Antiga Confeitaria de Belém, Lisbon

Long ago, the Antiga Confeitaria de Belém registered the name Pastel de Belém and legally only those tarts made on site, from the original recipe are entitled to be called Pastel de Belém. Any other similar tart, from anywhere else, is a Pastel de Nata. At least in theory, that's the case, but the law isn't universally enforced and one can find tarts called Pastel de Belém in pastry shops from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro, to Luanda, and on to Malacca and Macau. In Brazil they can be found in almost all pastry shops and are a favorite mid-afternoon treat or part of a dessert buffet at a gala party or a wedding reception.

Chinese egg tart

It's at the most-distant reaches of the former Portuguese empire that these tarts have been most enthusiastically adopted. Throughout southeast Asia and southern China (and around the world of the Chinese diaspora) bakeshop shelves groan under the weight of sweet egg-custard tarts. I've seen them in Malaysia, Hong Kong, Vancouver, San Francisco and London. The crust is no longer puff pastry, it's more typically standard pie crust and the filling normally isn't carmelized and crispy as it is back in Lisbon but these Chinese bakeshop standards are still recognizably pastéis de Belém.

Obviously, the three people in the world who have the true recipe for Pastel de Belém  do not include us here at Flavors of Brazil, and so we won't be publishing the authentic recipe. However, in upcoming posts we will provide a very typical, hopefully almost-authentic recipe for a tart that might be called Pseudo-pastel de Belém, as well as one for the Asian version that's found in Chinatowns around the world.

RECIPE - Pastel Dough (Massa para Pastel)

Like many distinctly-not-healthy fast foods, the Brazilian pastel varies tremendously in quality from location to location. Pastels are like that little girl in the Longfellow poem - when they are good they are very, very good, and when they are bad they are horrid. A bad pastel has too little filling, undercooked or overcooked dough, and the dough itself is greasy and heavy. A real stomach-bomb. But a good pastel has the right quantity of well-made filling, wrapped in a covering that is non-greasy, flaky and crunchy. (To see how a properly made pastel looks, check out the photo below.) Que delícia!


While researching in books and online for recipes for pastel dough, I discovered that the real experts in the art of pastel making all seem to swear by the same "secret ingredient" which guarantees a flaky, crunchy pastel, though it's really not much of a secret. They all say that the reason their wrapping comes out so well is that when mixing the ingredients, they add cachaça, the Brazilian sugar cane liquor. On a Brazilian website that offers questions and answers on every possible subject, someone asked why pastel dough was improved by the addition of cachaça, and the answer was this (my translation):

It's because the dough, though fried, doesn't absorb as much of the frying oil, and consequently ends up crunchy and full of little air pockets. Try making the dough without adding  cachaça and you will see the difference. There isn't any change in texture of the dough or in flavor with cachaça, it's only when the pastel is dropped in the deep-fryer that it goes into action. Bom apetite!

(Do you think McDonald's uses cachaça in the dough for their pies? I somehow doubt it.)

So here's the standard recipe for pastel dough, with the obligatory shot of cachaça. As it's the alcohol that causes the dough to be less absorbative, I would think that other liquors, for example, vodka, would work equally well.
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RECIPE - Pastel Dough (Massa para Pastel)
Enough for 50 pastels

2.2 lb (1 kg) all-purpose wheat flour
1 Tbsp. salt
1 Tbsp. chicken broth
1 Tbsp. lard
2 Tbsp. cachaça
2 cups warm water, approximately
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Mix the flour and salt, then add the broth and lard. Add the cachaça to the warm water, and add to the dough in 1/4 cup quantities, mixing in thoroughly and stopping just when the dough forms a ball. Do not overmix or add too much water.

Form into a ball, then let rest for 15 minutes.

After 15 minutes, dough is ready for rolling out, filling and cooking as desired.

Recipe translated and adapted from website Tudo Gostoso, by UOL.

Pastel - Brazil's Favorite Snack?

If you asked almost any Brazilian what food they would associate with the drinking of caldo de cana (freshly pressed sugar cane juice) the likely response would be "pastel." A pastel is a stuffed pastry that is deep-fried, and almost always served with a glass of caldo de cana.

For millions of Brazilians, a pastel serves as a quick lunch, a mid-morning or afternoon tide-me-over, or as an anytime treat at the market, a fair or at the beach.  Pastels have been part of the food culture of Brazil for almost a century, and most food historians are of the opinion that their origins can be traced back to the early-20th Century wave of Japanese immigration to Brazil. As newly-arrived immigrants from Japan began to leave the coffee plantations and move into the cities of southern Brazil one of the ways to succeed there was to open a restaurant. Anti-Japanese sentiments were strong at that time, and Japanese cuisine was unknown, so most of these restaurateurs opened Chinese restaurants. One always-popular item in such restaurants was the deep-fried spring roll, and it's from these small rolls that the pastel developed. What the pastel has retained from its spring roll ancestor is the thin, rolled-out pastry, the use of a filling, and the technique of deep-frying. What has changed is the size and shape of the pastry and the choice and variety of fillings.

Today, a pastel is most likely to be in the shape of a rectangle of the dimensions of a normal post-card or slightly larger, although other shapes and sizes do exist. It is filled with either a sweet or savory filling and is normally served hot right from the fryer - accompanied, of course, by the ever-present caldo de cana. A pastel is stand-up food, and meant to be eaten directly from the hand - they really can't be successfully eaten with a knife and fork. They are usually served in a paper napkin or in a small paper envelope, and the caldo de cana may be presented in a plastic cup.

I often wonder if McDonald's pies, which are similarly deep-fried, were inspired by Brazil's pasteis (pasteis is the plural form of pastel in Portuguese). They really aren't a pie in the North American sense of the word, and closely resemble a Brazilian pastel with a sweet filling, although Brazilian pasteis are not often filled with apples, cherries and other North American fruits.

Like many snack foods, the Brazilian pastel can vary tremendously in quality depending on the vendor. Poorly cooked in over-used oil with minimal amounts of filling a pastel can be a very depressing experience. But properly cooked in good-quality oil, with a tasty filling and crunchy pastry, it can be a delicious, if not exactly healthy, treat.