RECIPE - Crystalized Papaya (Mamão Cristalizado)

In previous posts on Flavors of Brazil, we've discussed how Brazilian servants, cooks and housewives dealt with the problem of overabundance of fruit in the days before electric refrigeration. In colonial Brazil electric refrigeration didn't exist and indeed up to the middle of the 20th century most Brazilian households didn't have a fridge or a freezer. So when one fruit or another was in season and there was a Biblical-scale abundance of fruit on the vine, in the tree or on the bush, the cook's problem was how to preserve the fruit so it could be enjoyed later in the year.

The most common ways to preserve fruits were either to boil and can them in a sugar syrup or to process them into jams and jellies. There was a third alternative, however. As with conserves and jams, this technique relied on the preservative properties of sugar to prevent the fruit from spoiling and allow it to be stored at room temperature. But in this case, in the process known as crystalization, the fruit was cooked in a sugar syrup, but then it was drained, partially dried and rolled in granulated sugar before it stored.

The crystalization process is not unique to Brazil. It's a traditional preserving technique that is used in many cultures, and was brought to Brazil by the Portuguese. The most common example of the technique in northern hemisphere cultures might be the production of crystalized ginger (sometimes called candied ginger).

In Brazil, the technique is applied to many varieties of fruits, such as pineapple, mango, fig and especially papaya. This recipe for crystalized papaya comes from the central state of Goiás, but similar recipes can be found in traditional kitchens almost everywhere in Brazil.
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RECIPE - Crystalized Papaya (Mamão Cristalizado)

2 lbs (1 kb) not-overly-ripe papaya, seeded, peeled and cut into bite-sized pieces
1 tsp baking soda (bicarbonate of soda)
3 cups granulated white sugar
2 cups water
3 cups granulated white sugar
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In a large saucepan combine the pieces of papaya with water to cover and add the baking soda. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat. When at a rolling boil, turn off the heat, remove the pan from the stove and let the papaya cool in the water for 24 hours. The next day, drain off the water, add fresh water to cover and bring to the boil again. Remove the papaya pieces to a sieve with a slotted spoon and let drain thoroughly. Reserve.

To make the syrup heat the 2 cups water and the 3 cups sugar in another saucepan until the sugar is completely dissolved and the syrup is simmering. Add the reserved papaya and simmer for 10 minutes. Remove from the heat and let cool, leaving the papaya in the syrup, for 24 hours. The next day, bring the papaya and syrup gently to a slow boil and cook until the syrup has thickened considerable. Remove the papaya into a sieve and let drain thoroughly.

While the papaya is draining, spread 3 cups sugar in a shallow serving platter. When the papaya is drained but still warm and moist, roll it in the sugar, making sure that each piece is completely covered with sugar. Let the papaya cool in the sugar, mixing gently from time to time, for 24 hours.

Remove the papaya from the sugar and store in airtight containers until ready to eat.

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

Carne de Lata - Brazil's Own Confit

Back in the days before a large majority of Brazilians had refrigerators in their home, people used other techniques for preserving foods. There are lots of ways to preserve food that don't involve cold temperatures - a good thing in a mostly-tropical country like Brazil. Smoking, pickling in vinegar or wine, preserving in sugar syrups, salting - all these techniques are important parts of traditional Brazilian cooking.

One additional way to preserve food, usually meats, that was popular in Brazil up to the middle of the 20th Century, has begun to make a comeback. The technique basically is to fry meat, usually some form of pork, in lard until most of the moisture is drawn out, then pack the meat into large jars, crocks or cans and pouring melted lard over to fill the container and seal the meat to prevent exposure to air. The meat is preserved in its own fat. Although the container might be glass or clay as easily as metal, in Portuguese the term used is carne de lata - literally "canned meat."

The technique is identical to the way that the inhabitants of southwestern France have always made their famous duck confit - the only difference is that the animal in question in Brazil is a pig whereas in France it's a duck. Both animals have large stores of body fat, so both are suitable for preserving in this manner.

Most of the production of carne em lata in Brazil historically was domestic - on farms where pigs were raised one was slaughtered every couple of months, the prime cuts were eaten fresh and the lesser cuts were preserved in fat. There were meat-processing companies that made canned meat on an industrial scale for people who didn't have their own animals to slaughter but who needed meat that could be stored at room temperature until consumed. Most of these companies were located in the states of Minas Gerais and São Paulo.

Recently there has been a surge in demand for carne de lata in Brazil. Just as in France, where duck confit has now found a place at the highest levels of gastronomy, Brazilian chefs are discovering just how good canned meat can be. Many of the chefs are making their own carne de lata, but others have gone back to the original industrial producers for the product. The result is that the original firms that made carne de lata, or at least those who survived the long drought during the second half of the last century, are now finding a renewed interest in their product and a large increase in consumption.

One of the best-known of these firms is named Xavante, from the city of Divinópolis in Minas Gerais. They sell carne de lata, in cans with appropriately retro labels, in sizes ranging from 500 gr (about 1 lb) to 3.4 kg (7.5 lb) behemoths. The product is even available for online purchase.

Here at Flavors of Brazil we find it comforting to learn about the return of carne de lata - it's honest food, made as it always has been (because of necessity originally, because of taste these days). It's just one more example of that truism - "Everything old is new again."

RECIPE - Preserved Biquinho Peppers (Conserva de Pimenta Biquinho)

This recipe, which comes from the website of a Brazilian nursery and online horticultural supply store called Agrotopical, is a typical Brazilian recipe for preserving whole chili peppers. The pepper in question in this recipe is the biquinho pepper, a pepper that has all the flavor of a chili with none of the bite (click here for more information on biquinho peppers). Any other small chili pepper, mild, medium, hot or scorching, and satisfactorially be substituted for biquinho.

In the recipe, the peppers are preserved in a mixture of white vinegar and cachaça. However, if you can't find cachaça in your local liquor store, you can substitute tequila or vodka. You can even use white rum, but if you do so, we'd suggest that you cut back on the amount of sugar called for, or the result will be overpoweringly sweet.
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RECIPE - Preserved Biquinho Peppers (Conserva de Pimenta Biquinho)
Makes one pint (500 ml)

1 cup (250 ml) white vinegar
1 cup (250 ml) cachaça
1 Tbsp granulated white sugar
1 tsp salt
ripe biquinho peppers (or other variety)
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Make the preserving liquid by combining the vinegar, cachaça , sugar and salt in a medium sauce pan, bringing the liquid to a boil and boiling for two minutes. Reserve, keeping simmering.

Prepare a large mixing bowl by filling it halfway with cold water, then adding 6-8 ice cubes. In another saucepan bring at least 4 cups (1 liter) of water to the boil. Put the peppers in the boiling water and let boil for 20 seconds only. Remove from the heat, drain immediately in a sieve or colander, then plunge the peppers into the ice water to stop the cooking process. Drain again. Reserve.

Using a properly sterilized Mason jar or other canning jar, pack the jar loosely with peppers. Bring the preserving liquid back to the boil, then fill the jar completely with the liquid. Tap the jar on a table or countertop a few times to make sure there are no air bubbles in the jar. Seal the jar and process in boiling water. (For directions on how to hot-water process, click here).

When processing is complete, let the jar cool completely on a wire rack. Let the jar stand in a cool, dark place for at least two weeks before consuming, and keep uneaten portions in the refrigerator once the jar is opened.

How to Make Your Own Hot Sauce - Brazilian Style

Obviously, a blog that concerns itself with Brazilian food and Brazilian cooking traditions is going to spend some time discussing hot chili peppers. Though some regional cuisines of Brazil do entirely without chilis, they are in the minority. (Most of these regional cuisines are in the southernmost part of the country, which is not tropical and which has a population of mostly European ancestry).

Chilis are native to the hot-climate zones of the Americas and have been consumed in Brazil for millennia. The native population used chilis to season and to preserve foods long before the arrival of Europeans. The slaves who were transported from Africa to Brazil took enthusiastically to chilis upon their arrival. Even European culinary traditions were perked up with a dash of chili in Brazil.

Flavors of Brazil already has a significant number of posts about chili peppers. You can use the search box on this page or the Flavors of Brazil labels to track them down. We've discussed the botany of the capsicum family of plants, we've talked about the quest for the world's hottest pepper, and we have demonstrated how to preserve chili peppers at home in vinegar or cachaça.

We think that one of the most useful chili peppers products to have in one's kitchen, particularly when faced with a Brazilian recipe that calls for some heat, is in the form of a hot-chili sauce. A hot sauce is not the same thing as preserved chilis. Preserved chilis are left whole, or at most halved, and depend on the preservative powers of vinegar or cachaça. When they are used in the kitchen, it isn't the chilis themselves that go into the dish, it's the preservative liquid, which in the meantime has picked up flavor and piquancy from the chilis. The chilis themselves are not eaten and in the end are discarded.

In a hot sauce, however, the body of the chili becomes part of the sauce, and so the sauce has much more of the heat and the fruity flavor that a hot chili provides. Think of Tabasco sauce or any other bottled hot sauce. The ingredients are chilis, vinegar, flavoring ingredients and salt. These are combined, blended and bottled, resulting in a sauce which can be added to almost any dish in exactly the quantity desired.

It's this ability to control the amount of chili "heat" that makes hot sauce so useful in the kitchen. If you're making a stew, for example, and want to perk it up but not make it fiery, adding hot sauce drop by drop and testing after each addition allows precise control of the heat. If you're working with whole chilis you can control the heat a bit by adding only one chili or two, but you don't have the same control. Sometimes even one chili is too much, and if you cut a chili in half you don't necessarily cut down on the heat. That's where hot sauce steps in.

Brazil has thousands of hot sauces sold commercially, including American-made Tabasco sauce by the way. Many are cheap industrial products that add little to a dish but heat, though there are many, many wonderful sauces as well. However, it's so easy to make hot sauce at home and the result is so superior to almost any commercial product that it's worth the effort to make you own at home. It will taste better than just about any store-bought sauce, it will have just the potency you want, and just like a favorite perfume can become your fragrance identifier, your homemade hot sauce can add your own identity to your spicy dishes.

Next round on Flavors of Brazil we'll detail exactly how to make your "signature" hot sauce.

INGREDIENTS - Clarified Butter (Manteiga de Garrafa)

All aspects of a traditional cuisine are informed by the cultural landscape in which it develops. Ingredients, techniques, equipment used, food preservation, all depend on topography, climate, availability of water and many other cultural factors, even such unlikely ones such as language. This is precisely why no two traditional cuisines are exactly the same, as they do not have the same "genetic background."

Nonetheless, certain elements of many different traditional cuisines seem to pop up independently in cultures that are geographically worlds away, and with little communication or connection between them. For example, the custom of eating crispy-fried insects can be found in traditional cultures from Australia, to Thailand, to Brazil's Amazon rain forest. Such similarities are nothing surprising, as cultures might share available ingredients, or similar climates, without even knowing of each others existence. The need to turn available foods into something palatable is universal.

Brazil's semi-arid northeast (called the Nordeste in Brazil) is a hot, unforgiving landscape with scant vegetation and less water. It resembles parts of the plains of India in all of these aspects. Both areas are  centers of cattle ranching and inhabitants rely on dairy products as an essential part of their diet. Until recent times refrigeration was uncommon in either area, and so preservation of dairy products was a matter of importance. In addition to cheeses, interestingly, both areas developed similar techniques for preserving butter without refrigeration, by clarifying it to remove the milky solids, leaving behind only the dairy fat. The Indians know the resulting product as ghee, and in Brazil's Nordeste is it called either "manteiga de garrafa" (literally, butter in a bottle) ou "manteiga da terra (butter of the earth).

Today, many urban Brazilians in the Nordeste  but manteiga de garrafa not because they must, but because it's part of their traditional palette of flavors. It is an essential ingredient in many of the iconic dishes of this region, and its characteristic taste and smell instantly identify any dish in which is it used as coming from the Nordeste. It seems that the product is virtually unknown outside this region of Brazil, and its availability of limited in other parts of the country.

Today, manteiga de garrafa is available in all local food shops and supermarkets in the urban centers of the Nordeste, but many people still prefer to buy it from roadside stands in the countryside, claiming that the taste is more authentic. Manteiga de garrafa is strongly flavored, and for some it's definitely an acquired taste - it has a strong barnyard aroma, with buttery and even cheesy dairy flavors predominating.

Like butter or cheese almost anywhere in the world, manteiga de garrafa is not something that many people make at home, although recipes for homemade manteiga de garrafa do exist. But most kitchens in Brazil's Nordeset have a bottle of it in the pantry or on a shelf. It lasts forever at room temperature, and when needed, it gives that "down-home" flavor that people everywhere crave.