Brazil's Daily Bread - Pão Francês

When Brazilians ask for "o pão nosso de cada dia" (our daily bread) as part of the Lord's Prayer, the vast majority of them are most likely thinking not of a loaf of sliced white bread, nor of a heavy rye bread. Not a wholesome 8-grain bread or a baguette, either. The image they have in their mind's eye is of a roll that fits neatly in the palm of a hand with a crisp brown crust and a light-as-air crumb inside. The bread that is generically known in Brazil as pão francês, or French bread.

For most Brazilians, pão francês IS in fact their daily bread. It is almost universally eaten at breakfast and often as part of a snack or a light supper, though almost never as part of almoço, the main meal of the day, eaten at lunch time. The typical Brazilian home breakfast is fruit or fruit juice, coffee, and one or two pieces of pão francês, either eaten simply slathered with margarine or cream cheese, or made into a sandwich with a slice of cheese or ham. At night, Brazilians eat pão francês as part of a supper that is smaller than standard North American or European dinner, again served with margarine or cream cheese, or made into a cheese or ham sandwich.

This pattern of eating pão francês every day dates from the early 20th Century in Brazil, when the style of bread we call French became known to Brazilian troops in Europe during the First World War, and was brought home with them when they returned from the battlefield. At that time, crusty rolls were more popular in France than long loaves (baguettes) and to this day, rolls are preferred in Brazil. Over the course of time the original French recipe became Brazilianized, and today most bakeries sell pão francês that has a pinch of sugar and a touch of butter or some other fat added to the original recipe for French bread dough.

Brazilians have come to prefer a roll that has a very airy and fluffy inside - pão francês is much less dense than French bread found in France or other countries. What is most important to Brazilians is the crust - it must be nicely browned and extremely crunchy. Brazilians love a roll that breaks into small sharp flakes when cut into. Because bread crusts do not remain crisp in Brazil's hot and often humid climate, Brazilians demand the freshest of bread on their tables. Many families buy bread from a supermarket or a bakery more than once a day - once for the breakfast bread, and again later in the day for afternoon or evening eating. Bakeries, by customer demand, are required to have fresh bread coming out of their ovens multiple times a day, so that when a customer comes in the bread is still warm from the oven. One bakery in Fortaleza that is a favorite of ours advertises that they offer 40 different bakings per day in order to assure the freshest possible bread.

Although Brazilians are united in their love for pão francês, the name that they call it varies tremendously from regions to region. For example, in São Paulo it's pãozinho (little bread), while in Ceará (home of Flavors of Brazil, it's called a carioquinha (little girl from Rio). Elsewhere, such varied names as pão massa grossa (thick dough bread - in Maranhão), cacetinho (little stick - in Rio Grande do Sul and Bahia), pão careca (bald bread - in Pará), média (medium - in the port of Santos), filão (long one - in Sergipe), pão aguado (watered bread - in Paraíba), or pão de sal (salt bread - in numerous regions) are all applied to this simple basic roll. It's a task for a foreigner travelling around Brazil to find out what to order in the bakery from one location to the next. Even Brazilians are confused when they travel domestically and find that the name they use at home is unheard of at their destination.

Next post, as a special treat for homesick expat Brazilians, we'll post a recipe for Brazilian-style pão francês for making in a home oven.

FRUITS OF BRAZIL - Abricó-do-Pará (Strawberry Guava)

abricó-do-Pará

In evolutionary terms some fruits, especially showy or aromatic ones like peaches or perhaps raspberries, are clearly meant to be eaten  (no discussion of creationism on this blog, please!). Their color, their perfume, and their sweet luscious tastes are meant to make them desirable food objects to animals. The evolutionary job of these lucky animals is to serve as a transport vessel for the seeds contained in the fruit, depositing them in their droppings miles away from the mother plant. Thus, the fruit species is able to reproduce and spread over distances which would be otherwise impossible for the stationary plants. Anyone who has ever seen tomato plants sprouting from the ponds at a sewage treatment plant will quickly get the idea.

There are some fruits, however, which don't have the evolutionary glamour of the "star" fruits. They might be modest in color, not particularly aromatic, or with a taste that's not particularly appealing. How have they managed to be evolutionary successes? The mechanics might not be clear, but somehow the species in question has solved the botanical world's particular reproductive problem - how can I reproduce and spread geographically when I'm rooted to the soil?

At least a partial answer must come from the animal world's voracious appetite and its natural curiousity about sampling anything that might possibly be food. There might only be one appetizing feature of a fruit - maybe only its aroma, or its inviting color - but that's enough for birds to swoop down to nibble at it, or a monkey to pluck it off the tree and sample it, or a human being to cook it up. If the fruit has a flavor that is appealing to those who consume it, it will have won the evolutionary game, or at least scored significant points. That animal will return again, eat more of the same fruit, and distribute the seeds as an unknowing propogation instrument.

There is a fruit native to Brazil, called the abricó-do-Pará, that is an excellent example of this principle. It really is the ugly duckling of the fruit kingdom, yet has spread from its original habitat of Brazil's Amazonian rain forest as far as Mexico and the Antilles. In Spanish-speaking lands is it generally known as mamey, and in English-speaking territories as mammee, mamey, mamey apple or Santo Domingo apricot.

In appearance, the fruit offers little to attract. It is largish (4-8"), irregularly shaped, and has a brownish-grey, thick rind. Under that thick rind, there is a dry, white membrane that has an astringent taste. It is only when one reaches the flesh itself, which is yellow or orange and not fibrous, and pleasantly flavored, that there is any gustatory benefit to eating abricó-do-Pará. And unfortunately, there is little flesh to eat, as most of the interior of the fruit is occupied by a large pit, or stone, which encases the seed.

Humans eat the fruit raw, or cut up in fruit salads. More commonly though, in Brazil and in the Caribbean, the flesh is cooked down with sugar to create compotes or fruit stews. One of the most unusual uses of the mamey is in El Salvador in Central America, where a mamey-flavored carbonated soft drink, kolashanpan, is very popular.

We here at Flavors of Brazil have yet to encounter abricó-do-Pará at our local farmers market, but researching this post has raised our curiosity and we'll keep an eye out for it. The literature we've found always describes the taste as pleasant, but gives no clues as to what the taste is like. If we find out, readers of this blog will be the first to know.

RECIPE - Pasta with Chicken and Palm Hearts (Massa ao Molho de Frango e Palmito)

Although there is probably no other ingredient that is more Brazilian than palmito (palm hearts or hearts of palm), for palm trees grow almost everywhere in Brazil and Brazilians have been eating palm hearts since long before the days of European settlement on these shores, it is also an ingredient that is relatively easy to find in most corners of the world.

In Brazil, palmito is often eaten fresh in those areas that have commercial cultivation of palm trees, but in most of the country palmito is eaten conserved in water or brine and preserved in a can. It is the canned palm hearts that can easily be found on supermarket shelves in North America, Europe, or Asia. At one time, in the early stages of the globalization of cuisine, canned palm hearts were considered exotic and strange, and they were relegated to the "gourmet" shelf in markets and supermarkets. They were also very expensive. Today, they're easy to find, usually near the olives, capers and canned artichoke hearts, and though they couldn't be considered cheap, the price is no longer exorbitant.

This Brazilian recipe for a light pasta dish that highlights palmito is an excellent way to serve up a can of palm hearts. Although the flavor of palmito isn't super strong, it often becomes a favorite food of those who come to know it. This dish is a perfect introduction for those unfamiliar with palm hearts, and a welcome treat for those who are already familiar with it.
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RECIPE - Pasta with Chicken and Palm Hearts (Massa ao Molho de Frango e Palmito)
Serves 6

500 gr package Italian pasta - your choice
4 Tbsp unsalted butter
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 lb (450 gr) boneless chicken breast, poached, cooled and shredded or cubed
3 medium ripe tomatoes, peeled, seeded and chopped
1 Tbsp chopped green olives
1 14-oz (300 gr) can hearts of palm, sliced into rounds
2 Tbsp chopped green onion, green part only, for garnish
salt to taste
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Prepare the pasta according to package directions or to taste.

While the pasta is cooking, melt the butter in a medium frying pan. Add the garlic, chicken, tomatoes, olives and green onion, and cook over medium heat for three minutes, or until the garlic is transparent but not browned and the tomatoes begin to break up. Season with salt to taste, then reserve, keeping warm.

When the past is cooked, drain it thoroughly, then put it in a large decorative serving bowl. Add the chicken/palm heart mixture and toss gently to combine everything. Sprinkle the green onion on top and serve immediately.

The XV Festival of Culture and Gastronomy - Tiradentes, Minas Gerais

Tiradentes

The small hilltown of Tiradentes (pronounced cheer-a-DEN-cheese), located in the mountains of Brazil's Minas Gerais state, is known as one of the prettiest and historically most important of Minas Gerais' baroque jewels. Named after Brazil's revolutionary dentist-hero Tiradentes (meaning "tooth-puller" in English) the town offers visitors and tourists lovely examples of Brazilian baroque architecture, a delightful small-town atmosphere and a great collection of inns, small hotels, and restaurants.

For most of the year Tiradentes is a quiet, slow-moving town, even if the number of daily tourists often outnumbers the town's 6000 residents. However, once every year the town explodes in Brazil's best-known gastronomic festival - the Festival Cultura e Gastronomia Tiradentes. This year's festival, the fifteenth edition, is currently on and lasts nine days from August 24th to September 02nd.

The festival offers lectures, exhibitions and festive dinners, and features well-known chefs from Brazil and around the world. This year's star attraction among the chefs is Catalan chef Jordi Roca, whose restaurant El Cellar de Can Roca was recently named the second best restaurant in the world in this year's World Restaurant awards. In addition to Sr. Roca, chefs from Chile, Venezuela, and Peru will join their Brazilian colleagues in presenting demonstrations and special dinners.

The culinary focus of this year's festival will be the food and cooking of six out of Brazil's twenty-six states - Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, Pernambuco, Amazonas, Ceará, and Rio Grande do North. One interesting innovation this year is a series of festive dinners created by pairs of chefs from diverse regions of Brazil, for example combining a chef from Pernambuco and one from Amazonas to create a five-course meal, or another with chefs from Rio de Janeiro and Ceará.

Because of the limited number of hotels, pousadas and restaurants in Tiradentes, the festival always sells out, and many festival-goers have to resort to staying in other nearby towns, returning each day to Tiradentes.

The festival has an excellent website, with full details of festival programs, menus of the festive dinners, and plenty of photos and videos (in Portuguese only.) Click here to visit the site.

We here at Flavors of Brazil have yet to experience the festival, but hope to attend the XVI edition in 2013. If we do, there will be extensive reporting on our adventures here on the blog.

RECIPE - Apple Coffee Cake (Cuca de Maçã)

This recipe for a crumble-topped, apple-flavored cake is probably not all that different from the one that readers of Flavors of Brazil have in their cooking repertoire, but it is an authentically Brazilian one - one that highlights the German contribution to the cake known in Brazil as cuca.

Cucas are customer favorites in the many Teutonic-style coffee shops in the mountainous regions of Southern Brazil. Apples are extensively cultivated in these regions, so flavoring the cake with spiced apples makes good culinary sense. It also makes for a delicious cake.
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RECIPE - Apple Coffee Cake (Cuca de Maçã)

cake mix:
3 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups granulated sugar
4 Tbsp unsalted butter
4 whole eggs, separated
1/2 cup whole milk
1 Tbsp baking powder
3 ripe cooking apples

crumbled topping:
6 Tbsp all-purpose flour
1/2 cup granulated sugar
4 Tbsp unsalted butter, chilled and cubed
1 tsp powdered cinnamon
fresh lemon juice
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Prepare the topping:
Combine all the ingredients in a mixing bowl, then using a pastry blender or two knives, mix everything together, cutting up the cubes of butter and distributing them through the mixture. Reserve in the refrigerator.

Prepare the cake mix:
Core and peel the apples, then cut them into thin slices. Sprinkle with lemon juice to prevent browning. Reserve.

Beat the egg whites to the soft peak stage. Reserve.

Combine the egg yolks, sugar and butter, then beat with a hand or electric mixture until you have a homogenous, creamy mixture. Beat in the milk, then the flour in 1/2 cup batches. Mix in the baking powder, then fold in the egg whites, being careful not to overmix.

Pour the batter into a 12 inch round cake pan, greased with butter and dusted with flour. Top with the apple slices, coving the entire surface of the batter. Finally, sprinkle the pre-mixed topping mixture over the surface, covering it completely.

Bake in a preheated 350F (180C) oven for 35-40 minutes, or until the topping is golden and a toothpick inserted into the cake comes out clean. Remove from the oven, cool in the pan on a wire rack.

The Brazilianization of a German Cake - Kuchen into Cuca

The Portuguese word cuca (at least the culinary meaning of the word) is a direct derivation from the German word kuchen, meaning cake. The word is much used in the southern states of Brazil, where large numbers of German immigrants settled in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and where German culture flourishes to this day. Among the most transportable of cultural elements, food traditions and recipes from Germany can be easily found in Paraná, Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul, the three states that constitute Brazil's southern region.

Cuca in Portuguese does not refer to all cakes - there's another word, bolo, to serve that purpose. A cuca is a specific kind of cake - the cake that North Americans call a coffee cake. Often containing fresh or preserved fruits, or alternatively, spices like cinnamon, ginger and cloves, cucas are not frosted. Instead they are topped by a crumbly mixture of flour, sugar and butter.

Cucas are most often flavored with apples and bananas, two fruits that grow particularly well in the climate of southern Brazil, though recipes for cuca exist that call for many other types of fruits - particularly fruits of the temperate zone, within which the south of Brazil lies.

Brazilians eat cuca as part of a breakfast buffet, or as a mid-morning or late-afternoon pick-me up with coffee. It's less likely to show up as a dessert, though that's not unheard of. For the millions of Brazilians who don't live in the south, a cuca is an entirely Brazilian conception and few of them would be able to spot its German origins. In areas where temperate zone fruits can't survive, apples or cherries are likely to be replaced by mangoes or cajus, making the treat more Brazilian and less German. But at heart, a cuca is still the same homey cake that is was in its European homeland, back it's still called a kuchen. In Germany a warm kuchen served with coffee at the kitchen table is a symbol of gemütlichkeit, in the USA or Canada a coffee cake served the same way symbolizes coziness, and in Brazil, a slice of cuca means aconchego. Whatever you call it, it still symbolizes the human warmth of the family kitchen and it still tastes just as great.

Weird Food News Brazilian-style: Possum-spit coffee

Pardon us if we sound a bit P. T. Barnumesque, but a recent article in São Paulo's Folha de S. Paulo newspaper brought his "sucker born every minute" quote to mind. We can't speak for our readers, but we have a feeling that very few of our followers would spend R$900 (USD$450) for a kilo of coffee beans that had been chewed, then spit out, by a gray four-eyed possum. Those readers of Flavors of Brazil who would fork out that kind of cash, consider yourself among those to whom Mr. Barnum was referring.

Accord to the article, this rather extraordinary coffee bean, is a marketing idea conceived by Rogério Lemke, owner of a coffee plantation called Camocim, located in Pedra Azul, Brazil. Pedra Azul is located in the state of Espírito Santo, which is situated on the Atlantic coast of Brazil, just north of the state of Rio de Janeiro.

The cuica

When interviewed by the newspaper's reporter about his R$900/kg coffee beans, Sr. Lemka explained that he discovered the beans by accident. He had long been puzzled by the fact that every morning the earth around his coffee trees was sprinkled with partially chewed coffee beans. The shell that normally protects the bean on the tree was missing, as was the sticky, sweet substance that surrounds the bean, called "honey." Even though he picked up the fallen beans, there were more of them the following day. One night, he decided to stay up and watch his trees to see what happened. And what happened was this: after dark, a native, nocturnal marsupial that inhabits the area, called cuica in Portuguese (and gray four-eyed possum in English) would settle in the coffee trees and begin to sup on the fruit. The little critters appear to love the shell, adore the honey, yet only tolerate the bean itself, spitting most of it out. The beans that Sr. Lemke found daily on the ground were the cuica's left-overs from their nightly coffee binge. He now says that he has determined how best to treat and to roast these beans, and plans on bringing them to the market beginning this November, at the startling price mentioned above.

There's no indication of how the market will accept these beans, but being followers of Mr. Barnum's philosophy, we won't be surprised if Sr. Lemke's (and the cuicas') coffee turns out to be a big success.

Sr. Lemke noticed that the marsupials didn't eat every fruit, and that they appeared to be quite selective in choosing which fruits to eat. Taste tests of coffee made from the cuicas' reject pile proved that they only ate the very best-quality fruits. Thus the coffee beans that they spit out constituted the best of Sr. Lemke's crop.

Being entrepeneurially inclined, Sr. Lemke decided to harvest the coffee beans that the cuicas rejected separately, a time-intensive and expensive process. He roasted these beans separately and began testing them for flavor, color and aroma. Having come up with what he thinks is the best roast for these beans, he plans on launching these beans on the market in November of this year. There's no real indication how these extraordinary beans (and their extraordinary price) will be accepted in the marketplace, but we have a feeling that Mr. Barnum might be proved right one more time. We'll have to wait and see.