If It's Thursday, This must be a Crab-fest

In Fortaleza, Thursday night means crabs (Portuguese: caranguejo). The weekend starts officially on Thursday evenings on the city's most popular beach, Praia do Futuro, when throngs of hungry and thirsty locals descend on any one of a number of beachfront bar/restaurants for a caranguejada. This word can be tanslated as a crab-fest, a crab-orgy or a crab-blowout depending on how many crabs one consumes. It's not gourmet food, but it's authentic, local and delicious. (And a bargain - last night two of us shared four crabs. Each one costs R$2.70 - Brazilian reais - which works out to approximately $1.50 USD per crab).

Fortaleza's beach is lined with establishments called barracas. They provide all the services one might need for a day, or evening, at the beach. There's always bar and food service, bathrooms and fresh-water showers, music (often live), and palm-thatched sun shelters on the beach itself. Last night we visited one called America do Sol for our crab tasting. Under a high thatched ceiling, open to the sea-breeze and night air, tables were set up simply for the crab-fest. There were no tableclothes for reasons that soon became obvious - eating crabs Fortaleza-style is a messy business! A group of about ten musicians sat in a circle in the middle of the restaurant playing traditional acoustic samba music. The crowd consisted of young singles, family groups, tourists, couples - a real mix.
 

We quickly ordered four crabs, and a bottle of Brazilian beer. In Brazil, the beer is mostly light lager-style and it's served extremely cold (-3 to -4 degrees Celsius). In normally comes in a large bottle, 600 ml. (20 oz.) in a thermal cooler-container. With crabs, beer is considered a necessity, not merely an option. The crabs came to the table in two plastic containers. One with the crabs themselves, very hot, and in a flavorful broth of crab nectar, coconut milk, onion, chilis and cilantro. The other container had two small pieces of granite, two hammers, and small cups of hot sauce and farinha, the ubitious Brazilian ground manioc accompaniment.

The technique for eating these crabs is simplicity itself. The piece of granite is used to hold the crab. Legs and claws are pulled off and pulled apart, using the hammers when necessary. Each bit is dipped into the broth, then slurped and sucked to extract the meat and the flavor. Some continue on with the body of the crab, but most people limit themselves to the limbs. Two crabs satiate a large appetite, but there are some people who eat three or four.

The coast of Ceará state is lined with beaches and with mangrove swamps, and it`s in the swamps where crabs are harvested. There is no commercial farming of crabs in Ceará, and all the crabs are wild. They, apparently, are not endangered, and thrive, even with a Thursday night crab-fest to supply every week.

Visiting Fortaleza without experiencing a Thursday night crab-fest is unthinkable. Choose from a number of barracas, order crabs and beer, and dig-in!

For a video on the Thursday crab-fest, including some wonderful samba music, click on this post (coming soon).

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.

Everything you wanted to know about the cajá...

In the Flavors of Brazil video tour of Fortaleza's central market many exotic tropical fruits were featured, including one called cajá. One of this blog's readers was intrigued by this apparently unknown fruit, and asked me to describe its taste. Trying to formulate a verbal description of any taste is a formidable task, but I thought I'd give it a try. Which led me to doing some research on this fruit, which led me to this post. Everything you wanted to know about the cajá, but were afraid to ask.

When I'd checked the internet casually for an English name for the cajá recently, I didn't find one, and so assumed that one didn't exist. Bad assumption! In doing more detailed research, I found the botanical name of the tree on which the cajá grows - Spondias mombin. Checking the botanical literature for this tree, I discovered that there is indeed an English name for this fruit, though not a very pretty one, I fear. Throughout most of the English-speaking Caribbean and West Africa, it's called the "hog plum". For what reason, I do not know.

The cajá is a tree-fruit, and one of the problems in commercial cultivation is the height of the tree - often more than 100 ft. (30 m). Nonetheless, it's extensively cultivated and highly appreciated in Brazil, particularly in the Northeast and in the state of Bahia. The fruit itself is about 5 cm. (2 in.) in length, and has a leathery skin, a thin layer of pulp, and a large, hard pit. Cajá is most often processed than eaten raw, and is valued as juice, jelly, and flavoring for ice cream, yogurt, etc. One of the most delicious ways to sample cajá is in a caipifruta, an alcoholic drink derived from the caipirinha. A recipe can be found in this post.

The only remaining task for this post now is the description of the taste of cajá. I've struggled mightly to try to think of how to describe it, and the best that I've been able to come up with is this - it's like a combination of apricot and mango (with a slightly resiny taste), but with jacked-up acidity, like a mild passionfruit. Don't know if that is sufficient, but I do know that even typing the description has made my mouth water. Cajá is exquisite, and any description beggars the task. 

RECIPE - Sautéed Shrimp with Sauce Rose

This simple and uncomplicated recipe can be made with any fresh shrimp of your choice - large, medium or small. Because the shrimp is served simply and unadorned, I find this dish works best with fresh shrimp. Save frozen shrimp for other uses where they are masked by cream sauces, or breaded.

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Sautéed Shrimp with Sauce Rose
Serves 4

1 lb. (500 gr.) fresh shrimp, deheaded, deveined and peeled
1 Tbsp. neutral vegetable oil
2 Tbsp. butter, softened
2 cloves finely-chopped garlic
1 medium yellow onion, finely chopped
2 Tbsp. chopped fresh Italian parsley
1 cup canned tomato sauce (plain)
2 Tbsp. plain cream cheese, Philadelphia-style
1 cup light cream (half and half)
1 Tbsp. brandy or cognac
1 Tbsp. flour
Salt to taste
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Sauce Rose:
Put the tomato sauce, the cream cheese and the light cream in a medium saucepan. In a small bowl cream 1 Tbsp. butter with the flour until a smooth paste as formed. Stir the paste into the ingredients in the saucepan, and continue stirring until well amalgamated, and there are no lumps. Cook over low heat until the sauce thickens and there is no taste of raw flour. Add salt to taste. Heat the cognac carefully in a small container; remove from heat, and light with small match. Let flame until flames extinguish. Add cognac to sauce. Set aside and keep warm.

Sautéed shrimp:
In medium to large saucepan, bring 1 quart (1 litre) of water to a boil. Add a pinch of salt, then shrimp. Reduce heat to simmering. Cook shrimp for 2 minutes, then drain, and immediately refresh in cold water. Add 1 Tbsp. oil and remaining Tbsp. butter to heavy frying pan or saute pan, and heat until butter melts and begins to bubble. Add garlic and onion, and cook until transparent but not browned, about 3 minutes. Add shrimp, and saute, tossing regularly, until thoroughly heated, and until the shimp lightly browns, about 5 minutes.

Serve the shrimp and sauce in separate bowls (see photo) with plain white rice.

(Adapted and translated from a recipe in Na Cozinha, com Lurdinha!)

Shrimp Farming in Ceará- a controversy

In Ceará, the state in which I live in Brazil, there is a rapidly growing shrimp-farming industry, and a just as rapidly growing controversy over the environmental and health impact of this practice. The market is principally an export-driven one, with the bulk of exported shrimp destined for Europe, the USA and Japan. It is an economically important industry in this area, and shrimp are the 14th highest value export product from Ceará.

Having lived for a long time in British Columbia, Canada where salmon farming practices have contributed to the decline of natural stocks and wreaked environmental damage wherever they have started, I have been very wary of farmed shrimp here in Ceara. It hasn't been proved to me that shrimp farming is harmful to the ecology of Ceará, but at the same time, it hasn't been proven to me that it isn't harmful. Fortunately, Ceará also has an artisanal shrimp fishery, and at the portside fish market near my house, I can buy caught-at-sea shrimp, at a decent price, and with excellent quality and freshness. I think I'll stick to these shrimps when I'm cooking at home for the foreseeable future.

For a simple, quick and delicious shrimp main course from Brazil, see the recipe in this post.

VIDEO GUIDE - Fruits and vegetables in video tour

The previous post in this blog was Flavors of Brazil's video tour of Fortaleza's central food market, São Sebastião.
Here is a quick guide to some of the tropical fruits and vegetables seen in the video.

Time:

• 0:43 - Sapodilla (Portuguese: sapoti)
• 0:53 - Cashew (Portuguese: caju)
• 1:15 - Hog Plum (Portuguese: cajá)
• 1:27 - Black-eyed peas (Portuguese: feijão verde)
• 1:47 - Passionfruit (Portuguese: maracujá)
• 1:57 - Dried coconuts (Portuguese: coco seco)

If you look carefully at the cashew fruit, you'll see the true fruit, containing the nut we know as a cocktail snack, hanging off the apple-shaped pseudofruit.

The black-eyed pea vendor is shucking fresh pea-pods before selling the peas. Black-eyed peas are sold both fresh and dried in Brazil.

VIDEO - Tour of Fortaleza's central market - Mercado São Sebastião