Category: Rio

Eat Rio

I love a food tour. What better way to start a trip than to be shown around a city by someone who loves food as much as you do? It’s a great way to find out how best to enjoy food for the rest of a trip.

So, after the usual trawl of reviews, I booked a tour with Eat Rio. Everything about their website said they were my kind of company, and they certainly didn’t disappoint. Starting at a market, it was brilliant to be able to ask questions about the weird and wonderful fruit and veg I’d never seen before. It still amazes me that this can be the case!

I came to the conclusion that maxixe, a small spiky cucumber with a slightly lemony flavour, would be best served in a G&T. My mind was blown that each single cashew nut comes from the stem of a cashew apple (caju) and that the fruit itself is so delicious! Having also learnt that the nut (really a seed) starts life in a poisonous form and has to go through rigorous process to make it safe, I now understand why they cost so much!

A favourite discovery was to ask for pimenta da casa when eating the wealth of snack foods available. I’d been surprised to see so many chillis in the market when the food I’d eaten so far had so little spice. And this is the answer. Everyone adds the fiery chilli sauce or oil ‘of the house’ to their snacks. It brings them to life and varies from good to incredible.

On the subject of snacks, well, wow! These are something that Rio does well, and they can really constitute a meal in themselves.

The tour offered opportunity to sample bolinhos de bacalhau (salt cod and potato croquettes), coxinha (traditional chicken croquettes), pastel (deep-fried pastry parcels), and even beiju de tapioca (a thin pancake-like form filled with the local salty cheese). I loved them all!

Visiting an Amazonian restaurant offered the most divisive dishes. Personally I enjoyed the Tacacá, a strange soup which leaves your tongue tingling and contains some super salty prawns. But I don’t think the Açaí bowls, fruit pulp of açaí berry, slightly sweetened with guaraná syrup, are really for me even if this berry is a supposed superfood. It was a great excuse to add lots of delicious nut filled granola though!

Away from the snacks and enjoying more of a meal, we demolished carne seca com abobora e feijão de corda (air-dried, salted beef with pumpkin and beans), moqueca Baiana (in this case prawn, stew made with coconut milk, peppers and red palm oil), escondidinho de carne seca (creamy mashed cassava with cured beef, topped with grilled cheese), and couve (shredded bitter collard greens cooked with garlic. The moqueca was a winner for me, and I could have gone on eating that with rice and greens all day!

Of course, no food tour is complete without added drinks! We tried sugar cane juice, which is beautifully balanced if you add a squeeze of lime, and has to be drunk freshly squeezed or it begins fermenting. And of course there was beer, fruit juice and the legendary caipirinha! Having experienced the classic lime caipirinha on the beach (and wobbled home afterwards!) I decided to try one made with passion fruit, which here are larger and a little more sour. It was DELICIOUS! The husband went even more rogue, and tried it made with jabuticaba, a sour black berry we’d tasted in the market. We also tasted a Cachaça, the spirit base of a caipirinha, made with jambú, the green leaf that caused the tongue tingling in the aforementioned soup. I can’t even describe how strange this was, hitting each of your taste receptors in turn over a couple of minutes to create some very odd flavours and sensations. Fun, but perhaps not a regular for the drinks cabinet!

A brilliant day of food, drink, and exploring the city with lovely people. So many things to eat and drink again.

Feijoada and all the Sides

Feijoada is just the kind of soul food I expected to find in Brazil, and what better place to try it than overlooking Ipanema Beach at sundown as the masses depart following a Sunday of sand, sea and surf.

Sitting on the terrace of the (deservedly) popular Bar Astor, I was glad that I’d made the stop that day. Feijoada is one of four dishes on the menu that are only available from Friday to Sunday, and it was this I’d come to try. I’d been tempted by the descriptions I’d read of this black bean and pork stew, though to call it that somehow undersells just how delicious it is, particularly here where it comes with a griddled pork chop in addition to the more traditional accompaniments. I mean, what this dish really needs is a little bit more meat!

Hiding under the chop were the traditionally served collared greens, heavily laced with almost caramelised garlic. The orange too is something you expect to find with this dish, and the freshness it adds makes it a must. Fluffy white rice topped with spring onion, a small bowl of toasted manioc flour, and a vinaigrette salsa complete the set of accompaniments, and that’s all before you get to the main event.

The stew may not look much, but trust me – it’s fantastic (albeit the stuff of vegetarians’ nightmares). Black beans slow cooked with what once would have been offcuts of pork, this dish was packed with smoked pork, short ribs, sliced chouriço sausage (akin to chorizo) and who knows what other chunks of melt in the mouth meat. Spicing varies, but bay, black pepper, salt and garlic are a must. Some of the beans are mashed to thicken the stew, and the resulting dish is rich, earthy and utterly wonderful.

Though I was far off able to finish the vast amount of food I was served, I was delighted to refresh my palette with the sharp lemon of the complimentary sorbet. Thoughts of any other dessert would have caused my waistband to burst!