Beautiful Brazillian Food

Saturday, April 26. 2008

I just got back from my annual trip to Brazil, and was reminded how little most North Americans know about the food there.

First of all, it's delicious. Especially the fruit.

Second, there are as many regional cuisines in Brazil as there are in the US, and they're just as distinct. If you've been to a Brazilian restaurant, that means that you've sampled only one of the types of food Brazil has to offer. I've had the pleasure of sampling many more of them. Let's start with breakfast.

North American hotels serve the "continental breakfast", the continent in question, of course, being Antarctica. Fossilized pastry, donuts, wan toast and jam, maybe some cereal. Not so in Brazil! Below are the breakfast buffets from the Quality Hotel in Porto Alegre and the Estanplaza in Sao Paulo:

And neither of these is a luxury hotel; they're both midrange. Every morning I treated myself to some bread, some Brazilian "white cheese", orange and/or pineapple juice, and some delicious, delicious fruit.

I swear that the fruit we eat in the United States (even in California) is what the Brazilians throw away. I don't eat papaya in the US, seldom pineapple, and never mango because even the best ones I can buy here are a week underripe. Brazilians care about their fruit, and it shows. Just look at a Brazilian fruit market:

I also need to say a word about the coffee. Brazil is the leading coffee exporting country in the world, and the average Brazilian (at least while I'm there) gets maybe 5 hours sleep a night. As a result, Brazilians fill their days with little cups of double-strength coffee (almost espresso) which are available everywhere: hotel check-in counters, taxi stands, show booths, even office foyers:

This coffee is generally drunk with substantial amounts of sugar (another Brazil export) although the use of liquid cyclamates as an artificial sweetner is inexplicably popular.

Of course, eventually when your sleep deficit is bad enough, even Brazilian coffee doesn't do it. That's when you resort to the mate (chimarrão in Portuguese).