Brazilian Pizza

Brazilians, who love their dessert, see nothing wrong with dessert pizza, or "sweet pizza". Made with sweet cheese and a variety of fruit and sweet toppings, this is the pizza you eat after you're done with your dried beef and curried chicken pizza. If you look on the covers of the pizza boxes in the pictures below, you'll see the most famous (and tasty) sweet pizza: fresh strawberries, chocolate, and caipury (cream) cheese.

Unfortunately, this trip out they didn't serve us that pizza, just sausage, broccoli, ham, curried chicken, and dried beef with mushroom. If all these wierd ingredients are sounding fairly "California", that's because a lot of the pizzaria proprietors in Northern California are Brazilian (including Mr. Pizza Man, Pizza Paradisio, Pizza Inferno, and others).

Oddly, perhaps because in Brazil pizza is eaten with knife & fork and not with hands, pizza delivery does not pre-cut pizza, forcing you to do it yourself for a large party:

Having had terrible pizza party delivery pizza (isn't it always bad, regardless of the country?), I wanted some really good Brazilian pizza. So we headed out for Braz in Sao Paulo, the #1 place to have pizza on a Sunday night (which meant we waited for an hour). But look at those brick ovens!

There, we ordered some cheese-bread with chard & olives as an appetizer, and some Argentine wine to drink (Argentine wine is vastly underrated in the US, so the good stuff goes to Brazil).

We got our pizza, with a crust of two cheeses concealing chopped olives, mushrooms and palmito with fresh basil on top.

But for dessert ... no sweet pizza! We had to "make do" with tarts filled with passion fruit preserve, topped with cream cheese.

All in all, Rodrigo declared it a success and that we were ready to go out Samba dancing.

Note: bigger versions of these pictures and more are available on my Smugmug photo page.