Culinária de Baía

Saturday, August 2. 2008

Brazillian food is as regional and varied as that of the United States; it's a huge country. On previous visits, I had eaten a lot of Southern Brazillian food, particularly churasscaria, the beef overload barbecue restaurants becoming popular in the US. But there's a lot more to Brazil than that, and I personally like spicy food and seafood a lot better than meat. So Marcelo from 4Linux.com took me out to a Bahian restaurant called Templo da Bahia near Avenue Paulista in Sao Paulo.

Bahia (or Baía) is the Northeastern state of Brazil, in the tropics. Accordingly, the food focuses a lot more on beans, nuts, coconut and fish. For example, this is acarajé, probably the quintessential Bahian food, and one of my favorite foods ever. It's made from a black-eyed pea batter, deep fried in palm oil, stuffed with nut & coconut paste, hot sauce, and fried fresh & dried shrimp.

Here's a little video of Marcelo showing how to eat acarajé, since it's a do-it-yourself food:

And the finished product:

Even better when accompanied by beautiful Brazillians. Here 4Linux's office manager demonstrates eating hers sandwich-style, as you would on the street:

Now, while acarajé could be a whole lunch, for us it was just an appetizer. We followed it up with a moqueca de camarão ... that's a hotpot stew of cheese, coconut milk, palm oil and shrimp baked in a large stoneware vessel. It was so hot it was boiling when they brought it out.

And we had a fish stew which turned out to be very similar to the moqueca, but came with Vatapá, a paste of beans and dried shrimp -- more very traditional Bahian food. On the top right is another traditional food, a thick sauce made from dried fish and cassava flour, the one dish I didn't like.

We finished off the meal with a mixed dessert plate, including carmelized coconut, fresh coconut pudding, carmelized fruit (not sure what kind) and stewed mangos in syrup.