Taste Portugal

Francesinha

2011-10-26T11:19:00.000-07:00

This dish was born in Oporto in the sixties by an emigrant that returned from France. He decided to add a special touch to a French sandwich very popular throughout the cafes, the "croque-monsieur". He transformed this sandwich into something with soul that appealed to the tastes of the people from Oporto.Thus was born the francesinha which is one of the most popular dishes in this region appreciated by the rich and poor.

Here is a recipe for francesinha. If you haven’t tried it, get ready for a treat. It was actually considered one of the top ten sandwiches of the world and is a emblematic dish from Oporto. Best served with chips on the side and and a chilled beer. Bom apetite.

Ingredients (for 2 francesinhas):

4 slices of white bread

2 pieces of steak

2 fresh sausages

2 “linguiças” (a type of Portuguese sausage and optional)

2 slices of cheese

2 slices of ham

Sauce:

1 beer

1 glass of Port Wine

1 meat stock cube

2 bay leaves

1 decilitre of milk mixed with 1 soupspoon of corn flour

2 soupspoons of tomato sauce

1 soupspoon of olive oil

piri piri to taste

How to prepare:

Begin by making the sauce: mix all the ingredients together and heat on the stove until the volume has halved and you have a thick sauce, which should take around 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, sprinkle the steaks with salt and grill them.

Lightly toast the slices of bread.

On an oven proof dish, put the grilled steak onto the toast, then on top of the steak, the sausage, the linguiça sausage and the slice of ham. Then put another slice of toast on top, and on top of the toast the slice of cheese. Pour the hot sauce onto the franscesinha and then put it into a previously heated oven to melt the cheese. Serve immediately and with fried chips.

Fish stew - Caldeirada

2011-10-25T11:49:00.000-07:00

This is a very popular dish in Portugal known as Caldeirada, being very common in the piscatorial areas where fish is abundant and fresh. It's also a traditional dish enjoyed by the fisherman. It basically consists of cooking various types of fish with potatoes, onions and peppers. This dish is usually served with whatever fish is available at the time and can be made up of various types of fish. But it's also possible to make this with just one type of fish giving you a different final result. Fish used are monkfish, conger, white grouper, hake, red snapper, ray, sardines... imagination is the limit. You can also add seafood to the stew and that'll give it that extra sea flavour.
So here is a basic recipe. Feel free to add your own variations and personal touch. I mean, that's what cooking is all about right? I can definitely see Jamie Oliver having this dish with a smile on his face.

Ingredients:
1 big onion
600g potatoes
1 pepper (green or red)
3 tomatoes
Olive oil
2kg of fish
1 chilli pepper

Preparation:
Peel the onion, slice it and place along the bottom of the pot. Peel the potatoes, cut into slices and place on top of the onions. Wash the pepper, clean of all seeds, cut into strips and place on top of the potatoes. Wash the tomatoes, cut into pieces and place on top of the veggies already in the pot. Drizzle with olive oil and, if you want, drizzle with some white wine too. Cover the pot and cook on a low flame for 10 to 15 minutes, shaking the pot every now and then. Do not stir as you will end up breaking up the everything.
In the meantime, clean the fish and season with salt. After the 10 to 15 minutes have passed, add the fish and the chilli pepper cut into pieces to the pot and cover to cook for another 10 minutes, so that the fish may cook. Shake the pot every now and then so that nothing sticks to the bottom and near the end, have a taste to see it it needs more salt. If you want to add seafood, like shrimp, or clams, add them about 5 minutes before the end. Right before serving sprinkle with some freshly chopped coriander or parsley.

You can serve this dish with a light white wine.

Enjoy.

Cod-fish cakes

2011-10-24T13:08:00.000-07:00

Cod-fish cakes are one of the most popular dishes in Portugal. It's usually served as a starter, but is many times served, in common households as the main dish, accompanied by some white rice or rice with tomatoes and some veggies. Here is how you make them.

Ingredients

750g salted cod-fish (rehydrated as explained in the previous post)
1.2kg potatoes peeled
4 eggs
1 medium onion
parsley
pepper

Preparation
Boil the potatoes with the cod. After the potatoes are cooked, the cod should be as well, drain the water. Take the cod and "clean" it of all skin and bones, and place in a cloth, making a ball, and compress and crush until the cod is shredded.
After draining the potatoes, make sure that they are dry and mash them.
Mix the potatoes and the cod together with the onions and the parsley to make a paste. Season with the pepper. Incorporate the eggs next and mix everything until the eggs are completely undone.
Shape the cakes with two soup spoons (or just use your hands) and fry them in oil until they are golden brown.

Enjoy.

Bacalhau

2011-08-19T11:13:00.000-07:00

One of Portugal's favourite ingredient is Bacalhau. For those who don't know what this is, it's a fish. Cod, to be more precise. But in Portugal, cod isn't consumed fresh. The cod that is preferred has been salted and dried. To cook it, it has to be rehidrated and this is what I'll be explaining next.

To rehidrate the cod, it has to be cut into pieces as shown in this image

These pieces are then to be soaked in cold water for 24 to 48 hours, depending on the size of the fish, taking care to change this water every 6 to 8 hours. If the water isn't changed, it will start to smell bad and ruin the fish. This process serves, not only to rehidrtae the fish, but also, to extract the excess salt. If the fish hasn't soaked for enough time, it'll be too salty and will ultimately ruin the dish. If soaked for too long, it's easier to remedy - just add salt to the dish. After the fish has been soaked, it is ready do be cooked, or frozen right away.
The higher pieces are ideal for cooking over the grill or in the oven. The medium ones are usually used for dishes where the fish is cooked in stews and the lower pieces are used for recipes where they are broken down into strands.
I hope this was a compreehensive explanation of one of Portugal's favourite fish.

Anthony Bourdain In Portugal

2011-08-15T07:48:00.000-07:00

Here is a text from one of the people that I admire the most - Anthony Bourdain. His no worry style, irreverence and his will to taste everything and curiosity of the different cultures make him someone that I respect. In the following text, he writes about an experience quite common to most Portuguese, although, has been falling in disuse due to industrialization and migration of people from the inland to the cost land. This tradition is the killing of the pig. This practice has been passed down through generations and is performed in the fall, usually in October. For the city folk, like me, who only know the meat as chunks of flesh at the butcher shop, witnessing something like this can be pretty traumatizing. Now, I don't want to give you the idea that I condone animal violence, no. The animals we eat should be killed with as less suffering as possible and the people who perform this kill, should be experienced and know what they are doing.
This tradition had been passed down through generations and has to do with the collection of food for the winter. Every part of the pig is used and nothing goes to waste. The legs are put in salt and cured to make presunto, sausages are made and smoked, everything is used and conserved so that it may last throughout the winter. This might seem barbaric to some, but has been a way of life for all Europeans as well as the settlers in the colonies.

"In Portugal

From the very moment I informed my boss of my plans to eat my way around the world, another living creature’s fate was sealed on the other side of the Atlantic. José had called his mother in Portugal and told her to start fattening a pig.

I’d heard about this pig business before. “First, we fatten the pig ... for maybe six months. Until he is ready. Then in the winter — it must be the winter, so it is cold enough — we kill the pig. Then we eat. We eat everything. We make hams and sausage, stews, casseroles, soup. We use” — José stressed this — “every part.”

“It’s kind of a big party,” interjected Armando, the pre-eminent ball-busting waiter and senior member of our Portuguese contingent at Les Halles [the New York restaurant where Bourdain is executive chef].

For my entire professional career, I’ve been like Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II, ordering up death over the phone. When I want meat, I make a call, or I give my sous-chef, my butcher or my charcutier a look, and they make the call. Every time I have picked up the phone or ticked off an item on my order sheet, I have basically caused a living thing to die.

What arrives in my kitchen, however, is not the bleeding, still-warm body of my victim, eyes open, giving me an accusatory look that says, “Why me, Tony? Why me?” It was only fair, I figured, that I should have to watch as the blade went in. I’d been vocal, to say the least, in my advocacy of meat, animal fat and offal. I’d said some very unkind things about vegetarians. Let me find out what we’re all talking about, I thought.

José Meirelles comes from a large family that, like its prodigal son, loves food. He went to New York, became a cook, and chef, and then made a rather spectacular success in the restaurant business. But you’ve got to see him at his family’s dinner table, eating bucho recheado (stuffed pig’s stomach), to see him at his happiest and most engaged.

He talked continually about the pig slaughter — as if it were the Super Bowl, the World Cup and a Beatles reunion all rolled into one. I had to take his enthusiasm seriously. Not just because he’s the boss, but also because along with all that Portuguese stuff that would mysteriously arrive at the restaurant came food that even I knew to be good: fresh white asparagus, truffles in season, Cavaillon melons, fresh morels, translucent baby eels, Scottish wild hare, gooey, smelly, runny French cheeses, screamingly fresh turbot and Dover sole, yanked out of the Channel yesterday and flown (business class, I think, judging from the price) to my kitchen doors. José knew how to eat. If he told me that killing and eating a whole pig was something I absolutely shouldn’t miss, I believed him.

So it was with a mixture of excitement, curiosity and dread that I woke up on a cold, misty morning in Portugal and looked out of the window of my room at orderly rows of leafless grapevines. On the day of the slaughter, we drove to the Meirelles farm, a stone and mortar farmhouse with upstairs living quarters, downstairs kitchen and dining area, and adjacent larder. Across a dirt drive were animal pens, smokehouse and a sizable barn. José’s father and cousin grow grapes, from which they make wine, and raise a few chickens, turkeys, geese and pigs.

It was still early morning when I arrived, but there was already a large group assembled: José’s brother Francisco, his other brother, also Francisco (remember the wedding scene in Goodfellas, where everybody’s named Petey or Paul or Marie?), his mother, father, assorted other relatives, farmhands, women and children — most of whom were already occupied with preparations for two solid days of cooking and eating. Standing by the barn were three hired assassins, itinerant slaughterers/butchers, who apparently knock off from their day jobs from time to time to practise their much called upon skills with pig killing and pork butchering.

Cousin Francisco positioned a sequence of bottle rockets and aerial bombs in the dirt outside the farmhouse and, one after the other, let them fly. The explosions rocked through the valley, announcing news of the imminent slaughter — and the meal to follow.

“Is that a warning to vegetarians?” I asked José.

“There are no vegetarians in Portugal,” he said.

At the far end of the barn, a low door was opened into a small straw-filled pen. A monstrously large, aggressive-looking pig waggled and snorted as the crowd peered in. When he was joined in the confined space by the three hired hands, none of them bearing food, he seemed to get the idea that nothing good was going to be happening, and he began scrambling and squealing.

I was already unhappy with what I was seeing. I’m causing this to happen, I kept thinking. This pig has been hand-fed for six months, fattened up, these murderous goons hired for me. Had I said, when José first suggested this blood feast, “Uh no ... I don’t think so. I don’t think I’ll be able to make it this time around,” maybe the outcome for Porky here would have been different. Or would it have been? Why was I being so squeamish? This is Portugal, for Chrissakes! This porker was boots and bacon from the second he was born.

Still, he was my pig. I was responsible. For a guy who’d spent 28 years serving dead animals and sneering at vegetarians, I was having an unseemly amount of trouble getting with the programme. I had to suck it up. I could do this. There was already plenty in my life to feel guilty about. This would be just one more thing.

It took four strong men to restrain the pig, wrestle him up on to his side and then on to a heavy wooden horse cart. It was not easy. With the weight of two men pinning him down and another holding his hind legs, the main man with the knife, gripping him by the head, leaned over and plunged the knife all the way into the beast’s thorax, just above the heart. The pig went wild. The screaming penetrated the fillings in my teeth, echoed through the valley.

I’ll always remember, as one does in moments of extremis, the tiny, innocuous details — the blank expressions on the children’s faces, the total lack of affect. They were farm kids, used to the ebb and flow of life, its at times bloody passing. A passing bus or an ice-cream truck would probably have evoked more reaction. I’ll always remember the single dot of blood on the chief assassin’s forehead. It remained there for the rest of the day, above a kindly, rosy-cheeked face. I’ll remember the atmosphere of business as usual that hung over the whole process as the pig’s chest rose and fell, his blood draining noisily into a metal pail. And I’ll never forget the look of pride on José’s face, as if he were saying, “This, this is where it all starts. Now you know. This is where food comes from.”

The horse cart, with the now dead pig aboard, was wheeled to a more open area, where his every surface was singed with long bundles of burning straw. Suddenly, and without warning, one of the men stepped around and, with the beast’s nether regions regrettably all too apparent, plunged his bare hand up to the elbow in the pig’s rectum, then removed it, holding a fistful of steaming pig shit — which he flung, unceremoniously, to the ground with a loud splat before repeating the process.

The animal’s belly was now split open from crotch to throat. Have you ever seen Night of the Living Dead, the black-and-white original version? Remember the ghouls playing with freshly removed organs, dragging them eagerly into their mouths in a hideous orgy of slurping and moaning? That scene came very much to mind as we all sifted quickly through the animal’s guts, putting heart, liver and the tenderloin aside for immediate use.

It was time to eat.

There must have been 30 assorted family members, friends, farmhands and neighbours crowded into the stone-walled room. Every few minutes, as if summoned by some telepathic signal, others arrived: the family priest, the mayor of the town, children, many bearing more food — pastries, aguardiente (brandy), loaves of mealy, heavy, brown, delicious Portuguese bread. We ate slices of grilled heart and liver and tenderloin, a gratin of potato and bacalao (salt cod), and sautéed grelos (a broccoli rabe-like green vegetable), all accompanied by wine, wine and more wine, José’s father’s red joining the weaker vino verde and a local aguardiente so powerful it was like drinking rocket fuel. This was followed by an incredibly tasty flan made with sugar, egg yolks and rendered pork fat, and a spongy orange cake. I lurched away from the table after a few hours feeling like Elvis in Vegas — fat, drugged, and completely out of it.

Lunch the next day was cozido, a sort of Portuguese version of pot-au-feu: boiled cabbage, carrots, turnips, and confited pig’s head, snout and feet. Dinner was a casserole of tripe and beans. Ordinarily, I don’t like tripe much. I think it smells like wet sheepdog. But José’s mother’s version, spicy, heavily jacked with fresh cumin, was delicious. I mopped up every bite.

Portugal was the beginning, where I began to notice the things that were missing from the average American dining experience. The large groups of people who ate together. The family element. The seemingly casual cruelty that comes with living close to your food. The fierce resistance to change — if change comes at the expense of traditionally valued dishes.

I learned a lot about my boss in Portugal, too, and I had some really good meals. I learned, for the first time, that I could indeed look my food in the eyes before eating it — and I came away, I hope, with considerably more respect for what we call “the ingredient.” I am more confirmed than ever in my love for pork, pork fat and cured pork. And I am less likely to waste it. That’s something I owe the pig."

Parte 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ryAL3VxftM
Parte 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOTY1r8xEQU

Introduction

2011-08-11T13:08:00.000-07:00

I have created this blog with the intent to share the richness and diversity of Portuguese cuisine, along with my passion for food. Good food, well prepared, well cooked, with quality ingredients. I will share recipes, share my experiences with cooking (another of my passions) and share some views about the wines that made in this part of the world.

I hope that you will participate and share your opinions and experiences, making this blog a place to share ideas, learn and teach.

I hope you will enjoy this blog as I'm sure I'll enjoy posting here as often as I can, along with reading your views and opinions.