Country Cuisine Confidential 2010, Part 4: Brazil

Welcome to Part 4 in a series examining each of the national cuisines on display at the 2010 Epcot Food & Wine Festival. Today's port of culinary call: Brazil.

Brazil made its first appearance at the Food & Wine Festival in 1996, the same year that the Festival itself began. This year, you'll find the Brazilian booth in Showcase Plaza directly across from the Puerto Rican booth and between the Argentinian booth and the Desserts & Champagne booth - sure to be a busy place!

Let's look at our menu:

Grilled Pork Skewer with Farofa

Given that Argentina, in the adjacent booth, is selling Grilled Beef Skewers, you could conceivably buy some of those and some of these, then fence two-handed until security takes you down.

Pork consumption in Brazil isn't particularly high, but the choice of pork as the main protein in the Brazilian booth wasn't arbitrary: its accompaniment, farofa, is widely consumed in Brazil and typically includes small amounts of pork which will complement the pork on the skewers. Though virtually unknown in the United States, farofa isn't the least bit frightening. It's an inexpensive local staple prepared from manioc flour toasted (in its simplest form) with butter, pork, and salt, then served as an all-purpose side dish. Even Grandma can get her gums around a bowl of farofa.

Shrimp Stew with Coconut and Lime

The name of this dish says little: depending on how it's spiced and what other ingredients are added, shrimp stew can be completely innocuous or hot enough to spawn a mushroom cloud over Bikini Bottom.

A typical Brazilian shrimp stew, however, is not particularly hot and includes (in addition to coconut and lime) garlic, onions, peppers, and lemon juice, with a dash of cayenne and lots of fresh cilantro. By 'coconut', incidentally, they mean coconut milk, and plenty of it. And if the stew is made in the traditional manner, it will also include palm oil that, when mixed with the coconut milk, will give the stew a deep reddish-orange color and a silky-smooth texture.

Beverages

Brazil is betting the farm on a single beverage, its national cocktail, the caipirinha. Chances are, you've never had one, or maybe even heard of it, but the drink (and cachaca, the alcohol from which it's made) is slowly but surely gaining traction in the U.S. market. Cachaca is similar to rum except that it's made from pure sugar cane with not even a trace of molasses, the ingredient which gives most rum its brownish color. And Leblon cachaca, the brand being used at the Festival, is top-shelf stuff.

A caipirinha (pronounced 'kye-pee-reen-ya') is cachaca mixed with a muddle of sugar and lime. I'm not sure why they chose to serve it frozen. Maybe they hope people will think 'frozen margarita'. If you've never had a caipirinha before, don't pass up your chance - but consider asking for it the way it's traditionally served in Brazil: on the rocks.

Taste It or Waste It

Brazil has one of the most balanced menus at the Festival: you can get grilled pork and a starch as your 'main' sample and fish as your 'side' sample served in a stew. And you won't have to dilly-dally with the beverage menu: as long as you can say 'caipirinha', you're set.

If I had to select between pork or stew, I'd select both: these dishes are meant to be eaten together and picking one over the another is like visiting Brazil but not looking at the Amazon. The farofa will not only enhance the flavor of the pork, it will also taste great with the stew, and the lime in the stew will mate exquisitely with the sugar and lime in the caipirinha. Brazil is a must-stop at this year's Festival.

The Series So Far: Argentina | Australia | Belgium | Brazil | Canada | Chile

Contact the Author: Bob McLain