Food - The Brazilian Way

I'll tell you a secret: I'm a food junkie. Especially when it comes to fruit and sweets, I lose all control.

I've come to the right place. 

The produce department at the grocery store here is easily double or triple the size of the average Michigan one, bursting with unfamiliar fruits and vegetables, or unfamiliar varieties of familiar ones (did you know there are several different varieties of avocado and broccoli?) Brazilians also know how to do sweets the right way, making them not mildly sweet but fully, richly delicious.

I have tried such a great number of interesting new foods that I could probably write a blog entry every single day solely about the cuisine encountered. It's THAT good. However, for the sake of not filling this website with pages upon pages of banana descriptions (by the way, even average bananas are SO flavorful here), I'll spill all the beans here.

Speaking of beans, they're absolutely the staple of a typical Brazil diet, along with rice. Almost every meal includes these two foods in some capacity. Brazilians know how to cook these to be delicious.

I'll break it down into some food categories for easy navigating! Hope you have some food handy, because you will likely be hungry by the end of this.

BY THE WAY: this blog is very long, I'm sorry. I just couldn't keep anything out. Please skip around as desired, but know that the beverages, fruit, and corn categories probably contain the most unique information.

Beverages

Juice. It is THE beverage. At the house, we make fresh juice 2 or 3 times a day. At restaurants, at food stands, at parties, juice is usually the only option available, and there are some weird ones! Cashew juice, strawberry juice, mango juice. Watermelon juice is my favorite, and I recall asking throughout my childhood why watermelon juice wasn't widely popular when watermelons are so juicy. The question hasn't dissipated here. It's divine. Passion fruit-mango juice is incredibly refreshing, and we had orange-apple-lime juice the other day which I feel should become queen of the universe.

Pop is available here, but not widely popular. 

Also, something I find odd is that meals are eaten without beverages. The thought is that the liquid takes up room where the food could have been, so people will feel full prematurely. Immediately after the meal, the juice is served. 

Here's a quick recipe to make juice in a regular blender! (That's how they do it here.)
1. Take away undesired peels, rinds, or shells. Seeds can stay.
2. Put the fruit in the blender, and add water until it's almost covered.
3. Blend until liquefied.
4. Pour it through a strainer into a pitcher. The tiny strainers with the handle and metal mesh work best.
5. Add sugar (because the water takes away some of the natural sweetness).
6. Enjoy!

Fruits

I've tried so many new fruits; my absolute favorite is called caqui (persimmon in English, but I didn't know that so to me it will always be caqui!) It looks like a tomato, but it's very sweet and slimy and very fun to eat. Another very delicious fruit is called pinha - cherimoya in English (why do we have so many long, complicated names for these foreign fruits??) Despite it's ginormous seeds, it is dreamy, though I fail to find the words necessary to describe its taste.

Passion fruit and goiaba (guava) are also fruits that are very popular here that are a bit more difficult to encounter in my end on the world.

Oranges are green, but they taste very similar to the orange ones. And oddly enough, they are still called oranges despite their greenness. 

There is great confusion when speaking about lemons and limes, as there is only one word for them in Portuguese - limão (pronounced lee-moan, more or less). Unfortunately, the fruit that is called simply limão happens to be what we call a lime. Regular lemons are called Sicilian limes. And what they call lemon juice, I call limeade. All conversations I have tried to have about either of these fruits has resulted in mass confusion.

It has been surprising how many things I dislike in the USA that are delicious here! For example, pineapple. I can force it down, though it's never my favorite. Here though - oh my goodness!!! A civil war broke out in the house over the last piece, and there was a very good reason for that war! It's beyond delicious. There are little saws on the leaves of the pineapples, which I don't recall in the USA, so maybe they're a different variety. (But then again, I've never bought a pineapple in the USA, so I may be very wrong about this).

Fruits can be dangerous, too! There may not be flying snakes here (contrary to André's persuasions), but there are attacker fruits. I. Am. Now. Terrified. Of. Cashews. Cashews grow attached to a giant fruit. Each individual nut is attached to it's own fruit the size of a small apple (no wonder cashews are so expensive!) The fruit is popular for juice here, and we bought some to try. Naturally, I had to get the cashew out of the shell, so I took a knife and started sawing away. A white oil emerged, covering my hands. Turns out this oil is related to poison ivy, and 4 weeks later, it continues to be a very bad experience. And I never did get to the cashew...

Veggies

Vegetables are pretty similar to those in the USA. The only huge difference I can note is that there are several varieties of a few vegetables I didn't know had several varieties. Like cucumbers and zucchini. Sure, I knew of salad cucumbers vs. pickle cucumbers (or maybe those are the same?) Here, they come in every possible shade of green.

Broccoli also has several varieties. And there is a very spicy lettuce variety called rucola (arugula in English) that takes me by surprise whenever I accidentally encounter it in a salad.

Squash is also popular, and is used in a variety of delicious desserts!

Corn 

Yes, corn gets its own subtitle. 

I always knew and loved corn on the cob and corn muffins, but here they take corn to a whole new level. 

Like corn juice. Seriously the most delicious beverage that has ever touched my lips. It is creamy, made with milk, and oh so sweet. We even made our own the other day, and it was so easy and good!

Corn popsicles are heavenly. Pamonha is delicious (cheese covered in this warm cakey corn stuff). And corn cookies are now my preference to the traditional flour-made ones. 

I never would have expected corn stuff to be good, but I found myself craving it every second of every day after I tried it. 

Dairy

Milk tastes different here. It is sweeter and has a totally different flare to it. As milk containers differ around the world, I'll also mention that it comes in small bottles or cartons, and is not kept in the refrigerator until after it is opened.

Cheddar cheese is very difficult to find here, and is very expensive when it is encountered. Several types of parmesan and mozzarella are easily found here. And grilled string cheese is a thing!

There is one type of cheese that comes in big half-moon chunks and is "the" cheese. I don't know if it has a widely known name, and the only thing I can compare it to is Mexican cheese. White liquid cheese is also common, and a delicious addition to tomato sauces and goiaba desserts.

Bread

Fresh potato bread is the best!! And their form of cinnamon raisin bread is far softer than ours. Warm egg and cheese between the raisin bread is simply the best! We also bought fresh French-style bread to eat with our cheese fondue on International Women's Day, and there is nothing like it.

An interesting sidenote is that I have not yet encountered a toaster here. I should probably ask about that.

Cheese bread, a traditional Brazilian favorite, consists of bread in the shape of a ball filled with cheese. And pastels, which technically aren't bread but I don't know what they would be considered, are cheese-filled thin pastries that are deep fried. They are even awesomer when paired with the corn juice.

Meat

Meat is an integral part of the Brazilian diet, and it looks to be very tender and delicious all the time. Octopus was included in a seafood dish the other day, but other than that it's pretty standard. I'm a vegetarian though, so I don't really have the authority to comment!

Sweets

Nothing else matters. Skip the rest of the blog. Read here.

My sweet tooth has tripled in size, and any self-control I had before coming here has flown out the window.

Mostly due to the widespread use of condensed milk. It had its own layer in the birthday cake. It is the staple ingredient in the peanut candy we had. It is in donuts. And... Guys, I'm in love.

Ice cream is always self-serve, so a person can try as many types as they want to each visit. The only problem with this, as I've discovered, is that they all melt together and it becomes difficult to distinguish one from another. Truffle ice cream is my favorite, with corn ice cream making a close second. There is also papaya, blackberry, passion fruit, coconut, and several varieties of chocolate and vanilla.

Fried bananas, tapioca cakes, churros with doce de leite, carolinas... The deliciousness never stops.

P.S. McFlurries here are the same as Mexican ones, which I once ate while walking through a thunderstorm and didn't even care if I got struck by lightning.