Feijoada Blog

Okay, so I was in a Brazilian restaurant and my tastebuds exploded over my first taste of the national dish of Brazil - feijoada which is pork and beans as far as I can tell from the recipe but what a combination! Use ham bones and white beans and tomatoes and molasses and you get something quite different - Boston Baked Beans. Use black beans and lots of smoked meats and garlic and bay leaves and you get a national dish! I knew I had to try making this myself and it was the long weekend so I assembled all the ingredients:

Smoked ribs, beef jerky, smoked hock, chorizo sausages and some pork bones.

I had soaked and boiled a kilo of organic black beans the night before and drained them a couple of times so the black colour from the beans wasn't too strong, my dish turned out more brown than the thick purple/black of the restaurant's version.

I stirfried the raw pork bones in oil with garlic and the bay leaves and then added the smoked meats, chopping them up so the flavour would come out really quickly. Once I got the soupy mix rapidly boiling, I added the cooked beans into the mix and turned down the heat, simmering the stuff until the meat started falling off the bones.

I tasted the feijoada and decided it was salty enough so I fished out the bones which still had a lot of meat on them so I put them in a separate saucepan and added more water to make some stock.

The stew I let boil until most of the beans had broken down but still leaving enough for some whole beans to still be in the mix. I then served it up over some plain white rice.

I was happy with the flavour although it wasn't as rich as the version I'd tried, but found it to be too mushy compared to the restaurant's version. I probably didn't need to cook the beans as much beforehand and next time I would leave the beef jerky out, it didn't really add anything to the dish and ended up being chewy and stringy on the plate. And I had a lovely smokey stock to make vegetable soup with the next day!