Sunday, June 21, 2009

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!

10 comments:

  1. Still looks like brown gloop but it tasted very nice. I'll have to try the Brazilian version to have something to compare it to though.

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  2. Oooh nice work. Looks lovely from where I'm sitting. Where do you get the black beans from?

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  3. Aldi have organic black beans on sale and the sadly closing down Macro also have bags of black beans but strangely NOT organic!

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  4. Looks fantastic :) Hehe snap indeed! Black beans are so delicious aren't they. Isn't it just the perfect antidote to the cold? :)

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  5. Fantastic flavours yaya. Using the smoked meats and chorizo added a lot of depth. I let it go hard in the fridge and then spread it on toast. mmmm.

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  6. Can I just say, it doesn't look like much! But I bet the flavours are great, with the pork bones and smoked meats.

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  7. Thanks Lorraine, I've decided I'm a black bean fan now!

    Lobo, what a great idea! I'll have to defrost my leftovers and try it.

    Hi Belle, you're right, the original wasn't that attractive either but that's the nature of pork and beans! It did taste pretty good though.

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  8. And my Brazilian friend said it looked good!

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  9. I love Black beans ! your recipe looks so Fabulous !

    Thanks for sharing your recipe:)

    Welcome~~~
    http://foodcreate.com
    Join. Submit your recipe:)

    And you can visit me if I can visit you:)

    Have a great Day~

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  10. Thanks for the comment Food Create, but please check out Sonia's Portuguese site which I have linked to, as that is where I found her recipe!

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