Food and drink in Brazil

There's a fair bit I'll miss about Brazil, but I'm not sure the food is really one of them. Don't get me wrong, I've eaten well, but I've got a little bored of the monotony of the cuisine - you have to go out looking for alternatives.

Brazil's cuisine is best known for and mainly characterised by meat. Lots and lots and lots of meat. I'm not sure I've managed more than one or two days without meat in at least one meal in some form or another. To be fair, when it comes to steak the Brazilians have it nailed - their beef is superb. The best steak I probably had was in a restaurant in Rio called the Braseiro da Gavea, along with a bunch of ONS-ers, but I had a pretty good and very rare one for less than £10 in Lapa one night too.

To accompany the piles of meat Brazilians like to add piles of carbohydrates. Now, I'm not a carb-hater, but I do feel that bringing a massive dish of rice plus a massive dish of chips or potato to go with your steak, fish or whatever is overkill. The most popular forms of rice are plain, or broccoli rice, which is rice mixed with very finely-chopped broccoli - it's rather good actually.

Typical mixture of salad, rice, beans and farofa (the meat came later)

To go with your rice and meat you must have two things: beans, and farofa. At the Olympics and Paralympics every meal had the option of rice and beans. The beans are usually black, sometimes red, and at weekends the thing to eat is feijoada or bean stew, which is essentially the same thing with extra meat in it.

Farofa was quickly christened 'sand' by us ONS gringos. It's toasted cassava flour which sometimes has other stuff mixed in, such as eggs, bacon, or garlic. I've actually come to quite like it; farofa adds texture to your rice!

Tilapia seems to be the most common fish and we had it loads during the Olympics. 

Brazilians have big lunches - when we were staying in Centro the restaurants opened at lunch and then closed at dinnertime, although in less business-minded areas there are plenty of places for dinner too. Buffet restaurants are the thing, either for a set price or with prices per kg or per 100g.

When I'm travelling I don't like big lunches, and at the Olympics I tended to have a massive lunch and then not need much dinner. So I've also investigated Brazilian snack and street food a fair deal.

Their biggest thing is pasties of various descriptions, usually containing meat (of course) or sometimes just cheese. They're either baked or fried. I think the most unfortunate one I got was a bit like a doughnut, except filled with the rubbery white cheese they eat a lot. The mortadella pastel I had in Sao Paulo was excellent. You can find variations on on the pasty everywhere for very little money - usually somewhere around R$5, or just over £1. Some places also do 'sandwiches' for a similar price which are generally toasted and minuscule. A 'misto quente' is basically a ham and cheese toastie.

My first tapioca from a place in Rio

In Rio I also tried both kebabs from street stalls, which were great, and had tapioca pancakes once or twice too. 'Tapiocas' are incredible things. The stallholder has a hot plate and a ring mould and spoons raw tapioca flour into the mould. They flatten the flour down and let it toast and somehow it all sticks together. Then they put a toppping on (ham and cheese and tomato was my favourite), flip it, let the topping cook, fold it and serve it. They're really good.

Although Brazilians have pretty sweet tooths (teeth?) they're not massive on pudding. But I did have a lot of cake with my breakfasts. Cakes are often made in ring moulds, usually involve coconut, and are called 'bolos' when they're that shape. Churros on street corners are also common and you can get sweet tapiocas too.

The breakfasts everywhere have been the same rule of thumb: fruit, usually melon and pineapple and sometimes mango; bread; scrambled eggs if you want them; and cake. Sometimes yoghurt. Also pao de queijo, which are little balls of a sort of cheesy bread and are very good.

Brazil is a pretty multicultural country and there are places serving foreign cuisine, but mainly in the big cities or touristy areas. Italian is everywhere but quality varies - I had a couple of very middling pizzas and a couple of really good ones, for instance. The other night in Foz do Iguacu I had a good Lebanese meal - apparently Foz is one of the biggest Lebanese settlements anywhere. Sao Paulo is a massive Japanese city and there are a number of Japanese restaurants as a result. That said, the Brazilian combination of meat/fish plus rice plus other carb of choice is common in many restaurants, even those which profess to be serving other food!

Decent coffee has been surprisingly difficult to find. In hotels and at the Olympics it was generally filter and very strong and the Brazilians normally drink it in tiny cups the size of shot glasses with masses of sugar. I don't drink milky coffee but reports from friends suggest that cappucinos and lattes came with sweetened milk too. I've had a few good coffees but it's been hard to find, which is weird when you consider Brazil is the world's largest producer of arabica!

All the snack bar, or 'lanchonete', places serve juice, freshly-squeezed, which is lovely to go with your pasty. Brazilians also like iced tea, and here it's a version called mate. If you buy it readymade in a bottle it's exactly like the iced tea you get in the UK but if you get it in a cup as I did once from a chain which specialises in mate it's more bitter in taste.

As a side note to this, on the Argentinian side of Iguazu Falls loads of people were lugging around huge thermos flasks and little cups, which I think is to provide them with mate throughout the day. A bit like the good old British flask of tea I guess, but we don't tend to carry ours around while we go on a walk to a waterfall.

The two principal alcoholic beverages of choice in Brazil are beer and cachaca. Beer is drunk everywhere, at any time, mostly very very cold lager-style beer. You can get cans at street food stalls and snack bars and petrol stations (yup). It's mostly served either draught, in small glasses which are called 'chopps', or in 600ml bottles to share between your party with tiny glasses to drink it out of. The big bottles come in their own special cooling covers to keep them icy. Beer also comes in 'long necks', which are usually 355ml bottles. The most common brands are Skol (the Olympic/Paralympic beer, tasteless and cheap), Brahma (drinkable) and Antarctica (similar to Brahma). Slightly up-market are Bohemia and Original and Serramalte is another step up in price usually, if a bar serves it. I found a couple of microbrewery places which had a wider range of beers such as wheat beer or stout but generally lager's what you get, and very nice it is on a hot day.

Cachaca is a rum-like spirit distilled from sugarcane which is the base ingredient for the ubiquitous, lethal capirinha - usually made with a base of lime juice and sugar. But you can get it with pretty much any juice. Capiroska is made with vodka.

Cheers!