How could we possibly leave Brazil's national dish out of this series?
We couldn't. So we've done it! It's feijoada.
So our Brazilian Feijoada is basically a big pork stew
with beans and rice. It's the beans we're going to start with, back beans.
Yep, tradition. So, Feijoada (bean stew) comes from the
Portuguese... Feijoa. Which means? Bean.
alright okay. I think. Oh, there we go, off to a good start. But basically,
in Portugal they might use white beans or red kidney beans were in Brazil they use
black beans. And they're dried, which means they'd break your teeth
if you tried to do anything with them other than cover them with water
and leave them overnight. So cold water. Yep. Cover them, leave them overnight
and, you're left with that. It's a very very very dark
mixture. They completely evaporate! No, they're in here somewhere and they just begin
to soften. Still not anywhere near edible, but just begin to soften.
So all we need to do is drain off the dark liquid and then the beans can go
into this pan. Get yourself a nice big pan, fill up with cold water
and to it we're gonna add two other ingredients. Bay leaves.
Yep, they're all going in there. Brilliant. And then the first
of our pork options and these are pork ribs.
Talking of pork options, am I right in thinking
and you can tell me this, that actually you wouldn't use things like ribs in a
traditional feijoada.
You would use the lesser used cuts of meat, things like snout and
foot, and things like that, because back in the old days it's the kind of
thing farmers would feed
to their workforce. Yeah. It would be the cheaper cuts, so they would keep the nice
ones for themselves,
and all the off cuts, you're absolutely right, the nose, the snout and stuff go in here.
So first up we've got beans, ribs and bay leaves in with enough water to
more than cover it. Yep. We're going to bring it up to a simmer and let it simmer away
for an hour, gently, at which point we're gonna add in the second
of our pork options. And that's a piece of ham. That goes in
after an hour of simmering. And it'll simmer for another hour
until the ham is cooked. At that point we can move onto the next stage of our feijoada.
There we go, two hours at cooking. Occasionally we've had to skim off
any foam that forms on top. It's not very nice, it's a bit scummy. Get rid of it.
What's left is this... already beginning to smell amazing
and now if we can move on to add so much more flavour. OK. So I'm going to peel up
and sliced 2 onions. Can you do the same with two cloves of garlic? I can.
In the meantime, I'm going to tell you a quote
that I found about feijoada. This is a dish
of bold temptation and prompt surrender for carnivores.
It takes a while to digest that. You're right. Yeah I am. It takes some thinking about, but you're
right
and the quiz of this is who wrote that quote?
I'm curious, I want to know. Tell me afterwards! At this point, we can put that into a pan
with a glug of oil. We want this to really begin to soften off before we start adding in
more pork and our other spices. We're got more pork options to go?
We've got more pork options. Options 3 & 4. Okay. Right so we've got some chorizo here
all I'm going to do is slice that up into little diamonds. And then I've got this
other pork sausage. So this is pork option number 4. Okay. Try some of that. It's a salted
smoky sausage. It's a good sausage. Again,
use what you like. So we've got our chorizo sliced up,
we've got our pork sausage, the one we're using there, ready. While they continue to soften
what we're now going to do is use some of the cooked beans as the thickening agent. Okay.
So if you bring over the pan. What we want to do is...
No!
You should never ever use metal utensils in a feijoada. Really? You idiot!
Are you pulling my leg? I'm not. I'm not pulling your leg. That metal
will change the taste. It's ruined! Was that back in the day when metal used to...?
It's ruined! You absolute idiot, oh, he's gone back for more. I'm sorry! I haven't got an alternative.
I'm sorry that Ben didn't research properly. The reason I scooped it out, can I explain why I scooped it out with a metal spoon?
You've left the metal spoon in there! It's because I'm now going to use a metal masher
onto our beans as well I just want to mush up some of these.
By breaking into them and then returning them to the rest of the dish
it helps to thicken the whole thing. Oh right, so it's a texture thing? Yeah.
When you have feijoada it kind of almost
holds it's form on a spoon. It shouldn't be a soup with beans No. It should be a nice beany stew.
So the mashed beans can go
into our feijoada. From a metal pan! Yes from a metal pan.
Onions. Look at these now. Nice and golden. Soft and sweet. We can add in
our chorizo, our sausage, the only spice we're going to add, a tablespoon of ground
cumin. That surprises me actually, it's the only spice. Well the other sausages are already spiced
anyway. We'll also take our ham out of this mixture
That's going to be hot Ben. And slice that up, add it in.
Mix everything together into one massive feijoada, and with the exception of
cooking off some brown rice and some collard greens (or spring greens)
we're pretty much good to serve. Excellant! I genuinely wish you could smell this
this stew now is incredible and ready to go. As is the rice.
A big bunch of fresh parsley. If you could chop that as fine as possible. That's going into
the feijoada. And I find this quite an odd one...
orange. Yeah, we've had a couple of feijoadas now and everyone has always said
put orange with it. Do you know why? Why not a lemon or a lime? I don't understand.
I thought it was very sweet and kind of unusual but
it really does work. Yeah. So what we're going to do is segment an orange by peeling it
cutting out the segments and then squeeze whatever's left into the feijoada. Just a little
orange juice is
delicious. Did you know that Brazil has the 9th
highest car ownership of any country in the world? Helpful!
Thank you for that. And we are ready to plate this up. One final stir.
In the meantime the rice can go into our dish.
Plenty of our collards. The orange going on top of here
...like so. Here we go, look at that. A couple of ribs
which literally now just fall off the bone. Oh yes! That meat is going to be incredible.
There we go, our take on the Brazilian national dish. I don't think we could have got much
more pork
or bean-y-ness in there. It smells amazing, but what we want to know from guys if you'd have done
anything different. Oh, SORTED!
Straight in for the good stuff.
Yes. That is awesome. Out of the 4, what's your best pork option?
2 and 3. Ohhhh interesting. What were 2 and 3?
Ham and chorizo. 3 and 4. Chorizo and sausage. mmm
I think I would be very happy and proud to call this my national dish If you were a
country
If I was a country! Ben-land! No