Get set for food carnival

Brazil's cuisine is getting global attention as the Summer Games in Rio near. A Brazilian chef visits Beijing to bring a sampling to Chinese diners, Mike Peters reports.

Erik Nako's baggage must have puzzled the scanner operators at Chinese customs when he arrived in Beijing on Monday.

"In a way, I traveled light - I think I have five T-shirts and a couple of pairs of pants with me," the young Brazilian chef says.

But Nako wound up paying for excess baggage, because he was also toting 140 kilograms of exotic foodstuffs.

The Rio de Janeiro native is in China's capital for a food festival that the Brazilian embassy has organized for a fifth year. This time, however, there is heightened interest in the weeklong party for foodies that starts on Saturday, because Nako's hometown of Rio de Janiero is about to host the Summer Olympic Games. LATAM Airlines and Renaissance Beijing Capital Hotel are co-sponsors of the festival.

The chef is an old hand at being an ambassador for his country's cuisine. At home, he shares his expertise through magazine pages, television screens and his varied food businesses. He studied culinary arts at the Institut Paul Bocuse (Lyon), and today he owns an Italian bar called Prima Bruschetteria, the Brazilian-Mediterranean restaurant Verso in the downtown Rio area, a Brazilian cheese-bread brand, and a food consultancy company.

Recently, he and his partner have also traveled to Lebanon, Kenya and Ethopia to spread the world about Brazil's diverse food culture.

"Of course, when you say 'Brazilian food,' everybody thinks churrasco - our barbecue," he says of his famously carnivorous nation.

But when asked about what sets Brazil's food apart from the rest of Latin America's, the first example out of his mouth is not meat on a stick but "cassava", the root vegetable also known as yuca.

"It's a major staple all over the country," he says, "and from it we get all sorts of flours and subproducts such as bread and tapioca (pudding)." Cassava fries are popular, and fans say they can be eaten without fear of weight gain.

Later, when Nako grills a lobster for a dish he's planned for the festival, he will start creating the plate with an artistically smeared scoop of yellow cassava puree.

But first, he's recalling the shopping list of ingredients amid that 140 kilos of produce he's brought.

"Brazil's food is a little bit like China's, in that the country is so large and has many culinary influences," he says. Many are indigenous, as the chef illustrates by identifying various foods and dishes by their faintly musical tribal names. Other influences come from colonial days, the African slave trade and waves of immigration.

"Around Sao Paulo there are German and Italian influences, in the northeast it's more Dutch - and of course there is Portuguese all over, so you find sweets with egg yolk. With that mix we end up with a cuisine that is all about color and freshness."

Tropical areas of Brazil boast flavors that would be familiar in southern China: ginger, coconut, banana.

Other items are so region-specific, however, that Nako promises that even many Brazilians won't recognize them.

But most foods and dishes will make any expats from the country homesick, like feijoada, the famous Brazilian stew. In the chef's hometown of Rio, black beans and white rice form its base, while in other parts of the country, black beans give way to red kidney beans.

His goal for the festival, he says, is not to be all about Rio but to showcase the breadth of the country's cuisine. So his packing includes pirarucu, an Amazon fish, on dry ice. There is air-dried beef from Brazil's northeast. ("It's not rock-hard and super salty like jerk beef", though the latter is also in his culinary bag of tricks.) There is coarse-ground cassava flour that will be cooked to a polenta-like consistency. There is pulp of acai, the healthful purple berry that's become trendy as the world's latest superfood.

There is also tucupi, fermented cassava juice, and therein lies a tale.

Angry yuca can be fatally poisonous, unless it's boiled for seven days straight to eliminate its hydrocyanic acid. (Happy yuca has the acid too, but not as much; even so, the tubers cannot be eaten raw.)

In a country of meat eaters - and in Brazil "meat" means beef, Nako espouses a nose-to-tail philosophy that avoids wasting any part of any animal. He says, however, that this is not really typical of his fellow citizens, whom he describes as not very adventurous eaters.

"We love our chicken hearts," he says, "but that's about as wild as we get."

Brazilian tradition is his repertoire, but he is always seeking different and informal approaches to classic recipes - quick to substitute ingredients when the precise item he wants isn't available.

Longtime fans of intestines and other offal, Nako and his colleague Tito Pal perk up when my Brazilian colleague suggests they might like to try such dishes at a local Chinese eatery. An hour later, they were wielding chopsticks in a hutong near Beijing's Gulou area, all smiles.

If you go

Renaissance Beijing Capital Hotel

61 Dongsanhuan Middle Road, Chaoyang district; 010-5863-8888.

Outdoor opening party Saturday, 6:30-10 pm, 288 yuan net per person, including Brazilian BBQ-style buffet, free-flow drinks, live band and capoeira dance performance.

Set menu Saturday through May 29 in Fratelli Fresh restaurant; lunch 388 yuan plus 10 percent service charge and 6 percent VAT per person; dinner 588 yuan plus service charge and VAT per person.

Semi-buffet Sunday through May 29 in BLD Cafe; 198 yuan plus service charge and VAT per person.

Contact the writer at michaelpeters@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily 05/20/2016 page19)