Happy January, food & foraging friends!
I rang in the New Year doing my favorite thing: having food adventures! My trip to Belem, a Northern Brazilian city known as the gateway to the Amazon, was a delight to the taste buds, to the extent I gained a record five pounds in ten days.
Over the course of the trip, I was introduced to a dozen Amazonian fruits and other intriguing native plants, which made their way into ice cream, cocktails, savory plates and more — in turn making their way into my belly!
My favorite excursion in the region entailed a private motorboat ride on the Guamá River to the humble island of Combu, where the family of my friend’s stepmother resides. Their home was surrounded by a mix of native rainforest and cultivated tropical tree crops that is both their livelihood and sustenance. Our forest walk on their land included taste tests of various intriguing fruits:
Cupuaçu (Theobroma grandiflorum): This pulpy, white-fleshed fruit is a cousin to cacao, also grown on their island grounds (and churned into gourmet vegan chocolate just feet away at Filha do Combu).
Cupuaçu tastes like every fruit of the tropics got together and had a botanical baby: creamy yet tangy, like a melon, banana and pineapple rolled in one. Native to the Amazon, this tree grows up to 65 feet high and is known as the national fruit of Brazil; the country is the world’s largest producer. We enjoyed it fresh from the tree, as well as in ice cream, cocktails, chocolate, cookies and more.
Taperebà (Spondias mombin): Known in English as hog plum, this small tree fruit with orangish-reddish flesh and a complex “sweet tart” flavor instantly became my fave. I would later have this in a fruit pop and a swanky cocktail, but liked it best fresh. It’s rarely cultivated anywhere but Northeast Brazil, and even there is not a major crop. Being in the same family as poison ivy (along with mangoes and cashews), some people may experience an allergic reaction to this fruit.
Bacaba (Oenocarpus bacaba): Upon our arrival, our Combu host’s mom offered us a freshly squeezed glass of bacaba juice, a creamy, fatty, thick white juice that had me double-checking it wasn’t made from the nut or seed. Bacaba, known as Turu palm in English, produces more fruits than any other palm in the Amazon, averaging around 2,500 little nuggets per bunch. I never saw this in any other form than the island’s pure home-pressed version, but could absolutely see it as a nut milk alternative for smoothies or other creamy treats.
Açaí (Euterpe oleracea): Açaí earned its place as a global superfood in the last few decades, becoming the base for sweet fruit and granola bowls at smoothie stands around the US and beyond. Yet in its native homeland of Amazonian Brazil, açaí is a savory staple, the unsweetened pulp served with “tapioca” (cassava flour, often made as crepes) and fresh caught fish or other main dishes. These dark purple palm fruits are not naturally sweet, and can actually help regulate blood sugar. I tried açaí the Brazilian way (see my purple-stained mouth below as evidence), and confess, I prefer it the Americanized way, sweetened!
Pupunha (Bactris gasipaes): Known as peach palm in English, this little fatty orange fruit is a taste-shifter, equally delicious with salt, sugar or spice. The flavor is out of this world, with a taste and texture reminiscent of kabocha squash but in a little round package. Our host brought a massive bunch of them back in the boat (see photo below), which got boiled for an hour, peeled and eaten simply with salt.
Jambú (acmella oleracea): While I did not encounter jambú in the wild, this plant, whose flowers are sometimes called buzz buttons, is wild! Jambú is a mouth-numbing plant utilized by indigenous healers for toothaches and more, but today makes its way into everything from cachaça-based cocktails to tacacá, a must-taste Paranese delicacy.
This flavorful soup, often consumed in late afternoon, is made from jambú leaves, shrimp, cassava starch and tucupi, a bright yellow sour broth made from fermented cassava juice, which needs to be boiled to remove potentially lethal cyanide. The flavor very much reminded me of Thailand’s tom yum soup.
Left/top: Açaí served with fish, the serving suggestion to take a mouthful of açaí and then add a bit of fish and chew together. No one warned me it would blacken my tongue! On the left, cupuaçu (cousin to cacao) before, and after, in a decadent vodka-based cocktail.
Right/bottom montage: Tapereba, equally delicious in a cocktail and fruit pop, a similar color to the bunch of pupunha to the right but worlds apart in flavor. Bottom row, bacaba palm nuts waiting to be squeezed into the milky, fatty juice to the right. Bottom corner is pepper elder, a common urban “PANC” plant.
I did also get to know a few wild urban plants, which in Brazil are known by the acronym PANC (Non-Conventional Food Plants, pronounced “punky.”) Lula was sworn into office as Brazil’s returning president on New Year’s Day, and I was delighted to find two PANC-flavored dishes on his inaugural dinner menu! I was not, however, delighted to be there for another January 7 insurrection, this time protesting Lula’s return to power, but we’ll leave that story for another day.
One PANC plant I was introduced to by way of Belem’s sidewalk cracks is known as erva de jabuti in Portuguese, pepper elder in English and Peperomia pellucida in Latin. The tender plant with heart-shaped leaves tastes dead-on like culantro (not to be confused with cilantro, culantro has a unique lemony flavor and is known as Brazilian chicory here). The plant is not only delicious, it’s also believed to have powerful medicinal properties, showing antibacterial potential against staph and e coli infections.
The best thing about my trip, though, was an uptick in health, at long last! Was it the superfoods or the super climate, or just time for my body to come back to equilibrium? I’ll never know, but boy, am I grateful! I hope your 2023 is off to a great start, too!
Wildly yours,
April