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Brazilian foods of the Amazon

7/27/2020

by Joan Peterson

Brazil was the first destination I covered in my EAT SMART series of international culinary travel guide books. I ventured there for a couple of months, thinking I’d write a simple pamphlet containing an alphabetical list of menu items with English translations and a similar list for foods available to buy in the colorful outdoor markets. That was in 1992 when there was little to nothing specifically published for travelers about the cuisine at foreign destinations, and menus in English were infrequent, so I thought I’d help fill the informational void. As it turned out there was so much else to cover about the cuisine of Brazil, including food history, regional specialties, and phrases to use in the restaurants and markets, in addition to the menu and market food lists I had originally planned for a pamphlet. Thus I chucked the idea of a pamphlet and decided that I’d better write a food guidebook instead.

Among the many awesome learning experiences I had in Brazil there were a several that took place on the Amazon river. For example, when I was exploring the food markets in Manaus, the capital and largest city of the state of Amazonas, I was approached by a young man from the United States who had intended to backpack from the southern tip of South America to as far north as possible in North America, but when he arrived in Brazil he met the love of his life and married. His in-laws ran a boat excursion business on the Amazon, and he wondered if I would be interested in taking a trip with them. My answer was sure, if I could be the only one on the boat (they accommodated fewer 10 people), and if I could have, in addition, an English-speaking guide who could tell me all about the food of the area. I was in luck. The next day I took off in a boat with the man’s father-in-law as pilot and his mother-in-law as cook, who prepared my meals in a lean-to kitchen off the back of the boat, and an English-speaking guide.

My guide was a delightful young man known as a caboclo, an inhabitant of mixed Portuguese and Indian ancestry, who lived in the hinterlands of the Amazon rainforest. He introduced me to the unique flavors of some of the myriad tropical fruits and to some exotic local fish, which he had the cook prepare for me on the boat, such as the enormous pirarucú, whose flesh resembles the white meat of chicken more than that of fish. This mammoth fish, which reaches lengths of almost 10 feet and 485 pounds, is the most valuable commercial fish of the region. It is marketed primarily in a dried, salted form. A popular dish made with this fish is posta de pirarucú seco ao leite de côco, or slices of fish served in a delicious coconut sauce. Certain inedible parts of this fish are also valued. The large, brown-tipped scales are sold as fingernail files and are used in a variety of handicrafts, especially masks. Even the tongue is recycled, its raspy surface useful as a grater.

Pirarucú. Photo credit: Global Aquaculture.

Posta de pirarucú seco ao leite de côco. Photo credit: Hirota Food

Tambaquí. Illustrated by SV Medaris

Another economically important fish featured on menus is the tasty tambaquí. This amazing fish is equipped with powerful, molar-like teeth for crushing its food—the fruits and seeds, especially the hard seeds of the rubber tree, that fall into the water of the flooded forest. A regional specialty is picadinho de tambaquí, which is a mixture of fish chunks served with rice, jambú leaves and toasted manioc meal. The beautifully colored tucunaré, or peacock bass, is also a prized food fish. It is the coveted catch of fly-fishermen who are beginning to discover the thrills of angling for it in the Amazon basin. A considerable number of catfish, such as surubim, caparari, and filhote, can be sampled. Filhote are juvenile specimens of the largest fish of the Amazon, the giant piraíba, which reaches lengths of 12 feet and weights of 440 pounds. All of these fish must be tried in the restaurants and seen in the markets!

After this fascinating exploration of some of the foods of the area, I experienced an unforgettable night time return to port. Sitting on the boat’s rooftop deck, I was entertained by a spectacular display of firefly pyrotechnics and the stars of the southern skies, unobscured by the pollution of civilization.

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The Prized And Tasty Bluefish Caught In The Bosphorus In Turkey

7/10/2020

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By: Joan Peterson, Author of Eat Smart in Turkey

The Bosphorus is a strategic waterway running through Turkey. This natural strait connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara. At its southern end it weaves through Istanbul, cleaving the city into two parts, one part in Asia and one part in Europe. To an “Istanbullu” (a resident of Istanbul), it is a fisherman’s paradise. Nothing compares with the fish of the Bosphorus, he will say. He knows the best fish there and the best time to catch them.

To understand fishing in the Bosphorus, one needs to know a bit about the waterway. It is roughly 20 miles long and averages about 1 mile in width. Interestingly, there are two different currents in the Bosphorus. The surface current flows from north to south, carrying brackish water from the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara and then to the Aegean. The under current flows in the opposite direction, from south to north, bringing more salty water from the Aegean to the Sea of Marmara, and ultimately to the Black Sea after passing through the Bosphorus.

The mechanisms responsible for two currents in the straight are as follows. The south-bound surface current of the waterway is the result of differences between the water levels of the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara. The higher Black Sea receives fresh water from several rivers and this difference in water level activates the surface current. The north-bound lower current is due to differences in salinity between the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara. Salty water coming from the Sea of Marmara is heavier than the brackish water of the Black Sea. It creates a permanent layer of salty water in the Black Sea that sinks to the bottom due to its density. The water below about 650 feet has no oxygen, and no marine life. It is essentially a dead sea at this level.

Now, to get back to the fish in the Bosphorus. There are both sedentary and migratory fish in the waterway. The sedentary species include the striped sea bream (“karagöz”), the brown meagre (“eskina”), and the gilthead sea bream (“çipura”). The migratory fish include the bluefish (“Pomatomus saltator”), the Atlantic bonito (“Sarda sarda”), Atlantic mackerel (“Scomber scombrus”), and horse mackerel (“Trachurus trachurus”). In the spring, these migratory fish swim north from the Aegean to the Sea of Marmara and then through the undercurrent of the Bosphorus to the Black Sea to spawn. When the water cools down in late summer, the fish return to home--the warmer Sea of Marmara and Mediterranean--passing through the Bosphorus in the upper current.

Of all the fish that remain in or pass through the Bosphorus, it is the migratory bluefish that is the most popular because it is deemed the most flavorful of all. Like several other fish, the bluefish has different Turkish names depending on its size. It is called “defne” when about 4 inches long; “çinekop” when a few inches longer; “lüfer” when about 10 inches long, and “kofana” when about 14 or more inches long. Note that the king of bluefish, the tastiest one according to the Turks, is the “lüfer,” and this is the favorite one ordered when dining out or purchased at a fish market. Fishing season occurs while bluefish migrate back home to the Sea of Marmara and Aegean, between September and late December. When bluefish migrate back to the plankton-rich Black Sea in May to spawn once again, the fish are not considered particularly tasty at this time so are not sought after by fishermen.