Cuisine · Brazil

Brazilian cooking

Brazilian recipes tested and adapted for the home kitchen — 7 dishes from Brazil, each with step-by-step instructions and ingredient notes.

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Acai Bowl with frozen acai, banana and frozen blueberries — Brazil recipe

🇧🇷BrazilEasy

Breakfast and Brunch

Acai Bowl

An acai bowl is a Brazilian bowl of frozen acai pulp blended thick enough to eat with a spoon, served under granola, fruit and seeds. Getting it thick is about temperature, not blender power: freeze the banana solid (at least 2 hours, or keep a bag of frozen slices ready), use no more than 60 ml of liquid, and blend on low, stopping often to push the mixture back down with the tamper or a spatula.

10 min630 kcal1 serves

🌱Vegan⚡Quick🌿Vegetarian

Brigadeiro with condensed milk, cocoa powder and chocolate sprinkles — Brazil recipe

🇧🇷BrazilEasy

Sweet Dishes

Brigadeiro

Brigadeiro is the small chocolate truffle that appears at every Brazilian birthday party, made from three ingredients cooked in one pan and rolled in chocolate sprinkles. Condensed milk, cocoa and butter are stirred over low heat until the mixture thickens enough to hold a shape, and the entire recipe reduces to knowing when to stop. It appeared in the mid-1940s and is generally linked to the campaign of brigadier Eduardo Gomes, at a time when imported sweets were scarce and condensed milk was not. Undercooked, it stays a spoonable cream; overcooked, it turns hard and grainy. Cooling time comes on top of the stated time.

25 min190 kcal8 serves

🌾Gluten-free🌿Vegetarian⚡Quick

Coxinha with chicken thighs, chicken stock and requeijão — Brazil recipe

🇧🇷BrazilAdvanced

Appetizers and Sandwiches

Coxinha

Coxinha is the teardrop-shaped chicken croquette sold in every Brazilian bakery and snack bar, named after the chicken drumstick whose shape it imitates. The dough is a scalded flour paste made with the broth the chicken was poached in, which is why a coxinha tastes of chicken all the way through rather than only in its filling. Inside sits shredded thigh meat bound with requeijão, the Brazilian spreadable cheese, and the whole thing is breaded and deep-fried until the shell crackles. The two things that decide the result are kneading the dough while it is still hot and sealing the shell without trapping air.

90 min480 kcal6 serves

Feijoada with black beans, carne seca and paio sausage — Brazil recipe

🇧🇷BrazilAdvanced

Meat Dishes

Feijoada

Feijoada is the black bean and pork stew eaten across Brazil, by restaurant custom on Saturdays (and in many places on Wednesdays too), as a full meal with rice, greens and orange on the side. Salt-cured and smoked pork cook slowly with black beans until the beans give up enough starch to turn the liquid into a dark, thick broth. The set of meats matters more than any seasoning: carne seca for salt and depth, smoked ribs for smoke, paio and calabresa for spice and fat. Origin stories tying it to slave quarters and discarded offcuts are widespread but historically contested, since bean and pork stews were already common in Portugal. Bean soaking and desalting the cured meat happen the day before.

240 min780 kcal6 serves

💪High protein🌾Gluten-free

Fraldinha with fraldinha, cassava flour and red onion — Brazil recipe

🇧🇷BrazilMedium

Meat Dishes

Fraldinha

Fraldinha is the Brazilian name for the bottom sirloin flap, a long flat muscle with coarse fibres and a loose grain that sits between the flank and the sirloin. It is one of the pillars of churrasco, cooked over charcoal with nothing on it but coarse salt, because the cut already carries enough fat and connective tissue to season itself. What makes or breaks it is not the fire but the knife: the grain is unusually visible and unusually coarse, and slicing along it instead of across it produces meat that no amount of chewing will get through. It is served with vinagrete and farofa, both of which are made while the coals come up to temperature.

45 min620 kcal4 serves

💪High protein🌾Gluten-free

Moqueca Baiana (Brazilian Fish and Shrimp Stew) with firm white fish, shrimp and coconut milk — Brazil recipe

🇧🇷BrazilMedium

Fish and Seafood Dishes

Moqueca Baiana (Brazilian Fish and Shrimp Stew)

Moqueca baiana is a Brazilian fish and shrimp stew from Bahia, simmered gently in coconut milk with tomatoes, peppers, onion, and lime, then finished with dendê — red palm oil that turns the sauce a deep orange and adds a nutty, faintly smoky depth found in no other stew. The recipe blends Indigenous, African, and Portuguese cooking, and it's built in layers rather than stirred, cooked on low heat so the fish stays in whole pieces. The fish and shrimp marinate in lime and garlic for 20–30 minutes first, which is not counted in the time. It's served hot over white rice, straight from the pot it was cooked in.

45 min530 kcal4 serves

💪High protein🌾Gluten-free

Pão de Queijo with sour tapioca starch, sweet tapioca starch and queijo minas — Brazil recipe

🇧🇷BrazilMedium

Flour and Confectionery Products

Pão de Queijo

Pão de queijo is the cheese roll of Minas Gerais: crisp and thin-shelled outside, hollow and stretchy inside, made entirely from cassava starch with no wheat anywhere in it. The texture comes from a single technique, the escaldo, in which boiling liquid is poured over the starch and gelatinises it before eggs and cheese go in. Traditional recipes use both grades of cassava starch, the sour polvilho azedo for lift and a faint tang and the sweet polvilho doce for tenderness, and the cheese is fresh cow's-milk queijo minas. It is eaten warm at breakfast with coffee, sold from insulated boxes on the street, and set out at churrasco tables while the meat cooks.

45 min390 kcal6 serves

🌾Gluten-free🌿Vegetarian

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