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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🇧🇷BrazilEasy

Breakfast and Brunch

Acai Bowl

A thick acai bowl is about temperature, not blender power: freeze the banana solid, use no more than 60 ml of liquid, and blend on low. Stop often to scrape the sides down. Done right, the base scoops like soft-serve and holds a peak; done wrong, it is purple soup with granola sinking into it. Frozen acai packets are unsweetened and taste faintly of dark chocolate and blackberry, so the banana carries the sweetness. Toppings go on the second the base is out of the blender — it starts melting immediately.

10 min420 kcal1 serves

🌱Vegan🌾Gluten-free⚡Quick

🇧🇷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

🇧🇷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

🇧🇷BrazilAdvanced

Meat Dishes

Feijoada

Feijoada is the black bean and pork stew eaten across Brazil, most often on Wednesdays and Saturdays and almost always as the only dish of the meal. 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

🇧🇷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)

🇧🇷BrazilMedium

Fish and Seafood Dishes

Moqueca Baiana (Brazilian Fish and Shrimp Stew)

Moqueca Baiana is Bahia's iconic seafood stew — firm white fish and shrimp simmered gently in coconut milk with tomatoes, peppers, onion, and lime, finished with dendê, the red palm oil that gives the dish its glowing orange colour and nutty, faintly smoky depth. Born from Indigenous, African, and Portuguese roots, it's layered rather than stirred and cooked low so the fish stays whole. Served over white rice, it's the soul of Brazilian coastal cooking.

60 min430 kcal4 serves

💪High protein🌾Gluten-free

🇧🇷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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