RouteBelém

Belém: Brazil's Finest Regional Cuisine

Belém is widely considered to have Brazil's best regional cuisine — the combination of Amazonian ingredients (açaí, tucupi, jambu, manioc), Indigenous cooking knowledge, and African-Portuguese technique creates a food culture of extraordinary depth

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1
Tacacá: Soul Soup of Belém
Tacacá—served boiling hot in calabash (cuia) by tacacazeiras at street carts in the late afternoon—combined tucupi broth, jambu (a lip-numbing herb), dried shrimp, and tapioca pearls; numbness in jambu and sour tucupi is unlike anything else
2
Açaí the Belém Way
In Belém, açaí salta is eaten — pure purple-black pulp with dried shrimp, farinha de tapioca and a dollop of tucupi; the idea of açaí with banana and granola is a São Paulo invention; The Pará version is a complete tasty meal
3
Maniçoba: Amazonian Feijoada
Maniçoba – Círio de Nazaré's signature dish – is made by cooking maniva (cassava leaves ground and stewed for 8 days to remove cyanide) with pork and smoked sausage; the result is a black, intensely flavored stew that is defined Belém
4
Pirarucu fish preparation
The pirarucu - the giant fish of the Amazon, up to 3 meters long - appears in Belém restaurants as dried fillets, grilled steaks and in the traditional dried pirarucu preparations that have sustained Amazonian communities for centuries
5
Jambu: The Electric Leaf
Jambu (Acmella oleracea) — the Amazonian herb that causes intense tingling and temporary numbness in the mouth — is Belém's most distinctive food ingredient; it appears in tacacá, in duck (pato no tucupi) and increasingly in innovative restaurant dishes
6
Pato no Tucupi
Duck cooked in tucupi (the fermented broth of wild cassava, poisonous until cooked) with jambu — pato no tucupi is Belém's most celebrated festive dish; the combination of the tartness of the wild cassava broth, the electric tingle of the jambun and the richness of the duck is remarkable