Where the flavors of the Amazon rainforest delight

A foreign visitor walking through Praça Brasil, a leafy square in the Amazon port city of Belém, might think that the whirring blenders of a dozen nearby food carts were creating the most authentic açaí bowls on earth.

That would make sense, as Belém is the capital of the state of Pará, the global epicenter for growing, picking and exporting açaí, the blueberry-husking-turned-superfruit that’s starring in smoothie shops around the world. But in Belém, the deep purple fruit is mainly consumed as a savory side dish with fish and shrimp, and the concoction sold at Praça Brasil – called guaraná da Amazônia – is a protein-rich shake whose ingredients include cashews, peanuts and a syrup. made from guarana seeds, which resemble coffee beans in appearance, but beat them in caffeine content.

The shakes are rarely available outside the Amazon. The same could be said of many dishes popular in this food-obsessed city of 1.5 million, dishes made from fresh ingredients – with indigenous names like tucupi, jambu, taperebá and pirarucu – that are hard to come by in Rio de Janeiro , let alone outside Brazil. This fall I visited Belém for three days and ate myself crazy, visiting about twenty restaurants and snack bars, devouring food and drinks so different from even the Brazilian norm that I felt as if I had stumbled into a secret culinary kingdom.

Attractions in a port city in the Amazon region

A “guaraná da Amazonia” costs about 20 reais, or just over $4 at 4.90 reais per dollar, and yes, it can be ordered with açaí mixed into it. But the shakes are tastiest with bacuri, a fruit with apple-like notes that apparently everyone loves. Add it to the list of ingredients that you will only find in frozen form outside the region, if at all.

That’s because fresh bacuri, like many of the other regionally grown ingredients, travel poorly. So do many tourists, whose only urban stop in the Brazilian Amazon is the not-so-delightful Manaus, five days by boat or two hours by plane from Belém, and the most accessible base for exploring rainforest eco-resorts or scenic boat trips. .

However, that will change as Belém expands its infrastructure to welcome tens of thousands of visitors in 2025 when it COP30, the 30th edition of the United Nations Climate Change Conference.

Visitors will find Ver-o-Peso, a bustling market selling fish, fruit and Brazil nuts from the Amazon; luxury restaurants and shops Estação das Docas, located in renovated 19th-century warehouses on the river; and a historic center that ranges from charming to dilapidated and is home to the city’s only boutique hotel, Atrium Quinta das Pedras. There are also outings ranging from day trips to nearby Combu Island to get a taste of river life or overnight excursions to the 25,000-square-mile island of Marajó, home to countless water buffalo (and their meat and cheese).

While the wider region offers these and other rainforest adventures, the three main attractions in urban Belém are breakfast, lunch and dinner. It’s fitting that one of the city’s most recognizable influencers is all about the food.

Marcos Antônio Gonçalves Bastos, known by his childhood nickname Medici, has documented the local cuisine in his Instagram account. He compares Belemenses to Italians in the way they care for and protect local tradition. “They say that something done a certain way should never change,” Medici said, referring to the outcry among purists when someone added beets to the main ingredient of shrimp soup, called tacacá, to create a Barbie version this summer.

True tacacá is cloudy yellow because its base is tucupi, perhaps the region’s most defining and addictive flavor, created centuries ago by indigenous groups. Tucupi is made by pressing the bitter cassava root, letting the tapioca starch settle while the liquid ferments, then adding spices and boiling it for days to remove the naturally occurring – and poisonous – hydrogen cyanide. The result is not so much sweet and sour as sour and sweet, and it magically pairs well with rice and fish, and shines in the local duck dish, “pato no tucupi.”

Sometimes tucupi works as a stock, other times it is more of a sauce or, mixed with hot peppers and bottled, a seasoning. Medici, who joined me for part of my dining extravaganza, simply calls it “my blood.”

Tucupi becomes tacacá when combined with tapioca starch, small dried shrimp, and another indispensable and ubiquitous staple of Amazonian cuisine: the jambu plant, whose leaves and sometimes flowers are randomly but deliciously added to just about everything, including cocktails. It contains a natural anesthetic that produces a pleasant numbness on your lips and tongue, counterintuitively enhancing other flavors. “Tucupi and jambu are like our ham and cheese,” Medici said. “If we could put them in anything, we would.”

Tacacá is such a popular street food that it often lends its name to street stalls or casual restaurants that serve a variety of other dishes, just as a taco stand serves quesadillas and burritos. I had lunch one day Tacaca MJsandwiched between a watch repair stall and a candy stall, run by a friendly young man named Diego Lublime, who keeps things as orderly as possible, as the eatery’s seating area is just a row of plastic chairs quickly sharing a busy downtown sidewalk – walking pedestrians.

“Sit down! Have lunch!” he told me, and I got the combination plate of vatap, caruru and mani oba, topped with the predictable tangle of jambu. Vatapá is a creamy shrimp stew, caruru, a shrimp and okra porridge thickened with cassava flour, and maniçoba, a pork stew whose main ingredient is maniva, the ground leaves of bitter cassava that are boiled for about seven days to remove the cyanide. Dishes of the same name exist elsewhere in the north and northeast of Brazil, but with variations. In the state of Bahia, vatapá is mainly a side dish made with peanuts and cashews, while in Pará it is a nut-free main dish.

One axiom of adventurous eating is that if you like everything, you’re doing it wrong – and maniçoba is where I drew the line: I thought it was too bitter and the color and texture too close to cow manure. To find out if you disagree, I recommend comparing your likes and dislikes Amazonia na Cuia, a kind of Paraen tapas restaurant where local classics are served in small gourds called cuias and cost between 18 and 49 reais. They include everything I had at Tacacá MJ, as well as Tacacá itself and the famous duck with tucupi. By the end of the meal your lips are numb and you know what you want to try again.

Sweet and savory treats

After sampling a number of main courses, I tasted fruits that most visitors had never heard of Bladdera local ice cream parlor offering taperebá, bacuri, tucumã and cupuaçu, a beloved cocoa relative that tastes uncomfortably medicinal to me.

I also tried açaí in its velvety, savory side dish form. The more refined options can be found in popular family and tourist spots, such as Point do Açai or Ver-o-Açaí, but at the Ver-o-Peso market, counter workers run fresh açaí through a machine that removes the very thin layer of pulp from the well and adds water. I soon discovered that the açaí I’m used to is not really açaí, but a candied version, like another Latin American export originally consumed in bitter liquid form.

“I like to compare it to chocolate,” Medici said. “Chocolate is not chocolate cake. Chocolate cake contains chocolate.”

At the Ver-o-Peso market, I opted for a place known for its seafood instead of açaí, the highly acclaimed Box da Lúcia. (Oddly enough, ‘box’ is Portuguese for stall, with Lúcia numbers 37 and 38). There I ordered a shrimp and fish plate with rice, beans and a refreshing cole slaw-like salad, for 70 reais. Although the succulent, thick-crusted shrimp is Lúcia’s most famous dish, I also fell in love with filhote, the meat of juvenile piracui (a type of catfish) that is soft and tender, but a little too firm to call custard. .

But unlike other local fish such as the tambaqui, filhote is wasted by frying. At a luxury restaurant outside the city center called Resto da Villa PrimeMedici and I had a filhote appetizer called avuado, a plate of delicate and juicy mini fillets, grilled and drizzled with olive oil and garlic. We also inhaled a steaming caldeirada, or stew, which cooked filhote, surprise, tucupi and jambu.

Extremely affordable

With so much delicious food on the streets, it almost seems redundant to go to luxurious restaurants in Belém like Restô da Villa. But with the current state of the Brazilian real, even the most expensive places are eminently affordable and go out of their way to emphasize local ingredients.

The Casa do Saulonamed after chef Saulo Jennings, offers creative dishes such as smoked pirarucu carpaccio – thin slices of the large pirarucu fish, drizzled with jambu pesto and cupuaçu jelly and topped with chopped Brazil nuts (58.90 reais).

At the polished Santa Chicoria, Pirarucu is made up with “three textures” of cassava – chips, foam and tucupi – for 81 reais.

On their cocktail menus, both restaurants showcase one of my favorite ingredients: the taperebá, a fruit with dark yellow flesh and a creamy tropical flavor.

Taperebá is not exclusive to the Amazon region; the same species is known in other parts of Brazil as ‘cajá’, and in some Caribbean islands as pig plum or yellow mombin. But Medici disagrees: Although it is genetically the same fruit, he said it is “influenced by the terroir – by variations in the soil and climate” of the Amazon. And considering how delicious the taperebá jam I brought home now tastes on my morning toast, I’m not inclined to argue with him.

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