Brazilian · Main
Feijão Tropeiro
- Intermediate
- 30 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with aromatics blooming from the first bite, toasted, nutty warmth throughout, fading in warm spice.
Ingredients
- 400 g dried carioca beans, simmered until tender and drained hard
- 200 g smoked bacon, diced
- 250 g linguiça calabresa, sliced
- 200 g farinha de mandioca torrada (toasted cassava meal)
- 4 eggs
- 150 g onion, diced
- 4 garlic cloves, sliced
- 60 g couve, shredded fine
- 40 g spring onion, sliced
- salt and black pepper
The skills inside
Rendering fat: and cooking in what runs out
Allergen screen
Found: egg
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Render the bacon from a cold pan until the fat runs clear and the pieces are crisp; lift it out and brown the linguiça in the same fat.
- Fry the onion and garlic in that fat until the garlic is pale gold, then scramble the eggs straight into the pan in loose curds.
- Fold in the drained beans and the meats and warm through, stirring gently enough to leave the bean skins intact.
- Kill the heat, rain in the farinha while tossing, and stop the moment every grain is coated and the mixture is loose and sandy.
- Fold through the couve and spring onion off the heat so they stay bright green, then season.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Rendering fat: and cooking in what runs out 73 recipes
- It started cold or low and came up slowly: fat that met a hot pan seizes and scorches before the inside can melt, and there is no recovering it.
- The fat in the pan is clear and clean-smelling, pale to golden, with no dark sediment on the floor and nothing acrid in the steam.
- What is left behind is crisp and deep gold with no soft pale fat still clinging to it and no black burnt edges.
- There is a real volume of it: enough to film the pan floor and be poured off and kept, not a dry smear that never ran.
- Whatever cooks in it browns in it and takes its flavour, rather than sitting in a greasy pool that never gets hot enough to colour anything.
Where it goes wrong The heat was raised to hurry it along, so the outside seized and browned before the interior fat could melt; very little runs out, and the solids come out burnt on the outside and rubbery within.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Riesling or Grenache
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais
- From the Taps
- Farmhouse saison
- Zero-Proof
- Cloudy apple juice, chilled
Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.
Saved on this device and kept across visits: export from My Menu to move them.