Vatapá

the Bahian bread, shrimp and groundnut cream, bound with coconut milk and loosened with dendê until it pours like thick custard

Origin: Salvador & Bahia, Brazil

From the journey of Oil Palm.

Vatapá is a purée rather than a stew, and the technique behind it is West African: a starch, in this case stale bread, worked into a sauce enriched with ground nuts and oil until it becomes smooth and thick enough to hold a spoon upright. The name is thought to come from the Yoruba, and close relatives of the method are found across the Bight of Benin, though bread has replaced whatever starch was originally used. It has three fats and each does something distinct. Coconut milk supplies sweetness and body, ground peanuts and cashews give the nutty backbone, and dendê is stirred in at the end for colour, aroma, and the savoury edge that makes the whole thing Bahian rather than merely rich. Left out, the purée is pleasant and anonymous; a Bahian would not recognise it. It is eaten in its own right with white rice, spooned over moqueca, and above all pushed inside a split acarajé, where it is the main filling. The three dishes, acarajé, vatapá, and caruru, form a set that appears together at Candomblé offerings and on the plates of the baianas selling in Salvador's squares. Northern Brazil makes a rather different vatapá, thinner and often without the dendê, which Bahians regard as a misunderstanding and Amazonians regard as their own dish.

Ingredients

  • 300 g stale white bread, crusts removed, torn
  • 500 ml milk, for soaking
  • 150 g dried shrimp
  • 100 g roasted unsalted peanuts
  • 100 g cashew nuts
  • 400 ml coconut milk
  • 80 ml red palm oil (dendê)
  • 1 large onion, chopped
  • 5 garlic cloves
  • 1 thumb of ginger, grated
  • 2 tomatoes, chopped
  • 2 malagueta chillies
  • 1 small bunch coriander
  • 2 tbsp olive oil
  • 1.5 tsp salt, or to taste

Method

  1. Soak the torn bread in the milk for fifteen minutes until completely soft.
  2. Soak the dried shrimp in warm water for ten minutes, then drain. Reserve a third of them whole for the garnish and blend the rest.
  3. Toast the peanuts and cashews briefly in a dry pan until fragrant, then grind them finely.
  4. Blend the onion, garlic, ginger, tomatoes, chillies, and coriander to a paste.
  5. Warm the olive oil in a heavy pan and fry the blended paste for eight minutes, until it darkens and the raw smell goes.
  6. Blend the soaked bread with its milk until absolutely smooth and add it to the pan with the ground nuts, the blended shrimp, and the coconut milk.
  7. Cook over a low heat, stirring constantly with a wooden spoon, for twenty to twenty-five minutes. It will thicken steadily and start to pull away from the sides of the pan. Constant stirring is not optional; vatapá catches instantly.
  8. When it is thick enough that a spoon drawn across the base leaves a channel, pour in the dendê and stir it through thoroughly. The purée will turn deep orange.
  9. Cook for a final five minutes, taste for salt, and scatter the reserved whole shrimp over. Serve warm with rice, or use it to fill acarajé.

Notes

The stirring is the recipe. Vatapá sticks and scorches faster than almost anything else in this atlas, and a burnt base cannot be stirred out. Use the heaviest pan available and a low flame. The dendê goes in at the end, once the purée has thickened, so that its aroma survives; added early it cooks out. Consistency should be spoonable rather than pourable, and it firms considerably as it cools, so stop while it still looks slightly loose.

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