Mainland Brazil · Volume 39, The Fritter and the Fire

Acarajé

Name: Acarajé
Total time: 4 h 45 min
Yield: Makes about 20
Cuisine: Bahia and the Dendê Coast
Ingredients: 500g dried black-eyed peas; 1, small onion, quartered, plus a sliver for testing the oil; as needed, for deep-frying dendê, for frying; a spoonful, to fill vatapá, for stuffing; a small handful, to fill dried shrimp, for stuffing; a spoonful, to fill fresh tomato-and-pepper salad, seasoned with garlic, for stuffing; to taste, for the ritual version only salt and grated onion, for the version offered to Iansã

Salvador, Bahia

Acarajé, a Bahian black-eyed pea fritter fried in dendê: a deep golden brown fried oval fritter, split open along the top to reveal a pale interior, filled with a thick orange vatapá paste.

An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.

Time: 4 hours 45

Researched: No outside sources linked
Reviewed: Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
Cooked: Not yet cooked and reported

by Salvador, Bahia

The colonial economy: sugar, slavery, and self-purchase labour. The Recôncavo was sugar country, and the standard brutal arithmetic of the plantation Atlantic applies here as everywhere else this atlas covers it. What is specific to Bahia is the mechanism that turned enslaved and freed cooking into the street food Salvador is now known for. IPHAN's own historical account of how the acarajé trade began states it plainly: freed African women connected to Candomblé communities sold food in the street under what was called "ganho," self-purchase labour, arrangements that let an enslaved or newly freed person earn toward buying their own or a relative's freedom while simultaneously discharging a religious obligation to the orixás through the act of selling their food. Selling and worship were not two separate activities happening to be done by the same women. They were, from the outset, one activity.

Read the history

As tradition built it

Acarajé

Makes about 20. Soak 4 hours or overnight, then about 45 minutes.

Ingredients

500g dried black-eyed peas
1, small onion, quartered, plus a sliver for testing the oil
as needed, for deep-frying dendê, for frying
a spoonful, to fill vatapá, for stuffing
a small handful, to fill dried shrimp, for stuffing
a spoonful, to fill fresh tomato-and-pepper salad, seasoned with garlic, for stuffing
to taste, for the ritual version only salt and grated onion, for the version offered to Iansã

Method

Soak the dried black-eyed peas at least four hours, ideally overnight.
Rub the soaked peas between the hands under running water until the thin skins lift free and can be washed away.
Blend the skinned peas with the quartered onion to a thick, fairly dry paste.
Beat the paste, by hand with a wooden spoon against the side of the bowl or in a pilão if you have one, without adding any further liquid, for a genuine ten to fifteen minutes, until the mass has visibly doubled or tripled and holds soft peaks the way a whipped egg white does.
Heat dendê in a deep pan to frying temperature, tested traditionally by dropping in a sliver of onion, which should bubble energetically around the edges the moment it hits the oil.
Shape the beaten paste into rough ovals with two spoons and lower into the oil, frying four to six minutes, turned once, until deep golden-brown and crisp.
Sell split and stuffed with vatapá, dried shrimp and a fresh tomato-and-pepper salad, seasoned with garlic.
For the version offered to Iansã, fry plain, unsplit, with only salt and grated onion in the paste: no garlic, no filling.

Notes

The ritual version offered to Iansã is fried plain and unsplit, seasoned only with salt and grated onion, with no garlic and no filling, unlike the stuffed secular street version.

What a modern chef changes

Better tools for the same aeration, not a different technique

Rung 1, Rung 2, Rung 4, Rung 5

Method

Do the beating in a high-power blender pulsed dry, scraping down between pulses so no water is ever introduced.
Finish the aeration properly in a stand mixer fitted with a whisk, which holds a more consistent, larger volume of air through the whole batch than an arm tires of holding by the twelfth minute; this is Rung 1 done with better tools, not a different technique.
Fry in flor de dendê decanted specifically for its heat stability, Rung 2.
Keep back a spoonful of raw, unrefined dendê to brush over the split, filled acarajé at the very end, off the heat, Rung 4, so the aroma a bottled dendê promises on the label actually survives the fryer.
Cure your own dried shrimp for the filling on the dehydrator and finish with a short cold smoke on the Big Green Egg, Rung 5, over a resinous fruitwood, honestly stated as a substitute for the aroeira wood Bahian curers actually use rather than a claim of equivalence.

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