Bobó de camarão

As tradition built it

Bobó de camarão

Serves 4 to 6. About 1 hour.

Ingredients

• roughly 1kg cassava, peeled and cut into chunks
• 1 can coconut milk
• 1, chopped onion
• 2 to 3 cloves garlic
• 2, chopped tomato
• 1, sliced pepper
• a spoonful dendê
• roughly 600g raw shrimp
• a good handful, chopped coriander, to finish
• a little raw dendê, to finish

Method

1. Boil the cassava until fully soft.
2. Mash or blend the cassava with its own cooking liquid and the coconut milk to a smooth, thick purée.
3. Build a sofrito of onion, garlic, tomato and pepper in dendê.
4. Stir the cassava purée into the sofrito.
5. Add the raw shrimp only in the final few minutes, just long enough to turn pink and opaque without toughening.
6. Finish with coriander and a little more raw dendê.

Notes

The dish is repeatedly described in Brazilian food writing as descending from ipeté, an older preparation built on yam rather than cassava, the substitution attributed, though on sourcing this chapter judges too thin to assert as settled, to indigenous rather than African or Portuguese influence.

What a modern chef changes

Sous vide shrimp added at the point of serving

Rung 4

Method

1. Cook the shrimp sous vide to a precise, barely-set doneness, added to the finished purée only at the point of serving rather than simmered in the pot, where shrimp is the ingredient most easily ruined by even a few minutes too long.
2. Pass the cassava purée through a chinois after blending for a genuinely silkier result than mashing alone gives, the cassava's own fibre being coarser than the shrimp or dendê it is meant to carry.
3. Finish with raw dendê off the heat, Rung 4, as throughout this chapter.