Mainland Brazil · Volume 39, The Fritter and the Fire
Caruru
Salvador, Bahia
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 40 minutes
- Researched
- No outside sources linked
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
As tradition built it
Caruru
Serves 4 to 6. About 40 minutes.
Ingredients
- 100g, or to taste dried shrimp
- 1 onion, chopped
- 2 to 3 tablespoons, or to taste dendê
- roughly 500g fresh okra, trimmed and chopped
- to cover water, to cover
Method
- Blend the dried shrimp and chopped onion together and sauté in dendê until fragrant.
- Add the fresh okra and sauté a further few minutes.
- Add water to just cover, bring to a hard boil for about five minutes, then drop to a slow simmer for a further twenty five, stirred occasionally, until the okra has broken down into a thick, glossy, deliberately sticky sauce rather than resisting into individual pieces.
Notes
Bahia's clearest fixed ritual food, offered to the Ibeji twin orixás and eaten on their feast day, syncretised with the Catholic saints Cosme and Damião, 27 September in Bahia's own popular calendar. Seven portions are traditionally set in a single basin for seven children to eat from together, the origin of the dish's other name, Caruru de Sete Meninos.
Angélica Moreira, ekede and traditional cook at Ilê Axé Opô Afonjá, on newer, modernised restaurant versions of the dish: "These innovations lack tradition; Candomblé and its traditional preparation methods hold the authentic heritage."
What a modern chef changes
The secular, everyday register, not a claim on the offering
Rung 4, Rung 5
Method
- Offer this elevation as exactly what Angélica Moreira describes: a different thing from the ritual dish, cooked in the everyday, secular register the tradition itself already sells and eats daily, rather than as any claim on the offering.
- Dehydrate a portion of the okra briefly before it goes into the pan, concentrating its own mucilage so the finished sauce holds its glossy body with less overall liquid and a cleaner final texture.
- Cure the dried shrimp on the Big Green Egg as described under acarajé, Rung 5, for a more concentrated savoury base than commodity dried shrimp gives.
- Finish, as throughout, with raw dendê stirred through at the pass, Rung 4.