Paçoca de carne seca

As tradition built it

Paçoca de carne seca

Serves 4 . about 12 hours, mostly desalting the dried beef

Ingredients

• 500g dried beef (carne seca)
• 1, large onion
• 2 cloves garlic
• ¼ cup (60ml) manteiga de garrafa (clarified butter)
• added gradually cassava flour

Method

1. Desalt the dried beef and cook until tender, then hand-shred or pound in a wooden pilão to a loose, fibrous texture, never a paste.
2. Sauté onion and garlic in manteiga de garrafa and work them through the meat.
3. Add cassava flour gradually until the mixture is moist but not wet, the balance judged by feel rather than by a fixed ratio.

Notes

This is a dish the São Paulo chef Cafira Foz, herself raised in Piauí, still makes to this method, pulsing rather than pulverising so the meat keeps its texture.

What a modern chef changes

Kept fibrous by a controlled pulse

Rung 04

Ingredients

• clarified butter
• a little smoked colorau

Method

1. Cure and dry a lean cut as for carne de sol, then, rather than boiling it back to tenderness the way a heavily salted charque would need, sear it hard.
2. Pulse it in short bursts in a dedicated spice grinder rather than a food processor run continuously, which crosses the fibre and produces exactly the paste the traditional pilão is built to avoid.
3. Finish in clarified butter with a little smoked colorau, and serve loose, warm, the way it is meant to be eaten, not compressed into a moulded shape.