Mainland Brazil · Volume 42, The Court and the Clay Pot
Picadinho
Rio de Janeiro
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 2 hours
- Researched
- 6 sources cited
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Born as an economical late-night snack in early twentieth century Lapa bars, tough cheap cuts slow-cooked for bohemians after a night out, and carried upmarket in the 1950s at the Copacabana Palace, where French chef Paul Ruffin began preparing “picadinho da meia-noite” for nightclub guests, the idea credited to Austrian baron Maximilian von Stuckart, who had discovered the dish in Lapa's bars himself. The dish's own elevation story is already a house precedent worth naming directly.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 1½ to 2 hours.
Ingredients
- 800 g beef chuck or blade, diced small
- 1 onion, chopped
- 2 cloves garlic, chopped
- 2 tomatoes, chopped
- 1 tbsp a splash of Worcestershire sauce
- roughly 500ml, or as needed to come halfway up the meat water or stock, enough to come halfway up the meat
To serve
- to serve white rice
- to serve crisp farofa
- 4, one per portion a soft fried egg, one per portion
- 4, sliced (1 per portion) fried or breaded banana
Method
- Brown the beef hard in batches so the pan never steams, then set aside.
- Soften the onion, garlic and tomato in the same fat.
- Return the beef, add the Worcestershire sauce and enough water or stock to come halfway up the meat.
- Cover and braise gently for 1 to 1½ hours until the beef is tender and the sauce has reduced to cling rather than pool.
- Serve with white rice, crisp farofa, a soft fried egg on top and fried or breaded banana on the side.
What a modern chef changes
A live-coal sear before the braise, and one shared flavour base
Rung 6
Method
- Sear the diced beef hard over live coals on the Big Green Egg before it ever meets the braising liquid, Rung 6, for a genuine char the stovetop pan cannot give, then finish the braise as tradition sets it out.
- Reduce the braising liquid separately once the beef is lifted out, passed through a chinois, to a glossy, concentrated jus rather than serving the thinner pan sauce straight.
- Fry the banana in the same rendered beef fat rather than fresh oil, so the whole plate shares one flavour base rather than three separately cooked elements that happen to share a plate.