Cruising the markets of São Paulo, Brazil

On my second day in town I booked a tour with Around SP, a small company in São Paulo that offers tours of the city’s cultural sites. I told my guide, Luis, that I wanted a culinary tour, so we zoomed off in his car one morning with plans to hit some of the city’s markets, bakeries and dessert shops.

The Food Tour Begins

One of our first stops was a feira, or outdoor neighborhood market. It looked just like the tianguis: vendors had set up under plastic tarps, selling fruits and vegetables arranged into attractive piles. They called out to customers passing by. (This was no doubt the Portuguese equivalent of “We have papaya! 10 pesos a kilo!”)

The feira had things I’d never seen before: bulbous, thick squash shaped like a barbell; short spiky cucumbers; wild Brazilian cabbage known as couve, shredded and wrapped in plastic. Thick bulbs of garlic hung from ropes. Mounds of spices sat in large bowls — whole cumin seeds, peppercorns, dried chilies.

A big meat and seafood section lay beyond all the fruit, with the items displayed in neat rows inside plastic display cases. There were fresh sardines, calamari, and whole, fresh fish that I didn’t recognize. I was kind of in awe about how orderly this section was. In Mexico all the meat sits out in the open and kind of piled on top of each other.

Moving on: São Paulo’s Mercado Municipão

Toward the end of the day we stopped at São Paulo’s Municipal Market, a huge indoor place filled with fish, produce, sausages, nuts, dried fruits, spices, thick blocks of guava ate, and even cacahuates japoneses. (In Portuguese they’re called amendoim, and they come in barbecue flavor!)

It was pretty much a gourmet-food lover’s paradise. Bacalao, several varities, lay stacked maybe two feet high, next to linguica and soft cheeses, hard cheeses, olives. We tasted soft, spreadable catupiry cheese on crackers, and I looked at an oyster bar longingly, where people sat slurping and drinking beer. The market’s second floor has a food court, where you can supposedly find the best mortadella sandwiches in the city.

I still wasn’t very hungry, so we walked around the fruit area. I tasted jabuticaba (pronounced jah-boo-chee-KA-bah), an oversize grape kind of like a capulín. And, best of all, I tasted cajú, the cashew fruit.

Didn’t know cashew came from a fruit, you say? I didn’t either. The weird thing is that the cashew lies outside the fruit itself, like a little hat. You have to open the shell and fish out the cashew. The flesh itself, on the main part of the fruit, was the strangest thing I’d ever tasted — rubbery, fibrous and juicy like a ripe peach. I think I laughed while I was eating it, because I didn’t know what else to do.

Here is a picture of the cajú, again:

And the jabuticaba, which is fantastic in a caiparinha. And it apparently grows on trees, literally on the bark itself.

Pão de queijo: The perfect end to a great day

We finished our tour with a piece of pão de queijo, a stretchy, dense cheese bun made with tapioca flour. As a sidenote, I think I had pão de queijo every single day in Brazil. I think it might be the world’s most perfect food.

Rio de Janeiro photos coming next!