Dubai – Brazilian chef Thiago Castanho (pictured above) participated this Friday (18) in a cooking show at the Brazil Pavilion at Expo 2020 Dubai. From Pará, Castanho is famous for highlighting the ingredients and food of his state. He planned to precisely present this cuisine during the world exhibition, but the menu took on new contours with ingredients the chef found in the emirate.
In Dubai and at Gulfood, a food sector show which ended this Thursday (17), the chef from Pará found Brazilian products with abundance – and quality. “The açaí berry was a surprise, and I wasn’t going to put it on the menu, but I found it and decided to add it as an extra dish. I had ordered other fish, and when the chef told me there was arapaima here, I said, ‘Really?’ So, let’s also include the arapaima from Brazil [also known as pirarucu]. The fish is something I wouldn’t be able to bring, and finding it here was surprising,” he said.
From Brazil, the chef brought cassava-based products, such as tucupi. And the presentation was filled with references and content in videos and photos from cultivation to food processing by people from Pará. “My purpose is to showcase. If you show the culture, you have a value; you can add it. You can make more people produce chocolate or manufacture açaí in our region the way it should. It’s easier to make fair trade when you know the basics.”
The menu included a starter of rice pamonha in a banana leaf with arapaima and shrimp moqueca, a main course of arapaima, butter bean salad and plantain gnocchi, and dessert of Amazonian chocolate mousse with cupuaçu and cocoa crunch jelly. And one of the highlights, the extra dish was fried fish with açaí, served in the original way of the North of the country. “I showed açaí as it is for us, as food. It is the main dish, which accompanies salted fish, as it is in Pará. It’s good for people to know that,” Castanho recalled.
The chef intends to continue living and working in Belém, the capital of Pará, amid the forest and the city that inspires him. It is there he will open his new venture, BaYuca. “I like to have roots in the Amazon and my feet in the world. So, I’m here in Dubai talking about the Amazon. I go back to my house, I feel good, then I want to travel again and come back. That’s it,” he concluded.
The cooking shows are organized by the Brazilian Trade and Investment Promotion Agency (Apex-Brasil), with the Arab Brazilian Chamber of Commerce (ABCC) support. The Brazil Pavilion continues with other events in its schedule until the end of Expo 2020, in March. In the coming days, there will be an event dedicated to a food that is also a symbol and basis of the diet of many Brazilians, cassava.
Translated by Elúsio Brasileiro
