Snack-y food in Brazil
In my two weeks in Brazil, I have to say that the food I've tried is generally over-salted, oily, and without nuance (if savory), or too sweet (if a dessert)...the big exception being the natural fruit juices which I love. Not to say that eating here isn't fun, courtesy of the snack foods that are in abundance.
In Rio I went to the famous Confeitaria Colombo, overrun with tourists like myself admiring the elaborate Art Nouveau interior. Here I tried the salmon and leek quiche (dry, too much crust), the bolinho de bacalhau (a typical snack, cod fish ball - amazingly dry and greasy at the same time). On the plate on the back, I tried the quindim (like the Chinese dan4ta3, only more gelatinous and sweet), and the brigadeiro (condensed milk and chocolate, rolled in chocolate sprinkles - way sweet and chewy!). The best was the quindim.
A cute, though also greasy, snack is the coxinha. It's always this tear-drop shape; deep fried, it has shredded chicken inside.
My favorite snack food (though it can be more of a meal), is the filet mignon sandwich at the juice bars. This can be over-salted too at times, but so satisfyingly simple. Just tender meat and bread!
In Sao Paulo's Mercado Municipal, the two things to try are the pastel de bacalhau and the mortadella sandwich. Between a sky-high sandwich of bologna with cubes of fat, and more cod (having eaten the bolinho de bacalhau and every kind of cod pastry and cod casserole you can think of in Rio), I was less in the mood for a sandwich. So I had the pastel de bacalhau. Apparently the place to try it is Hocca Bar, which I happened upon by seeing the quantity of people eating there. Served with a tin of olive oil, you can actually make the cod more moist yourself, but it actually wasn't that bad straight out of the fryer. The crust was actually really tasty and not greasy either.
By the way, the drink I'm having with this is Kuat, Coca-Cola's brand of guarana. Guarana is the ingredient that's become popular in a lot of energy drinks (along with yerba mate, the ice tea people drink here, which I like)!
