Brazilian barbecue needs to be more than a good copy of the American one, says Churrascada creator

Next Saturday (6), 3,000 people will gather in a complex of sheds on Avenida Henry Ford, in Mooca, to eat barbecue until they get tired.

The address, kept secret and disclosed by the Sheet first hand, it was chosen as the stage for the seventh edition of the Churrascada event in São Paulo. Tickets — at R$ 550 and entitlement to unlimited food and drink — were sold out in April and sold out in just 36 hours.

As has been the case since 2015, the American barbecue, the most popular technique among barbecue lovers, promises to be one of the highlights of the event. The biggest star will be American pitmaster Ed Mitchell, who has just been inducted into the coveted Barbecue Hall of Fame.

But whoever takes a good look will see that new winds are blowing the embers of Barbecue, a trend that was already visible in recent editions and appears to be reinforced this year.

Antônio da Conceição, known as Playboy, will be there, preparing the traditional smoked meat from Maragogipe (BA), in the Recôncavo Baiano, and the gaucho Fabricio Goulart, roasting shoulders in the ditch barbecue, a centuries-old method that resists in the pampas.

Maíco dos Santos, brought from Alter do Chão (PA), was in charge of displaying the Amazonian piracaia, fish roasted in moquém — for the first time, fish were allowed to enter the Churrascada.

And Paulo Yoller, from São Paulo, will prepare lamb and pork using biaribi, an indigenous technique in which the food is cooked in a pit, wrapped in a banana leaf.

To prepare the menu with a brasuca accent, Gustavo Bottino, creator of the festival, took advantage of the interruption of the event during the pandemic to delve into the research of techniques of the native peoples of the Americas, many of them tempered by African influences.

“I think these techniques have the potential to become a new wave. It’s time to find a Brazilian identity for barbecue”, he defends.

Among roasters, Bottino is reputed to be one of the main responsible for the American barbecue fashion here. From 2012 to 2016, he ran the BOS BBQ restaurant, in Vila Madalena, and introduced the so-called Texas barbecue to São Paulo residents.

In this technique, the cuts are roasted by the indirect action of fire in special grills, the pit smokers. Who does the service is a combination of smoke and heat generated by firewood or charcoal.

The result is a very peculiar type of barbecue, as explained by Edvaldo Caribé, from Pará, author of the book “The Brazilian Barbecue – from Moquém to Pit Smoker” (Lettera publisher).

“The characteristic of American barbecue is the dark and caramelized crust, different from the mahogany color of Brazilian barbecue, the result of direct contact with fire.”

What few people know is that American barbecue and our ancestral techniques have the same origin. “Although the barbecue be the symbol of the culture of the United States, its roots are strongly linked to the indigenous peoples of Central and South America”, says Caribé.

In the early days, both there and here, meat and fish were roasted on suspended wooden structures — the moquém, or barbacoa, whose principle is also the preparation in smoke, under the indirect action of fire.

It was no different in the south of the country, where the Guarani used to eat barbecued rare, to the despair of the Jesuits, who feared contamination by worms.

“The most that the natives did was to put some pieces of meat on top of a kind of grill called môcaêta. In practice, they did not roast, but smoked the meal”, explains Clarice Chwartzmann, co-author of “Os Gauchos e o Churrasco – Uma Jornada Around the Fire” (Editor. Quattro Projetos).

The difference is that North Americans invested so much in the evolution of the smoking method that they arrived at the current pit smoker, luxurious equipment that allows precise temperature control and smoke circulation, with a format similar to that of a barrel transformed into a barbecue.

Here, the path was different: the barbecue that became popular in urban centers was the gaucho dos skewers, duly adapted to the modern routine.

“The ground fire barbecue, made with huge cuts, takes from 4 to 12 hours to be ready. As the market started to offer smaller cuts, which can be roasted quickly in direct contact with the fire, the culture was changing”, explains Clarice.

Meanwhile, the more rustic techniques, the barbecue grilled under smoke, which requires space and patience, were restricted to regional cultures.

“The moquém was despised by the colonizers, but I see that, little by little, it is arousing interest in the world of barbecue”, celebrates Caribé, who does not miss the opportunity to mount moquéns in the gastronomic events to which he is invited.

Nobody advocates that Brazilian roasters seal their expensive pit smokers and go back to using rudimentary wooden structures for smoking — on the contrary.

Finding a Brazilian identity for barbecue doesn’t just depend on technique. It’s even worth using the American pit smoker, which after all works so well, but with our own flavors, from seasonings and side dishes to the type of firewood.

Want an example? At Churrascada, the duo Tatá Lowrider and Walter Amaral will serve brisket, the most famous cut of American barbecue, but with jambu and tucupi.

For Bottino, it’s just a matter of turning the “key”. “Brazil has a lot of ace and it’s high time we stopped being a country that only knew how to copy the American barbecue well. Now it’s the turn of the Brazilian barbecue.”