Opinion – Recipes by Marcão: Vinaigrette with everything finely chopped is important for a champion barbecue

Today is the day to complete the World Cup recipes album with the only country that was missing: Brazil. While we’re in the running, this column will only publish Brazilian recipes.

And let’s go with him, who pretends to be humble, but is the soul of Brazilian barbecue. Yes, the vinaigrette sauce, which even vegans devour with bread when painting on someone else’s barbecue.

Although cuts change regionally, grilled meat is more or less the same everywhere. What makes the difference are the seasonings (in the case of Brazil, coarse salt, the basic of the basics), the accompaniments (farofa), the extras (heart and coalho cheese) and the sauces.

Vinaigrette is the sauce for Brazilian barbecue — and for other dishes as well. The name and recipe vary by region. It could be campaign sauce, it could be lambão sauce. You can use bell pepper, you can use pepper, you can use cilantro.

My recipe has garlic because I love it, but you can take it out. There is no bell pepper, but you can put it. If you have green tomatoes, great — it’s one of the few recipes where they go well.

What I want to highlight in this recipe is not the choice of ingredients, it’s the painstakingness of chopping everything very small, really tiny.

The size of the pieces radically changes the perception of food. To make it easier to understand, I’ll explain with the example of meat: a steak is very different from a minced meat, which is very different from ground beef.

So, I ask that you have the patience to cut everything very small, slowly so as not to get hurt. Use a very sharp knife, as what causes an accident is a dull knife. Suffer a little and earn the reward of a champion vinaigrette.

vinaigrette

Yield: 4 servings
Difficulty: easy

INGREDIENTS

1 tomato

1 big onion

1 clove of garlic

1 hot pepper

2 spring onion bulbs

100 ml of olive oil

50 ml of vinegar

1 teaspoon salt

PREPARATION

1. Remove and discard the tomato seeds. Chop all the vegetables as small as you can, transferring one by one to a bowl.
2. Add oil, vinegar and salt. Mix and store in the refrigerator until ready to serve, up to one day.