In Love With Lisbon

Category: Portuguese Food and Drink

  • Lily makes Portuguese Easter Bread

    Azulejo 9As an Early Easter descends on us, I decided to try a recipe I found in “A Taste of Portugal”.

    Easter Sunday is celebrated after the first full moon that occurs after the Spring Equinox. Spring Equinox marks the time when the Sun moves into Aries – Equinox means equal day and equal night. The new festival of Easter harks back to the Pagan festival of Oestre (meaning ‘egg’) so eggs are traditional at this time of year across the Northern Hemisphere. Eggs are a wonderful symbol for new life and for pondering the big questions i.e. which came first – chicken or egg 🙂

    As the sun moves into Aries, the earth gets a vibrant push to produce. The ground begins to warm and new life springs everywhere.

    Marking the end of Lent, Easter is a time to indulge in good food and celebration. Regardless of whether or not you are religious, it’s an excellent time to let your hair down and celebrate Spring.

    Easter in Portuguese is Páscoa and just as we have Hot Cross Buns and Easter Eggs in England, Portugal has it’s own traditions for Easter food.

    Folar is perhaps one of the best known of Portuguese Easter foods and from what I have seen there seems to be a variety of ways to cook it. Folar is typically associated with having a boiled egg (or few) embedded into the top of the bread and held in place by a cross of bread dough. Most of the recipes I have seen are slightly sweet and contain cinnamon although I have seen reference to savoury breads as well which include meats.

    INGREDIENTS

    Portuguese Easter Bread - Ingredients

    14oz (400g) Flour
    1/2 oz (15g) Fresh Yeast
    1 1/2 (45g) Caster Sugar
    3oz (90g) Butter
    1 Large Egg
    1/2 pint (300ml) Milk
    1 teaspoon Powdered Aniseed
    1 teaspoon Cinnamon
    1/2 teaspoon Salt

    For Decoration
    2 hard boiled eggs
    1 beaten egg for brushing

    METHOD

    1. In a bowl combine the yeast, 1/4 of the flour, a 1/3 of the milk (warmed) and half the sugar.
    2. Mix together to make a dough, cover and leave in a warm place for 1/2 hour
    3. Beat the eggs with the salt and spices and remaining milk and sugar.
    4. Kneed in the flour and egg mix to the dough gradually.
    5. Kneed in the butter. The dough should not stick to the side of the bowl.
    6. Cover the dough and leave it to rise for about three hours in a warm place.
    7. Break the dough into two (or leave whole) and plant the eggs on top. Make a cross with two rolled lengths of dough to put on the top, holding the egg in place.
    8. Brush the bread with the beaten egg.
    9. Cook at 210c/425F/Gas 7 until golden brown.

    Sounds simple doesn’t it?

    What I discovered when I was setting up the photograph of the ingredients (yes I did forget to put the milk in the picture) was that I hadn’t read that the recipe called for fresh yeast and what I had was dried yeast. I attempted to use the dried yeast but found that the mixture was far wetter than it should have been. To compensate, I ended up using a lot more flour which made the final result rather doughy. This sorely tried my patience – especially when I had to leave halfway through to go and buy some more flour from the shops!

    Anyway – aside from this problem, my Folar did turn out rather nicely. I personally am not that keen on aniseed so I did leave this out. In retrospect I would definitely use fresh yeast, not only to keep the consistency but also the avoid the stench of readying dried yeast for cooking – uggh!

    Portuguese Easter BreadI really like this recipe as you can really make it your own. Whilst it might not quite be to Portuguese tradition, why not embrace your inner child and paint your boiled egg with food colouring? I’ve seen quite a few pictures of breads from other places made like this and they do look very attractive. This is what I’m planning on doing next time 🙂

    Whilst researching Folar, I also came across a couple of other recipes for Easter that you might be interested in. One is Ninho de Pascoa (Easter Nest) which is a cake made to look like a birds nest. Such a wonderful idea for Spring celebrations! This is certainly a cake I would like to make as it could involve a lot of play. I imagine just using a simple sponge mix would suffice, scoop out the top, add chocolate eggs and decoration and there you go. There’s a lovely example here (in Portuguese) and here (also in Portuguese)

    Happy Spring and Happy Easter everyone!

     


  • Lily Makes Portuguese Apple Tart

    One of my New Year’s resolutions was to invite some friends over for dinner. I tend to find cooking for people quite stressful – not because I don’t like cooking but because I’m never quite sure if what I’m going to cook will arrive at the plate looking like it’s supposed to!

    I decided to shake of my worries and invite my best friend Markus and his partner over for an evening with a Portuguese flavour. I made a big old faithful chili – a tried and trusted recipe that gave me a starting point for talking about how Portugal was a major mover and shaker in the spice trade. For dessert I decided on Tarte de Maça e Creme. Markus had bought previously me a copy of The Taste of Portugal and this recipe comes from there. Obviously, Portuguese wine was on the menu. I chose Dão mostly because it was the only Portuguese wine that was in the supermarket (!) but it’s a nice dry red. We followed the meal by watching A Lisbon Story.

    Anyway – back to the recipe…

    INGREDIENTS

    Portuguese Apple Tart Ingredients

    Pastry
    6oz Flour
    3 oz Butter
    Pinch of Salt

    Filling
    1lb apples (cox or russet)
    1/2 pint milk
    4 tablespoons caster sugar
    2 eggs
    1 tablespoon flour

    METHOD
    1.     To make the pastry:-
    Mix together the flour and salt.
    Rub the butter with your fingertips into the flour until you have a light breadcrumb like texture.
    Add enough water to the mixture to make it into a dough. You don’t need too much water – maybe about a tablespoon.
    Wrap the pastry with clingfilm and leave to rest for 30 minutes.

    Notes – I only had coarse salt in as you can see from the photo and I realised this wasn’t going to work so I left the salt out. I also only left the pastry for about 10 minutes. Since then, I have read on Delia Smiths website that the reason you leave pastry to rest is so that the gluten in the flour has time to react and make the pastry more elastic and easier to roll out – hmmmm…probably should have read that before but the pastry wasn’t too badly behaved.

    Portuguese Apple Tart 2

    2. Roll out your pastry and press into a tin. I used a 9 inch special French tatin tin greased and floured first. There was just enough pastry to cover it.

    3. Next peel and core the apples (oh for an apple corer!) and cut into neat thin slices.

    Without an apple corer I found this rather challenging so ended up with nice thin slices of varying shapes! Place the slices neatly (or in my case, haphazardly) in the pastry lined tin.

    Portuguese Apple Tart 3

    4. Put this into an oven pre-heated to 180 degrees (gas mark 4) for 25 minutes.

    5. While this is cooking, whizz together the eggs, flour, milk and sugar for the filling. Once the tart has been in the oven for 25 minutes, take it out and pour over this mixture. As I don’t cook a great deal I was worried this very liquid filling wasn’t going to set but I can assure you now that it does. Put it back in the oven for another 20 minutes until set and slightly golden. Personally I found that I needed to leave it for about half an hour but that could be down to my very old cooker.

     Portuguese Apple Tart 4

    The Tarte can be served hot or cold. I served it cold with cream, a slice of strawberry and a spring of fresh mint. I would however, like to try this hot with perhaps a sprinkling of cinnamon.

     Portuguese Apple Tart 5

    This is a lovely recipe. I tried Tarte de Maça in Portugal from Café Suiça and fell in love with the light cream like custard. I have never liked the custard we have in England. Even when I was at school I would turn my nose up at it. Something that shade of yellow could not possibly be edible!

    This Portuguese custard however is a simple sweet creaminess with a delectable texture that goes well with the apples and the crisp pastry.

    I had a lovely evening and the food seemed to go down well. It was nice to discover the pleasure of cooking again and of course share my passion for Portugal. I’m sure there will be more posts like this in the future as I try my hand at other Portuguese recipes. Be warned though – desserts and cakes have always been my forté! It probably all stems from the first time my Granny showed me how to make victoria sponge cake when I was about 5, then let me lick the spoon 🙂