Cavaquinha ( brazilian lobster ) in white carrot mash

Today, I've cooked a wonderfull cavaquinha, also known as brazilian lobster.
It came very well with the white carrot and coconut slices.
Also, to add some crispness I've done a white corn and Dendê oil farofa, which is the white corn flour toasted in a pan with a kind of oil.
There is no recipe at all.
Sauteé the cavaquinha, cooked the white carrots with azafran and mashed with butter, fresh coconut stripes on top and voilá.

Dinner at Noma - Winter 2011

This post is entirely dedicate to the best dinner I have ever had in my life. It was at the restaurant Noma, in Copenhagen, Denmark and is considered the best restaurant of the World.
And from what I have seen, both working there, and eating, it really is one of the best restaurants in the globe. The food is absotutely great, probably the closest to perfection I will ever find in my whole life. The service is polite, without being too over you. And the atmosphere, with the simple tables and chairs, let you know that the important thing is the great food, not nice decoration or beautiful places.
To start of, 11, yes eleven , bite size starters, with the most different tastes, textures and so on.
So here goes the starters:


Moss and cep


Blue Mussels


Cookies and Cheese


Leek and Parsley


Potato and chicken liver


Pickled and smoked quail egg


Radish soil and grass


Toast and herbs, smoked cod roe and vinegar


Cod liver

Now you must be counting, and yes we are missing 2 starters, the Malt flatbread and juniper and the Pork Skin with black currant. Sorry, we couldnt wait 10 seconds for pictures so we ate them before.
Everything was bite size, mostly finger food. Perfect starters. Couldnt say anything bad about any of those. The mix of textures, tastes, everything was magical. The highlights here goes for the Cod liver, the Pork belly and the Smoked Quail Egg.

Then, we move on to the actual dinner. A 12 course menu, of those 3 desserts, telling about the Scandinavian cuisine and using all the Nordic ingredients at the best.


Apple and Jerusalem artichoke, Garden Sorrel and coriander.
This cute dish was basically a passing dish, mouth washing. Acidic flavors, very juicy, to clean your mouth from the starters, to get you ready for the real deal.


Sea Urchin and Cream Cucumber and elderflower.
It was a very interesting dish, I would say. The sea urchin tasted great with the cucumber 'sorbet' and the elderflowers, a cold dish, full of flavor. The only downside was, to my mother, the texture of the sea urchin. For me, it was overall a great dish.


Bio dynamic grains and watercress Dried scallops and beach nuts.
For me, one of the stars of the night. The dried scallops are so crispy, and full of flavor. Its brilliant. I loved every single thing about this dish. Also, the idea of bringing a new texture to an old flavor is something that i really love.


Chestnut and Löjrom (Bleak Roe or Kalix Caviar)
Probably, if not for sure, the dish that I liked the most. Raw chestnuts, in a white butter sauce, with Kalix Caviar. It sounds quite hard to imagine all that together. But when you get to taste, it is certainly a dish that I wont forget anytime soon. The sweet of the chestnuts, the brilliant white butter sauce, and the salty of the Kalix caviar, made this dish one of the best things I have ever tried in my entire life. Full of flavor, textures, its really hard to describe what felt to eat this at Noma


Onion and lemon thyme and goose berry juice.
One of the most simple dishes in Noma, if not the simpler. It is basically roasted onions in clarified butter, with lemon thyme and goose berry juice. And it is absolutely amazing that with those ingredients, the dish is so nice, really good. The melting onions, the really acidic lemon thyme and the sweet and sour goose berry juice. Dishes like this show that the chef is brilliant. It takes a lot of knowledge and skills to come up with something so brilliant with so few and simple ingredients.

Unfortunately I had a problem with my camera and some of the pictures are not good, pretty much dark and you can not see anything. Which is really disappointing, but I will try to explain the missing dishes the best I can.
The following dish was Pike perch and Cabbage.The roasted cabbage stuffed with the pike, was one of the best of the night as well. The fish was cooked to perfection and went really well with basil. Also, some stems of dandelion, cooked in clarified butter, really helped the pike to gives out all the potential. A brilliant dish, a true shame I dont have the pictures.

The next dish, which I dont have pictures as well was the Celeriac and truffles.
A simple, but great dish. Basically roasted celeriac with Swedish truffle sauce


Pickled vegetables and bone marrow.
This is mainly a 'passing dish' to clean the palate to the main course. But it is a truly brilliant pickles dish. 7 types of vegetables, including shallots, carrots, beetroot and celeriac. And on top of that, a brilliant hay smoked bone marrow. To finish, a lovely presentation of the dish. What else can you want from food? Great taste, lovely looking.

The main course.
Unfortunately, no pictures. A shame. A real masterpiece. Wild duck and beets, beech and malt. Perfect cooked wild duck chest, soft beets and apples, both roasted, and lovely slices of beetroot. Malt on top of all that. The combination of the sweetnes of the beets, with the malt, and the soft and tasty duck chest, made this dish something really close to perfection. A wonderfull dish, worth all the time you have to wait to go to Noma. Mind blowing. Hard to find words to describe.

Now, its desserts time.


Gammel Dansk
Meaning old dansk, this is the name of a very famous Danish liquor. Very herbal taste. The white part is made of frozen yogurt. The green sauce tastes a lot like Jaggermeister, with the very sour of the frozen yogurt.


Pear Tree.
In my opinion, this was the downside of the evening. The dish was a roasted pear with herbs and a Pine parfait. The pear was absolutely lovely, but the pine parfait had a too herbal taste that i couldn't enjoy.


Potato and plum
A brilliant dessert. Mashed potatoes, with a plum jam and plum seeds cream. The combination of the plum jam and the potatoes is great. To finish that, the lovely cream of plum seeds, with the taste of cherries ( yes plum seeds taste and smell like cherries) made me really love this dessert. By far the best of them. Once again, only 2 ingredients, but taken to another level. Who would imagine that potatoes and plum would go so well together.



Little sweet treats. Potato chips in dark chocolate and fennel seeds and Cookie and yogurt under a chocolate cover. Also, a bone marrow caramel , which i do not have pictures.

Thats all guys. Sorry about the missing pictures, and aswell the quality of the pictures. I have a policy to not take pictures with flash lights in restaurants, because I find that very rude toward the other guests.
This was the best dinner I had in my entire life. I really appreciate that my parents gave me the opportunity to be with them this night. Thank you very much Carlos and Catia. Love you guys.
Thanks for reading, sorry for such a long post, but it was a long dinner ( nearly 4 hours total). Hope you enjoyed reading my comments and the pictures.

Smørrebrød at Kanal Cafeen

Following my dad's suggestion, I took this afternoon to taste something from the danish culture, the famous Smørrebrød.
The Smørrebrød is basically a open faced sandwich, with 1 slice of bread and thousands of different toppings.
After researching for a while on the internet, found a couple of websites suggesting places to go, nice local restaurants and stuff like that.
I chose the Kanal Cafeen which was the closest to my hotel. Wonderful choice. Got there, the place was full, and also fully booked for lunch. Luckily I got a place. The menu had easily over 20 options of Smørrebrød. Really hard to chose as all of them seemed very interesting.
After a couple minutes of thinking, I decided to go to something I found very interesting and never tasted before.
It was the Lamb Belly rolled with spices and cured in the rye bread. The lamb was great and really similar to the Italian Porchetta I would say.
Well enough talking, I also took 2 pictures, hope you guys enjoy.

Noma - Week 2 and 3

The days are going so fast. And its already week 3, and 1 more to go only.
Luckily this week I got to see more the dishes, plate them up, and feel the sensation of how is to work in the best restaurant of the world.
I mean, everything here is done with so much care, with so much work put in, which makes me have no doubts on why this is the best restaurant of the world.
Not only work, but what else makes this restaurant unique is a thing called " Saturday Night Projects" where the stagiers and chefs make a dish and everyone gives a try and tell opinions, likes and dislikes. It`s a true learning night. You get to see food from everywhere in the world, different techniques, ingredients, colours, tastes, presentations.




The dishes are wonderful. Unfortunately I dont remember what they really are, since that day i wasnt feeling very great, though I stayed to see all the brilliant work from my work friends.

Noma Stage - Week 1

I`m not here to post any recipes or anything like that today. Im just here to make a diary of my experiences as a stagier at Noma.
The 1st week gone so fast, it`s even hard to describe all that happened.
The restaurant enviroment is so friendly and it is surely a really nice place to be. I`m learning so much, and seeing so many new stuff that really makes me like every single second I spend there.
For the first 5 days I`ve been here, i got to see all the production part of the kitchen, helping with the mise-en-place and doing some dishing up.
Despit the really long hours, I`m having such a great fun, always talking about cooking and techniques either with the chefs or the other stagiers.
Tomorrow, a new week of work will start. Hopefull I will get to see and do different stuff.

Brazilian independence day meal

Yesterday, 7th of september was brazilian independence day, so I decided to do a little cooking to my family. The meal was prety simple, nothing really hard to cook. Just plain ingredients, fresh and good tasting.
For starters we had sautee scallops with garlic and basil butter.




Then we moved to the main course. A wonderful lobster tail, with Casarecce pasta in rosé champagne and onions sauce.
I baked the lobster in medium heat oven, just added salt, pepper, parsley and olive oil. Nothing else.
Hope you guys like the pictures. If you have any suggestions to what I should be cooking next weekend, please do.


Thanks for visiting my blog.

Deep fried egg yolk

Hello my friends. After a real long time I'm back to posting here what I've been doing the past few months. Unfortunately my awfull memmory makes me forget almost everytime to take pictures of what I've cooked.
Even tho, I still got a couple recipes with pictures up on my computer and I will upload them in upcoming days.
This photos are of a breaded and deep fried egg yolk. As you can see, the yolk is fried, with a crust on the outside, and still creamy inside, and tastes absolutely great.


If you guys get curious about the recipe, leave some comments so I post a how-to-do this on the next post.
THanks for reading.
Pedro R.