Despite Portugal's proportionally enormous coastline and the large number of local fish available, the country's most popular fish is cod, imported from Norway and Canada.
Today, the Portuguese have hundreds of recipes for cod.
"There are more than enough cod dishes for each day of the year," chef José Avillez told me when I had lunch at his new restaurant, Cantinho dos Avillez, in Lisbon.
One of the Portuguese's favorite is "bacalhau a bras," scrambled eggs with shreds of salted codfish and topped with black olives, served with matchstick-sliced fried potatoes, onions and parsley.
My favorite cod dish was "migas bacalhau," a stew of cabbage, red beans, cod, bread and parsley, served in a bread bowl and topped with olives. Back in the day, Portuguese fisherman would throw anything they had around into a single pot, similar to how the French came up with the fish stew bouillabaisse.
In addition to the traditional recipes, innovative chefs at new restaurants in Lisbon are giving the fish a makeover.
"Codfish is almost a fetish for the Portuguese," Miguel Castro e Silva, the chef at Largo, a new upscale restaurant in the Portuguese capital of Lisbon, told me. "I like to cook cod by giving our traditional recipes a modern twist."
On Largo's menu is codfish with wild mint bread quenelles. Using the modern sous-vide method, Castro e Silva puts the ingredients in an airtight plastic bag and then cooks them slowly in a water bath at a low temperature over a long period of time, thereby ensuring a juicy result.
Down the street at Cantinho dos Avillez, try the flaked cod with bread crumbs, a low-temperature egg (an egg cooked at 150 degrees F. for 45 minutes) and "exploding" olives (gel-cased spheres of olive juice that explode in your mouth).
Belcanto, its sister restaurant, serves its own version of the traditional cod "açorda." At Belcanto, the codfish is served with crunchy, sautéed bread cubes injected with cod stock, coriander-textured water, coriander sprouts, cod stock foam, gel-encased spheres of grape juice and a low temperature cooked egg.
But codfish, which once sustained sailors on long journeys, is disappearing because it was severely overfished in the 1970s and '80s. Head to Portugal and try these delicious dishes before there are no more fish left in the sea.
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Yummy...I love all those chemicals leaching into my food.
Craziness!
It does not appear that you have any reason to fear chemicals leaching into your food because of Sous Vide. Sous Vide bags are not PVC based and don't have plasticizers, which are worth being concerned about.
Those chefs who cook a la Sous Vide using only cling film *may* be inviting some chemicals to leach through the polyethylene layer and into their food - but that's never been demonstrated and is solely hypothetical.
The risks from canned food and Bisphenol A in the lining of those cans is probably a greater risk that Sous Vide.
In addition to the spectacular and inexcusable error in the first sentence, the author makes an absolute hash of Portuguese history, and is wrong about the time of year and specific reasons why Portuguese ate salted cod. Somebody needs to go read "Cod" by Mark Kurlansky.
The author also makes it seem that salt cod is somehow Portuguese, but almost anyone reading in HuffPost's travel or food pages will probably already know that's false.
And the author is a bit of a jack-hole for suggesting that cod are disappearing and therefore folks should head to Portugal and try them before they disappear.
WTF?
When fish are disappearing, threatened, or endangered, you don't try them while they last. You put them on the AVOID list and instead dine on sustainable fish stocks.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/4409100/North-Sea-sees-recovery-of-cod-stocks.html
http://www.barentsobserver.com/record-high-cod-stock.4968563.html http://www.torontosun.com/2011/07/27/atlantic-cod-stocks-recovering-study
Sadly, I have to say that this is a lazy piece of 'journalism' at best, but rather more like somebody out of their depth bashing away at a keyboard with scant regard for the responsibility of their actions or their obligations to reporting the truth. It's also an abuse of an opportunity.
Research + Collate = Accurate reporting... Simple.
obrigado pelas dicas!
The Celtic tribes that dwelt (And still Dwell) in Iberia prior to the Roman invasion lived mostly in coastal villages, its fair to say that their diet would consist largely of fish and meats, therefore not a big stretch for the Portuguese to continue to do so. The emergence of Cod as a national staple was most likely due to the discovery of Newfoundland where cod stocks were abundant, and through Norwegian traders from Northern Europe.