Delightful Macaroonada Recipe – Perfect for Dessert Lovers

Long time readers will know about our tradition here on Memorie di Angelina of featuring an Italian-American dish every October, Italian-American Heritage month. Over the years we’ve covered such classics as Spaghetti and Meatballs, Sunday Sauce, Baked Ziti, Stuffed Shells, Chicken Parmesan, Chicken Scarpariello, Chicken Francese, Baked Clams, Wedding Soup, along with along with some perhaps lesser known regional specialties like San Francisco’s Cioppino and Upstate New Yorks’ Utica Greens.

Well, this year I thought I’d do something a little different and start exploring the cookery of the Italian diaspora outside the United States. And I want to start with a dish from the country with the largest population of Italian descent in the world outside Italy itself: Brazil’s macarronada.

The Italian Dispora in Brazil

Now if you’re like me, you may have thought—or rather just assumed—that the United States was the country with the largest number of Italian descendants outside Italy. I don’t know. In fact, the US is third with 18,000,000 Italian-Americans, far behind Brazil with 32,000,000 Italian Brazilians and Argentina with 25,000,000 Italian-Argentinians. (If you count percentage of the population, Argentina takes the prize with over 60% of its total population having Italian heritage.)

I have to confess I had no idea the Italian diaspora in Brazil it was so large. I actually lived in Brazil for a short while during college, studying for a semester at the Pontifícia Universidade Catôlica do Rio de Janeiro. But I don’t remember running into many Italians, nor do I remember eating much Italian food as such, though as a penurious student I ate my fair share of pasta, much to the amusement of my Brazilian roommates. And I do remember a particularly delicious plate of gnocchi I had at a friend’s parents’ house.

If I didn’t run into many Italian Brazilians in Rio, maybe that’s because the Italian immigrants mostly settled further south, in states of São Paolo, Rio Grande du Sul and Minas Gerais. (Interesting factoid: São Paolo has the largest Italian population of any city in the world.) In common with a number of other Latin American countries, the immigration came primarily from Northern Italy in the late 19th century. The pattern shifted, however, to a predominance of southern Italians in the early 20th century.

Macarronada

As in the United States, this immigration has influenced Brazilian cookery significantly, and not just among the Italo-Brazilians. My roommates’ ribbing notwithstanding, macarrão (pasta) has become very popular among Brazilians. One of the most iconic Italian influenced Brazilian dishes is today’s featured dish, a pasta dish called macarronada.

What is macarronada? Reminiscing about his childhood growing up as an Italian Brazilian in an intriguing academic paper on Italian migration to Brazil and its influence on the country’s cookery, author Willi Freire writes:

For this post, I dusted off my rusty Portuguese and plunged into the internets. Just as the author describes, you can find a vary array of recipes for macarronada. But perhaps the most iconic of all is the macarronada à bolonhesaalso known as moist meat macarronada: pasta with a thick meat and tomato sauce much like the good old Spaghetti Bolognese aka “Spag Bol” so popular in the English speaking world.

But where macarronada to bolonhesa parts ways from other similar dishes is the variety of optional ingredients you can add to the sauce while it simmers, from fairly conventional ones like heavy cream, sliced ​​mushrooms or peas to others like olives and corn kernel that would be out of the question for most Old World Italians. (More about these variations in the Notes below.)

Although the family resemblance is clearly there, an actual Bolognese sauce this definitely is not. If this dish is any guide, Brazilians are even more willing than North Americans to break with the Italian culinary conventions. That said, like its Anglophone cousin Spaghetti Bolognese, a macarronada has a kind of primal appeal. And if you’re a fan of Spag Bol, it will be agreeably familiar and yet, for my money, even keyboard.

Ingredients

Serves 4-6

• 300-450g (11 oz-1 lb) spaghetti, fettuccine or another pasta of your choice
• 500g (1 lb) ground beef
• 200g (7 oz) bacon, or about 6-7 strips, cut into dice or crosswise into thin ribbons
• 1 medium onion, finely minced
• 2-3 cloves of garlic, finely minced
• 1/2 bottle of passeda small (400ml/14 oz) can of peeled tomatoes, puréed or small can of crushed tomatoes
• 2 Tbs tomato paste (omit if using crushed tomatoes)
• salt and pepper
• olive oil

Optional additions:

• 250ml (1 cup) heavy cream
• 1 small can of peas
• 1 small can of corn kernels
• A handful of green olives
• Sliced ​​mushrooms

You need:

Directions

In a large sauté pan, braiser or saucepan, sauté the bacon in olive oil until it is lightly golden brown. Add the garlic and onion and sauté until the onion is soft and translucent.

Add the ground beef, mixing it with the sautéed and seasoning with salt and pepper. Simmer, stirring from time to time, until the meat has lost its raw color.

Add the tomatoes and tomato paste. Mix and simmer, partially covered, stirring from time to time, until the tomatoes have lost their raw taste and the sauce has acquired a rich color and consistency, about 15-20 minutes.

If you are using any of the optional ingredients, add them to the pot and simmer for another 5 minutes or so, or until cooked through.

While the sauce is simmering, boil the pasta in well salted water until cooked to your taste.

Transfer the pasta to a serving dish, Pour over the sauce and mix. Serve immediately, topped with extra sauce and grated cheese.

Notes

The macarrão (pasta)

You can make macarronada with any pasta you care for—most recipes just call for macarrão or “macaroni”—but perhaps the most common are long ones, in particular spaghetti or fettuccini. That said, I’ve found a few recipes that call specifically for fusilli or even lasagna noodles. (More on this last one in the “Variations” section below.)

Brazilians tend to like their pasta much softer than Italians. The concept of “al dente” doesn’t really apply to Brazilian pasta dishes, at least outside (I’m guessing) foodie circles. So if you want a real macarronadacook your pasta for the maximum cooking time indicated on the box, or even a minute or two longer.

The tomato

The tomato comes in different forms depending on the recipe. The most common is a lot of tomate or a commercially sold tomato sauce. It comes in sachets, in both smooth and chunky versions. Many recipes also call for some fresh tomato, cut into dice, added to sauté along with the onion and garlic. Still others call for tomato paste, usually as an additional ingredient but occasionally just on its own, diluted in water or broth. (Very few recipes call for canned tomatoes, which would be the norm in Italy.)

There is a product by the name “tomato sauce” sold in the US, but its not clear to me it’s the same as Brazilian a lot of tomate. It comes already flavored with onion and garlic—redundant in this recipe—plus extraneous spices, not to mention preservatives. I’d say better to go with a simple puréed tomato aka tomato puree as a substitute. You could also use canned tomatoes, which you’ve puréed in a blender, food processor or food mill. Or crushed tomatoes, but in this case, I’d avoid tomato paste as crushed tomatoes are already quite thick.

The meat

Most recipes just call generically for moist meat (ground beef) but a few will specify the cut or a mix of cuts. For example, peito di boi (breast aka brisket), muscle (shank) or copa loin (loin) or patinho (knuckle).

Variations

My quick dip into online recipes revealed a truly vast array of variations on the basic recipe. While an onion a garlic flavor base, ground beef and tomato in various forms figure in just about every recipe, there are lots of variations especially in the other ingredients that can make their way into the dish.

For example, not all recipes call for using bacon for the flavor base. Some add ham or a spicy sausage called Calabrian language (which looks rather more like a Spanish spicy chorizo than hot Italian sausage) instead. Sometimes the cured meat goes into the flavor base, sometimes to the already simmered sauce. Others just omit cured meat entirely. Many recipes add a bit of chopped bell pepper, usually red or green, to the base. A few call for carrot (bringing closer to the taste of the original Italian dish).

Herbs and spices sometimes make their way into the sauce. Paprika is perhaps the most common, but you will also see recipes calling for bay leaf, basil, thyme or oregano.

Most recipes call for grated cheese to finish the dish, but some take it further, having mixing the pasta and sauce in a baking dish, then topping with lots of cheese–usually mozzarella–and baking it in the oven. And if you want to take that even further, I found one recipe for a “Sunday” macarronada where you basically make a lasagna, layering lasagna noodles with regular tomato sauce, the meat sauce, béchamel and mozzarella.

Other macarronadas

As mentioned, the term macarronada is applied to a whole family of pasta dishes made with all sorts of ingredients. Probably the most common—and horrifying for most Italians—would be the macarronada made with chicken. Although tomato sauce is typical, I’ve also seen a tomato-less vegetarian macarronada. The pasta is dressed in a mix of broccoli, peppers, carrots olives and canned corn in garlic and olive oil. Again, not a dish I’d suggest to any of my Italian friends…

The variety is so vast you could think that you could call any pasta dish a macarronadabut I don’t know. At least according to this articlewhile all macarronadas are made with pasta (macarrão), not all pastas are macarronadas. To qualify as a macarrondathe pasta has to be dressed with a sauce—usually but not necessarily tomato-based—then topped with lots of cheese—and includes at least some “complementos” or additional ingredients to make a truly substantial meal ideal for sharing.

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