Potuguese food is inspired by the Atlantic, hence many of the dishes contain fish, especially salted cod. Portuguese food is generally inexpensive and served in large quantities.

Portuguese Pastries

A typical day in Portugal starts with breakfast, usually a croissant or other such pastry and a coffee to wash it down. Coffee tends to be served as espresso (uma bica in the south or just um café in the north) or milky coffee (um galão).

Staple foods in Portugal are the various soups, caldo verde (thick vegetable soup), sopa à alentejana (garlic and bread soup with a poached egg in it) and the many varieties of fish and shellfish soups. There are many types of fish and shellfish used in Portuguese cooking, including crab, clams, barnacles, prawns, crayfish, mullet, tuna and the ubiquitous bacalhau (dried, salted cod). Bacalhau can be cooked in hundreds of different ways

Bacalhau

and is really tasty when cooked as bacalhau à Gomes de Sá with potatoes, onions, olives and hard-boiled eggs. Sardines (sardinhas) are the second most popular fish and can be be grilled or barbequed, or there is the arroz  demarisco, which is a bit like a seafood risotto crossed with a soup.

Meat is less popular in Portugal and often comes served with piri-piri sauce. Chicken is very popular and no churrasco (barbequed chicken) has whole restaurants dedicated to it. Pork is usually grilled or cooked with clams (porco à alentejana).

Vegetables are not used very often, a mixed salad (salada mista) of tomatoes, onions, olives et al is eaten more often than vegetables.

Portuguese Pastries

Portuguese people are sweet toothed! Their specialities include a least two hundred different types of pastries.

This national taste to sweets seems to have originated during the Moorish occupation, and in the 15th century there was the sugar cane planted in Madeira. In the 17th and 18th century, the convents became famous for their pastries with specialities such as “toucinho do céu” (heaven’s lard) and “barriga de freiras” (nun’s belly).

The best among the egg paste pastries are the “ovos moles”, originally from Aveiro. They play a major role in Portuguese pastrymaking, and you can find them in little shells, complementing tarts and pies or decorating cakes, sometimes these are sprinkled with cinnamon or with grated walnut or almond.

pão de ló

Other desserts include “pão de ló” (light sponge cake), “palha  brantes” (golden thin strings of egg yolk based paste), “pastéis de nata” of Belém, almond paste (marzipan) of the Algarve and “pão de rala” of Évora (white pumpkin candy wrapped in almond paste).