Portuguese grilled sardines

Whether you’ve got a week or a month for travelling in Portugal, the country has much to offer to international tourists. Recently, the small coastal country has gained a reputation for its food. With a long history of exploration, Portuguese food consists of a wide variety of international spices. Portuguese cuisine is also heavily influenced by other Mediterranean cuisines, with a heavy penchant for olive oil and garlic.

Tour in Porto – tripe & red wine

Being a coastal country, Portugal features a lot of fish and seafood in its cuisine. A food tour to Porto, however, wouldn’t be complete without the meaty tripe—a speciality of the Porto region. Tripe is animal intestines but, in Porto, mixed with red wine, beans, sausage & black pepper, the dish is particularly flavorful. Because many of the wines from the Duoro valley near Porto are rich, full-bodied reds, most of the cuisine you’ll encounter will usually be meat & rice dishes.

You’ll find many of the local apartments in Porto in the Ribeira district, just along the Duoro River. Restaurants, bars and cafes in this area are a popular place to find good food and interesting people.

Food specialties in Lagos

Located on the southern coast of Portugal, Lagos has several food specialties.  The southern region of Portugal, the Algarve, is famous for its sardines which many locals cook throughout the day—a simple snack food for the barbeque! The Algarve region also has two other main-dish specialties, if you’re on a food tour through Lagos and the surrounding region:

Chicken piri piri: This barbequed chicken dish is served with the local piri piri sauce. Piri piri is a spicy sauce, made of a particularly hot chile. The Portuguese introduced the sauce into their cuisine from their colonies in Mozambique and Angola. Though it’s mostly used with

Cod in Portugal

barbeque chicken, it’s also a popular seasoning for grilled fish & shrimp.

Salted cod: Called “bacalhau”, salted cod is a staple dish of Portugal. It’s even a traditional Christmas dinner in some parts. While it’s a popular food from many of the seafaring nations during the times of colonisation, the Portuguese are known to have specialized salted cod into as few as 365 different recipes (one for every day of the year), or as some legends have it, over 1000 different recipes.

Food in Lisbon, with an international flair

If you’re staying in one of the many Lisbon apartments in the trendy Bairro Alto neighbourhood, you’ll be near many of the restaurants—restaurants popular with both the locals and the tourists. Food in Lisbon, the Portuguese centre of tourism, is renowned around the world for its high-class chefs and international cuisine, not to mention five-star Portuguese restaurants. Within the Bairro Alto neighbourhood are many small cafés and local eateries—perfect locations to find an undiscovered restaurant.

Whether you’re on a country-wide food tour in Portugal, or just visiting Lisbon on a short break, you’ll find food is as much a part of the local culture as anything else—maybe even more so. If you hop from city to city, consider staying in one of the many apartments on offer throughout Portugal. With hundreds of apartment & bed and breakfast options, you’ll be living a bit more like a local while travelling.

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).