Excellent Brazilian Shrimp Dish: Vatapá

"Vatapá" is the name of a great Brazilian stew featuring shrimp in a somewhat sweet creamy sauce. I recently fixed this dish and I intend to do so again. For those unaware, Portuguese is the language of Brazil.* I took the basic recipe from a Brazilian cookbook, "Brazilian Food," by Thiago Castanho, Firefly Books Ltd., Buffalo, N.Y. and Ontario, Canada, 2014, but I then used my own adaptations to make a version of the dish. This is not difficult to make and I have simplified it even more, and the ingredients are all things most people already have on hand, or they are easily found in the supermarket. 

Ingredients:
2 lb. shrimp (I used frozen cooked shrimp in the 41/50 size, with tail shell on, which I removed after thawing the shrimp and before adding them to the recipe)
3 or 4 slices of dried French or Italian bread
Panko bread crumbs (plain/non seasoned), if needed
8 oz. coconut milk (plus some water)
8 to 10 oz. clam juice (or homemade seafood stock)
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 small onion, minced or chopped
1 large garlic clove, minced
2 Roma or other small tomatoes, seeded and diced
1 or 2 mild chili peppers or 1 mild and 1 serrano, seeded and chopped
1 or 2 bay leaves
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon Sazón with culantro and achiote (easily found in Latino markets or in the Latino section of your supermarket or Latino shops)
(2 teaspoons palm oil, not palm kernel oil. I skipped using the palm oil completely.)
salt and pepper
1/4 cup of cilantro leaves, torn into pieces
1/4 cup basil leaves, torn into pieces
Serve with white rice (I added some onion and garlic, as per the cookbook, to the general recipe I use for white rice, which includes a little butter and some oil, besides the rice, water and a little salt).

First, the cookbook recipe calls for making homemade shrimp stock, made from the heads and shells of the shrimp. I have simply used store bought clam juice. Tear or cut the bread into smaller pieces, put it into a dish and pour the coconut milk over it, plus add 1 cup of water. Let the bread soak while you fix another part of the recipe. Using a large saucepan, heat the olive oil and then add the onion, then a minute or so later, the garlic, the tomatoes and the chili peppers. Saute to let the mixture soften. Add the shrimp and the clam juice and mix well. Add the bay leaf (or leaves). Bring mixture to a low simmer and then add the cumin, the Sazón, a pinch of salt and some black pepper (also the palm oil, if using). Add the bread mixture, stirring well to incorporate. The bread should thicken the dish into a sauce, but if it does not thicken properly (it should be pretty thick), stir in some Panko breadcrumbs a little at a time until the mixture does thicken. I had to use the breadcrumbs when I made this. The sauce should have a yellowish color to it. Stir in the cilantro and basil leaves. Cook for just a minute, and you're done. Serve with the white rice. If you want the dish to look nice, withhold a few shrimp from the recipe, cook them separately in some water and then add them to the top of each serving as a garnish, as I've done in the photo below. 

* Portuguese is a Latin-based language that developed in the Iberian Peninsula in western Europe. It is closely related to Spanish, but even more so to Galician, a language primarily spoken in northwest Spain. Brazil was once a colony of Portugal, and Brazil has the distinction of being the largest Portuguese speaking country in the world. Portuguese is from the Indo European family of languages, and thus it is related to English, but further down the family tree.  

 

WORD HISTORY:
Shrimp-This word for a "generally small, narrow shellfish" is related to "scrimp." The ultimate origin of "shrimp" is unclear, and its overall history is a bit "iffy," but Old Germanic had "skrimpanan," which had the notion of "to make smaller, to shrink." From this came Old English (Anglo-Saxon) "scrimman," which meant "to shrink." Whether a form of this English word then later produced "schrimpe" is not known, but that form later became modern "shrimp." Forms of the word in the other Germanic languages have a "p" sound,^ and it is "possible" that an English form of the word did too, but that that word had not been recorded by the educated part of English society from post Norman invasion times, when French and Latin were the preferences of the heavily Norman based nobility and high society. Of course it is also possible that even if the English word lacked the "p" sound, that the influence of its mainland Germanic relatives could have altered the English word, giving it the "p" sound, as the English traded with, and came into contact with, speakers of other Germanic languages, especially Flemish, Dutch, Frisian, Low German and Old Norse.         

^ The other Germanic languages do not use a form of the word for the shellfish.