Feijoada Per Person

Feijoada per Person Calculator

Feijoada is Brazil's national dish, a thick black-bean stew loaded with assorted salted and smoked pork cuts. When you're cooking for an event, the usual per-person portion runs around 250-300 g cooked black beans + 100-150 g mixed meats + 80 g rice + 40 g kale + 30 g cassava flour + 1 orange slice. Those "mixed meats" tend to be a combination of linguica calabresa, smoked pork ribs (costelinha), paio sausage, pig's ear and trotter, jerked beef (charque) and bacon.

Where feijoada actually comes from is still argued over. The romantic telling credits enslaved Africans on colonial plantations, who supposedly stretched leftover pork scraps with beans. Modern historians, Carlos Augusto Ditadi and Luis da Camara Cascudo among them, push back and trace it instead to European peasant stews such as the Portuguese cozido, the Spanish cocido and the French cassoulet. Whichever story you believe, the Saturday-lunch feijoada grew into a national tradition that IPHAN now lists as part of Brazilian intangible heritage.

Applications

You'll find this used in restaurants, churrascarias, samba schools, at weddings, corporate Saturday lunches and family get-togethers all over Brazil. The formula holds up anywhere from 10 to 500 guests. For really large events it's common to trim the per-person meat a little, since the side dishes (rice, farofa, kale) end up filling people up.

FAQ

Why oranges? The orange slices on the side cut through the fat, help digestion and offset the heavy pork. People have been serving them this way since at least the 19th century.

Can I make a lighter version? Sure. A "feijoada light" drops the pig's ear, trotter and charque and keeps just sausage, ribs and bacon, which brings the total meat down to roughly 100 g per person.

How long should the beans soak? Give the black beans 8-12 hours. The salted meats (charque, pork ear/trotter) need a full 24 hours, and you'll want to change the water a few times to pull out the excess salt before they go in the pot.