Tacaca Recipe Calculator

Tacacá: the indigenous soup served in a gourd

Tacacá is a hot soup with Tupi indigenous roots, and few dishes say Belém do Pará quite like it. You build it from tucupi + jambu + dried shrimp + cassava gum + chilli and serve it scalding hot in a cuiá coité, a calabash gourd. The ingredient that gives it away is the jambu (Acmella oleracea). Its leaf carries spilanthol, the compound responsible for numbing your mouth and tongue and leaving behind that telltale tingle.

Tell the calculator how many people are eating and it scales the recipe up, keeping the tucupi, jambu, shrimp and gum in the right proportions. On the street the soup is the domain of the tacacazeiras, women who work big pots from late afternoon into the night and ladle it straight into the gourd. IPHAN-PA has it on record as Intangible Cultural Heritage.

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In Belém it is close to a daily habit. People queue up at the neighbourhood stalls somewhere between 4pm and 10pm. The dish left the street corner behind a long time ago; you'll find it on tasting menus and at cultural festivals now, and most tourists in the Amazon end up trying it. Always from the cuiá, mind you. Serving tacacá in a bowl is frowned upon.

FAQ

Why does my mouth go numb? That's the spilanthol in jambu at work. It behaves like a natural oral anaesthetic, tingling and slightly numbing the tongue, lips and cheeks. The feeling wears off after a few minutes and does no harm.

Can I make tacacá without jambu? You can, but then it stops being the real thing. Outside the Amazon, where fresh jambu is hard to come by, some people fall back on watercress, and it never quite measures up.

Is the cassava gum the same as tapioca? Both come from cassava starch, so they share a common origin. The difference is in how they end up. For tacacá the gum is hydrated and cooked down until it turns translucent and gelatinous, rather than the granular form you find in tapioca crepes.