Sardines with chickpeas and poached egg/Conserva de Sardinhas com Grão e Ovo Escalfado

Portuguese fast food. Lunch for one with your favourite tin of sardines (we used sardines in tomato sauce), some chickpeas and a poached egg. This is literally quicker than ordering a pizza, much healthier and much tastier (than your average pizza)…

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Preserved Sardines/Sardinha de Conserva

Sardines are a big deal in Portugal. Together with bacalhau (salted cod), the sardine has become a symbol of Portuguese food and culture recognised around the world. A visitor to Portugal will not need to search much to see sardines on a menu, printed on t-shirts, made out porcelain, on designer goods etc…

Tomatoes stuffed with sardines and black eye beans / Tomates recheados com sardinhas e feijão frade

The legendary Portuguese sardines are known for their depth of flavour. Even in their canned state, these are little gems of Portuguese flavour. This recipe uses sardines to enhance a traditional salad of black eye beans, onion, parsley and olive oil.

Grilled Sardines/Sardinha Assada

The cornerstone of Portuguese coastal lifestyle. The smell of sardines grilling outdoors flavours any recollections of walks trough Bairro Alto in Lisbon, Ribeira in Porto or a small town on the coast of Alentejo.

This is one of those incredibly simple dishes which can very easily go wrong. The two main elements are the sardines themselves and the “assador” the person who grills them. In restaurants specialising in grilled fish this is a specific person, different from the chef.

The traditional season for Sardines in Portugal is July during the religious festivals. Sardines feature in everything from large banquets to fast food stalls where you eat one on a piece of bread while standing and drinking a glass of wine or sangria.
Sardines for grilling need to be absolutely fresh, medium size and pre-salted for at least 30 minutes.

Grilled Sardines

Cockle Rice with Petinga/Arroz de Berbigão com Petinga

This dish combines two key flavours of Portuguese cooking: rice cooked in a light shellfish stock and crispy fried fish. This is a slight variation on the traditional seafood “running” rice using risotto to produce a rich and creamy finish. I didn’t call the dish itself “cockle risotto” as this does not follow the Italian technique for cooking risotto rice. The fried fish used here are small sardines (fishing these is forbidden in most countries) but any kind of small fry should work. The rice can also be served on its own as a main dish.

Cockles/Berbigão

BBQ/Churrasco

Now, BBQ is a big topic! Once you get over the Anglo-Saxon obsession with cooking cheap and nasty bangers and burgers on what is possibly the best cooking method – grilling over lump-wood charcoal. The three letter word starts to become more useful. In Portugal, churrasco or grelhados ao carvão is often synonym with extremely fresh food, simply seasoned and cooked to perfection.The terminology is itself ambiguous and the words “assar” and “grelhar” are used interchangeably depending on the ingredients (e.g. sardinhas assadas, peixe grelhado)! Let’s keep it ambiguous!