Acai!!! Acai!!!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Hey! After much saudade (longing for, missing) acai, I found the genuine stuff!!

Woo-hoo!!

Forget the frickin’ acai smoothies. They don’t taste like acai. They taste like whatever other fruits, but with a grittiness and a slightly purple-y color that come from the berry.

What you want are the smoothie packs. Specifically, try the Sambazon Original Acai and the Pure Acai flavors.

The back of the Original Acai package will tell you to take a couple packets of acai and whip them up in a blender with some juice or soymilk and a banana. Ignore that advice. Let the individual packets defrost. Then put the contents of the packets into a bowl and smoosh them up until there are no hard frozen bits left. The consistency should be more or less that of smooshed-up, partially melted ice cream. Then eat it, bit by delicious bit, with or without granola. The taste isn’t perfect, but it’s about right. It’s the right kind of stuff. The main flavor is that of the acai.

If you want something with the consistency of a thick juice or pre-packaged smoothie, whip two packets of acai with a little bit of orange juice and a tiny bit of pineapple, or something like that. IMHO, using soymilk blunts the taste. And go easy–very easy–on whatever fruit or juice you add. For whatever reason, the flavor of the acai from these packets is easy to overwhelm.

I haven’t yet tried the pure acai pack, but, since the ingredients are acai with a tiny bit of natural preservative, I’d be willing to bet that the flavor’s the same as the stuff I had in Brazil. Straight up, unsweetened acai is about as appealing as unsweetened chocolate–bleah! But with a bunch of honey or something, it would be delicious. In Brazil, the stuff would be blended with one of a zillion fruits, many of which are unavailable in the US, and would have guarana syrup as the sweetener. So far, I have not found guarana syrup for sale at any of my local stores. It might be available on-line, though.

Acai!! Acai!! Woo-hoo!!!

All right. I just ate 2 packets of the Original Acai, which might be why I’m a little bouncy right now. But just thought I’d let you know–this thread’s a follow-up to another thread, in which Stranger asked where you can find acai like the stuff some of us have had in Brazil.

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Update…for anyone interested.

I have just finished eating the contents of one pack of the Pure Acai blended with dark honey.

And, my, was it ever delicious. Divine. Wow.

The flavor of the dark honey complemented the flavor of the acai beautifully, and the sweetness was perfect.

In Brazil, the pure acai would be blended with another type of fruit to add a second flavor and with guarana syrup to add sweetness. The dark honey/acai combination is not one I think you’d find too readily in Brazil, but that really doesn’t matter. It’s incredible, and I highly recommend it to everyone.

Yum, yum, yum, yum…

So, who else here is an acai addict?

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I see you’re in Ohio. :cool: (poor thing!)
Anyway, where do I get these acai smoothie things? You make it sound so great, I just want to try some!!!

:slight_smile:

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I guess I didn’t look hard enough in Whole Foods, where I’m sure they have it. I’ve been trying to find it ever since I started Perricone back in January.

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Where in OH are you? Anywhere close to me?

If so, I can answer your question:

pretty easily.

Check out Wild Oats, or any other upscale organic/health food place. They’ll have it. So might some gourmet/general imported foods places. I know that Trader Joe’s doesn’t stock it, though.

And you don’t want the ready-to-drink stuff. What you want are the frozen packs. At Wild Oats, the acai is with the other frozen berries–raspberries, strawberries, etc. But I could see other stores putting acai with the frozen desserts.

vivalostwages–Whole Foods does, indeed, have acai. At least, they have it in the San Francisco Bay Area. I saw it in the freezer section a couple of weekends ago.

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HEATHEN! I bet you learned how to eat açai in São Paulo or Rio. Only those southerners would do something this blasphemous. Açai should be eaten with farinha de tapioca and nothing else! You are allowed to eat some “camarão seco” as a side dish, but that’s it. Next thing, you’ll be telling me maniçoba should be cooked for less than three days. You could kill someone like that! :smiley: My wife is from Belém so I know of what I speak.

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On another note: do you think there is any chance Sambazon might deliver to the Netherlands? I miss açai like crazy. Also, do they by any chance have cupuaçu?

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They have acerola, but I don’t think acerola’s really all that special. Yeah, it’s good, but it’s no cupuacu. As far as I can tell, they don’t have cupuacu. Or cacau. Or graviola. Or mangaba. Or…but you get the idea, I think. I don’t understand why so many incredible Brazilian fruits are unavailable in the US. I have half a mind to become a fruit importer just to remedy this dreadful situation. I’d love to know that your basic soccer mom in, say, Indiana could go to her local grocery store and pick up a couple pounds of bacuri, umbu, or fruta de conde.

Sambazon might well deliver to the Netherlands. I have no idea. Check out their website for details. An Australian guy I met while in Salvador became as hooked on acai as I did. It would be really cool if that guy could get his acai fix delivered, too.

And in re: your heresy comments–yeah, I had acai in Rio and in Salvador. I’m a heathen. I admit it. I really wanted to go further north when I was in Brazil, but I ran out of both money and time. Ah, well…

And frozen acai, by itself, is yucky. In Belem, you probably don’t have to rely on the frozen stuff, so it probably tastes different (better, if such a thing is imaginable) there. I always thought that acai had a really interesting taste and . might add a lot to a dish if used as a spice. (Like, maybe it could be dried and added to other spices in curries, etc.) I never saw acai used that way during my rather limited time in Brazil, but I think it has potential.

Could you give us some examples of non-sweet dishes involving acai? Dishes that could be made with frozen acai would be best, of course. I’d love to try them, if the other ingredients were available. Other people might enjoy checking them out, too. You’d be fighting ignorance of northern Brazilian cuisine.

BTW–in re: manicoba. Hey, I was in Salvador. Those guys make some great manicoba. It’s basically the Brazilian equivalent of collard greens. Actually, it was really interesting to see the links between Afro-Brazilian cuisine and American soul food. But I digress…

Oh, and BTW–how do you get the accents and cedilhas you used in your text? I can do that in Word, but somehow I can’t get them to go in my posts here on the SDMB.

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Actually, I just did some googling and actually found a store here in the Netherlands that sells frozen “polpa de açai” online. They also sell açerola, goiaba and pitanga, but no cupuaçu. :frowning:

Yep, you got that right. There’s really nothing comparable to fresh açai, but since there’s no way I will get that here, I can live with the frozen pulp.

In Belém it is usually eaten as a side dish (together with “camarão seco”, “pirarucu frito”, or “charque”), or on its own with farinha de tapioca and sometimes even sugar shudder added. The only recipes I have ever seen with açai as an ingredient are for ice cream or cake.

Have you ever tried “tacaca”? This is basically dried salted shrimp cooked in tucupi (that’s fermented mandioc juice) together with “farinha de tapioca”, “pimenta malageta” and “jambu”. Jambu is the leaves from the plant “Wulfia Stenogossa” and has the interesting effect of making the lips tingle. There is a good recipe for tacaca here.

I’m using Firefox as my browser on Debian woody. I just write the words with cedillas and accents in OpenOffice, and then copy and paste them into my post. If it’s a longer post, I will write the whole thing in OpenOffice and copy and paste that.

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You know why maniçoba has to simmer for at least three days, right? it is actually made from the finely ground leaves of the manioc (or bitter cassava) plant, and these have such high concentrations of cyanogenetic glucosides, that they are poisonous (or will at least cause a nice headache). They have to cook that long to break down the glucosides completely.

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Mycroft–Yeah, actually, I did know about preparation of manioc for human consumption. In the course of my grad program, I’ve ended up learning a ton of stuff about plant defenses against herbivores. Manioc’s high concentration of cyanogenic glycosides is one of the classic examples of a plant using poisons as defense against herbivory.

But there was no way I was gonna let you diss the cooking from Northeastern Brazil. Which is incredibly, addictively tasty, as long as you stay away from the bland and sticky faux-European cuisine of the white colonial ruling class. But that’s another story.

In re: tacaca, jambu, pirarucu frito, and charque–I’ve never had any of those things, unfortunately. I really need to find a way to get my sorry butt over to Belem if only for the food.

I’m impressed you found a source of pitanga. I’ll have to look for some company or other that’ll ship Brazilian fruits to the US.

You haven’t, by any chance, come across anyplace that will sell you good licor de genipabo? I bought several liters of it from the headquarters of the landless movement in Bahia, but the package I shipped it in never made it home. :frowning: It’s such a pity, too. The stuff I bought was like liquid gold on the palate.

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Well, Mycroft, much though I love discussing all things Brazil, we should probably be getting back on topic. If you’d like to discuss Brazilian cuisine in general, or Brazilian cultural stuff, or what-have-you, I’d be happy to do so in another thread.

But for now–we’re just discussing the acai available in countries other than Brazil.

For those of you who’ve found acai outside of Brazil–where did you find the stuff? What do you think of it so far? Have you made any acai-containing concoctions you found particularly scrumptious? If so, could you post the recipes for said concoctions?

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Hey, I know. Some of my wives friends are from Bahai, and I love me some caruru, mocotó or vatapá (and I love those names too).

The place that sells açai and other “frutas” here in Europe is actually called acai-do-brasil, and there is a store in Almere, Netherlands called Finalmente Brasil that sells some of their products along with other Brazilian specialties. No genipabo tough. :frowning:

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Mycroft–Thanks for the links. Neither of those companies would be practical for me to order from, but I know people in Germany who would be glad to hear of these guys. I’ll pass on the info. :slight_smile:

Besides–the fact that there are European companies that specialize in Brazilian imports makes me think that there must be American companies that do the same thing. I’ve heard that there are Brazilian expat communities in Miami, LA, and NY. They must be getting their fruit fix from somewhere, you know? I’ll check it out in a couple of days–as soon as exams are over.

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Boston also has a very large community of Brazilians.

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Boston, huh? Wow–I had no idea. I knew that the Boston area was big for Capo Verdeans, but I didn’t realize that there was a Brazilian community there, too.

Maybe there are other Brazilian communities in other places in the US I am totally unaware of. I think some Googling is called for, here.

And after tomorrow night, I’ll do just that.

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Thanks for the info.

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There must be a goodly number of Brazilians in Vancouver, BC as well. I had a terrific bowl of feijoada in a small bistro there, served by a Brazilian waitress.