Basiado cocktails
“Like soccer and samba, cachaça is part of the Brazilian soul,” explained Fazenda Soledad’s master distiller, Vincent Bastos Ribeiro, at the Gourmet Latino Festival’s cachaça tasting seminar. Attendees were doing their part to add to the 6.4 billion caipirinhas—the Portuguese-speaking country’s national drink—said to be served annually, while sampling lesser known beverages like the spiced batida de maracuja, a chile-spiked passionfruit cocktail, and learning how to evaluate cachaça on appearance, aroma and taste just like with wine, spit bucket and all. “There is nothing more insulting than calling cachaça rum” Leblon’s CEO, Steve Luttmann, emphasized. We can think of a few worse things to be called, but Luttman is on a crusade to free cachaça from the Brazilian rum label. One is made from fresh sugar cane juice, the other from molasses. Got that? Cahaça expert, Olie Berlic, was also a bit of a rum disparager, describing cachaça as “more akin to a quality tequila than rum.”
Chef and author of “The Brazilian Kitchen,” Leticia Moreinos Schwartz, who cooks lighter Brazilian food using French technique, provided snacks like pao de queijo and croquette de carne for soaking up all the cachaça in various guises. She’s such a proponent that she recommended adding the clear liquor to chocolate, risotto, penne a la vodka...and hamburgers. Ok, ok, not the latter but we wouldn’t be surprised. —Krista Garcia; photos by Gabi Porter
