Side Dishes

3 recipes

Bolo Do Caco

Bolo do caco is the Madeiran flatbread you'll get at every restaurant on the island, traditionally cooked on a hot basalt stone (the caco) but very happily on a heavy dry griddle at home. The dough is straightforward (strong flour, yeast, salt, water) with one twist: a small boiled and mashed orange sweet potato folded in, which gives the bread its faintly sweet edge and golden colour. After a single rise, you divide the dough, shape into 18 cm rounds, and press them onto a hot dry pan for five minutes a side until both faces are charred-spotted. Split horizontally, slathered with garlic-parsley butter, and closed back like a sandwich. Eat hot; it does not keep.

1 hour 45 minutes Serves4

Pão Alentejano

Pão Alentejano is Portugal's great regional bread, a slow-fermented loaf from the southern Alentejo plains with a deeply dark crust and a chewy, slightly sour crumb. It starts twelve hours before you bake, with an overnight poolish of flour, water and the tiniest pinch of yeast. The main dough goes together the next day, gets a stretch-and-fold every half hour during a two-hour bulk ferment, then shapes into a round and proves a final hour and a half. Into a hot oven (240°C with steam for the first fifteen minutes, then 220°C dry for another half hour) and out comes a loaf that smells faintly of vinegar and tears open with a structured, irregular crumb. Worth the day it takes.

17 hours 15 minutes Serves8

Sardinhas Assadas

Grilled sardines are the smell of a Portuguese summer. From June to August the small finger-length sardines come into season, you buy them from the fishmonger in the morning, salt them with coarse salt for an hour to firm the flesh, then grill them whole over charcoal (or under a domestic broiler) for three or four minutes a side until the skin chars and the flesh just lifts off the spine. Eat them with your fingers, off torn bread, with a glass of vinho verde and the lights low. The sea, in a single mouthful.

1 hour 22 minutes Serves4