Manioc Showdown: Farofa v. Farinha

Manioc, the root vegetable more commonly known to Americans these days by the Spanish word yuca, makes it to the Brazilian table in infinite ways, from tapioca to chopped-and-fried mandioca frita to a dense but spongy cake. But it is most common in floury form, served as ever-present side dishes called farinha and farofa.

I love farofa, which is made by toasting the finely ground flour, preferably with butter, and adding bits of meat or sometimes egg or banana or greens or something else mixed in. At its prepackaged worst, it’s good, and at its homemade best, it’s enough to make you wonder why we aren’t all eating more manioc these days. How much do I love the stuff? A Brazilian journalist once literally wrote a column on my passion for it. Not kidding.

Farofa is what you get in much of Brazil, including São Paulo, where I’ve been living. But when you hit the Amazon, you’re downgraded to farinha, which in its most common version is a coarsely ground flour sprinkled on rice and beans and meat to give it the unmistakably unpleasant crunchiness suggesting it was laced with sand.  This is not, I should add, an opinion shared by those who live here.

For four days aboard the Dois Irmãos I ship from Manaus, we were deep in the heart of farinha land. The locals poured the granular stuff onto the already starch-heavy meals; I mostly abstained.

After four days aboard, we arrived in Rondônia, a sparsely populated state so distant from Brazil’s urban centers that when people in São Paulo hear my accented Portuguese and ask where I’m from, and I say Rondônia, they sometimes actually believe me. One of the first things I found out when I got there is that many Brazilians who settled there actually came from the south and southeast, farofa country.

So when my bus from Porto Velho to the Bolivian border stopped for lunch in the tiny town of Mutum Paraná, there was farofa — with little bits of bacon, mmm — on the table at the pay-by-weight buffet. I loaded a heaping spoonful onto my rice, garlicky beans, slices of beef and chunks of fried chicken. (Total meal cost: $3).

The Rondonienses accents, it turned out, sounded nothing like my own. But their taste in manioc products made me feel right at home.