Some of the food flavours of Portuguese-speaking countries were recently on display at IFT. The Institute was one of the partners of the 10th Cultural Week of China and Portuguese-speaking Countries, organised in October by the Permanent Secretariat of the Forum for Economic and Trade Co-operation between China and Portuguese-speaking Countries (Macao).
Two cooking demonstrations took place at IFT as part of the Cultural Week, featuring respectively chefs from Cape Verde and Mozambique. Each guest chef prepared a menu featuring traditional dishes from their home country, offering participants step-by-step instructions on the entire process.
“This type of event is very important to showcase our cultural heritage,” says Chef Olívio Fernandes from Cape Verde. “My country’s cuisine is very rich, but often people know little about it, especially in Asia… But once they try some of our dishes, they love them.”
During his cooking demo, Chef Fernandes prepared dishes featuring traditional ingredients from Cape Verde such as “xarém” (a mash made with corn flour) and a cheesecake using cheese from Cape Verde’s Fogo Island.
Chef Fernandes is an instructor at the Cape Verde Hotel and Tourism School. He says that IFT, by hosting cooking demonstrations with chefs from different countries, is helping to build among its students knowledge of different culinary traditions.
“Culinary arts have no boundaries. Wherever you go, cooking techniques are similar; the differences are in the seasonings and ingredients used,” he says. “This type of demo stimulates curiosity among students, namely to taste novel things – even if they are completely unfamiliar to them at first.”
Chef Humberto Nhantumbo, from Mozambique, also delivered a cooking demo at IFT as part of the Cultural Week. He says his country too offers a wide range of dishes, varying from region to region depending on local availability of ingredients.
“Our gastronomy is quite diverse: for instance, in Central Mozambique, people use coconut a lot for cooking; in the southern part of the country, people like to use baobab fruit,” he says.
Chef Nhantumbo was until recently a chef at Mozambique’s Embassy in the United Arab Emirates. He is now based in Maputo, Mozambique’s capital.
Chef Nhantumbo says some ingredients for his demo were hard to find in Macao; but he was pleased to see that people enjoyed Mozambican flavours. For his cooking display at IFT, the chef prepared dishes such as shrimp curry with coconut milk, and dry fish chutney with tomato sauce and “xima”, a mash made with corn flour.
IFT has been particularly active in promoting culinary flavours from around the world. The Institute has in recent years held chef demonstrations and food promotions celebrating the national culinary heritage of countries across several continents, including South America, Africa and Oceania.
