Portuguese Recipes: Five Classic Dishes You Can Actually Cook at Home

The best Portuguese food is stubbornly unfashionable. It does not photograph like a tasting menu and it rarely involves anything you could call a technique in the French sense. What it involves is patience, good raw ingredients and a confidence that salt, garlic, olive oil and time will do the work. That is exactly why it travels so well into home kitchens. You do not need special equipment or a supplier of esoteric ingredients, just a willingness to let a pot simmer and to slice greens thinner than feels reasonable. These five recipes cover the range from weeknight simple to a proper weekend project, and between them they will teach you more about how Portugal eats than any list of restaurant recommendations.

Start with caldo verde, the green soup of the north, because it is the easiest thing on this list and one of the most eaten dishes in the country. Peel and slice 600 grams of potatoes, simmer them in 1.5 litres of salted water with half an onion and two crushed garlic cloves for about twenty minutes, then blend the whole thing into a smooth base. While that cooks, take 200 grams of collard greens or kale, remove the thick central stems and roll the leaves into tight cigars before slicing them into threads as fine as you can manage. This cutting, done properly, is called cortar em juliana and it is the only part of the recipe that asks anything of you. Stir the greens into the potato base, simmer for five minutes until tender but still vivid, then ladle into bowls over a slice of fried chouriço and finish each one with a thread of good olive oil. Total time is around thirty five minutes, and it feeds four people for roughly six euros. The mistake to avoid is boiling the greens to death, which turns the soup khaki and flat.

Next is bacalhau à Brás, the dish Lisbon eats when it wants comfort. If you can find ready soaked salt cod, use 400 grams of it. Otherwise soak dried cod shreds in cold water for twenty minutes, changing the water once. Fry a large sliced onion and two garlic cloves slowly in generous olive oil until sweet and golden, add the cod and let it soften for a few minutes, then tip in 300 grams of matchstick fried potatoes. In Portugal everyone buys the ready made batata palha from the supermarket, and you should too if you can find it, since frying your own matchsticks is the one part of this recipe that is genuinely tedious. Beat six eggs, pour them in and stir over low heat until just set, keeping the mixture moist rather than scrambling it dry. Take it off the heat, fold in a handful of chopped parsley and a dozen halved black olives, and serve straight away. The whole dish takes twenty minutes and works as lunch, dinner or the thing you eat standing up in the kitchen at midnight.

For something that tastes like a holiday, make arroz de marisco, the wet seafood rice of the coast. Sweat a chopped onion, a red pepper and three garlic cloves in olive oil, add a tin of chopped tomatoes and a tablespoon of tomato purée, then pour in a litre of good fish or shellfish stock and let it reduce slightly for ten minutes. Add 300 grams of short grain rice, the same kind you would use for paella, and simmer uncovered for fifteen minutes, stirring occasionally. Then add your seafood: prawns, clams, mussels, squid rings, whatever looks good, around 800 grams in total. Cook five more minutes until the shells open and the rice is swimming in broth, not dry like paella. This is the point people get wrong. Arroz de marisco should be malandrinho, meaning loose and almost soupy. Finish with coriander, check the salt, and serve it in the pot in the middle of the table. Feeds four generously, costs around twenty five euros if you shop sensibly, and takes under an hour.

Frango piri piri is the Algarve's gift to weekend cooking. Spatchcock a whole chicken by cutting out the backbone and pressing it flat, which lets it grill evenly. Make the marinade by blitzing four red chillies, or two if you are cautious, with four garlic cloves, the juice of a lemon, four tablespoons of olive oil, a tablespoon each of paprika and red wine vinegar, a teaspoon of salt and a splash of whisky or brandy if you have it. Rub this all over the bird and leave it for at least two hours, overnight if you can. Grill over medium coals or roast at 200 degrees Celsius for about fifty minutes, turning and basting, until the skin is charred in places and the juices run clear. Serve with chips, a simple salad and extra sauce on the side. In the Algarve this costs about twelve euros at a roadside churrasqueira, but the homemade version has the advantage that you control the heat, which matters because piri piri should tingle, not punish.

The pastel de nata is the weekend project, and it deserves honesty upfront: your first batch will not look like the ones from a Lisbon pastry counter, and that is fine, they will still taste remarkable. For the custard, whisk 300 millilitres of whole milk with a strip of lemon peel and a cinnamon stick until steaming, then cool slightly. In another pan dissolve 250 grams of sugar in 150 millilitres of water and boil to a light syrup, about three minutes. Whisk 30 grams of flour into 100 millilitres of cold milk, combine with the warm milk, strain out the peel and cinnamon, then add the syrup and six egg yolks, whisking until smooth. For the pastry, use a sheet of all butter puff pastry rolled into a tight log and cut into twelve discs, pressed into muffin tins with wet thumbs so the base is thinner than the walls. Fill three quarters full and bake at your oven's maximum, 260 to 280 degrees Celsius if it goes there, for ten to twelve minutes until the tops are blistered and blackened in spots. That scorching is not a mistake, it is the signature. Eat warm with cinnamon and icing sugar dusted on top, preferably the same day, ideally with a strong espresso.

A few shopping notes make all of this easier. Salt cod appears in most large European supermarkets now, and ready soaked versions remove the only annoying step. Pimentão doce, Portuguese sweet paprika, is worth seeking out for its smokiness, but a good Spanish pimentón dulce is a fair substitute. For olive oil, anything labelled Portuguese from a mid range shelf will outperform a generic extra virgin in these dishes. And if you can find a bottle of Vinho Verde for the arroz de marisco and a cold Sagres or Super Bock for the piri piri chicken, dinner starts to feel less like a cooking exercise and more like a small trip south.