Vatapá

Bread is blended with shrimp, peanuts, coconut milk and dendê palm oil into a thick, creamy, spiced purée served with rice or stuffed into acarajé. It is a cornerstone of Afro-Brazilian Bahian cooking.

Vatapá traces its roots to West African culinary traditions, where similar ground-nut and seafood stews were common, and was carried to Brazil by enslaved Africans during the colonial era. In Bahia, it became a defining dish of Afro-Brazilian cooking, closely tied to the city of Salvador and the cultural heritage of the region, though its exact origins are debated among food historians.

The dish is a cornerstone of Bahian cuisine and appears in both everyday meals and religious contexts, often associated with candomblé traditions where it holds symbolic significance. Regional variations exist across Brazil - in the Amazon, for instance, vatapá may substitute cassava flour for bread - while Bahians typically serve it with rice or as a filling for acarajé, a deep-fried black-eyed pea fritter that is itself an iconic Afro-Brazilian street food.