Crossroads, No. 3: Marcela Ikeda’s Adzuki Bean Feijoada
(That One Dish’s Version) (From the Dill Digital Vault)
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Crossroads is a column where we explore Asian immigrant stories through the lens of food. A challenge immigrants often face in a new environment is not having the access to the same ingredients as they did in the motherland—and one way they end up adapting is by turning what they do have available into familiar dishes that remind them of home. This act of culinary resourcefulness and creativity results in quirky, in-between cuisine that beautifully showcases the experience of growing up with a multicultural identity. We’re not talking fusion cuisine here (as in, stuff that would be served in a restaurant or marketed to the masses) but rather, food that’s simultaneously rooted in tradition and innovation—not to mention, becomes deeply personal to immigrants and their families. You can check out TOD’s archive of past recipes here.
Hi all, hope everyone is well. I just wanted to chime in real quick and share that today’s dispatch of “That One Dish” actually comes via Mike Sula, a long-time contributor and friend of Dill Magazine who wrote the first iteration of this column for Dill’s weekly newsletter. This piece in particular featuring Montevideo-based chef Marcela Ikeda was originally penned in 2021, and has been kept in the vault for quite some time. I’m so happy that I now have the platform to give it the spotlight it deserves. (For OG subscribers, do expect to see a few of Mike’s pieces from “Crossroads” V1 re-appear further down the line). Mike—thank you so much, as always, for your brilliant storytelling. And now, without further ado …
Marcela Ikeda has a dependence on beans that was ordained by both heredity and environment.
“As a good Brazilian I do need to eat beans once in a while,” she says. “Otherwise my body knows something’s wrong.”
Marcela is a Montevideo-based chef who was born in her Brazilian-Italian mother’s hometown in the southern Brazilian state of Parana. But at seven the family followed her Japanese-Brazilian father to the enclave of Oizumi, Japan, aka “Brazil Town,” home to thousands of Nikkei expats. The cuisines of both cultures don’t exist for her as a forced fusion. They flow together through her veins.
“I have memories as a kid of my grandpa eating pasta with chopsticks,” she says. “I remember eating Japanese bean sweets with a spoon with my cousins. I grew up eating Japanese family meals with beans and rice with green tea on the side. Whenever I am eating Brazilian food I throw in a big chunk of pickled ginger.”
Marcela moved to Uruguay in 2015, and eventually began cooking professionally just as Montevideo was undergoing a “food boom,” as she puts it; a gastro renaissance in which its citizens embraced the cuisines of the world. Lines formed around the corner at the café where she was working when she introduced the capital to okonomiyaki. At the snack kiosk she opened near the beach, she sold a variation of the Japanese pancake dorayaki stuffed with a sweet paste made from brown Brazilian beans. (As I type these words she’s stuffing gyoza live on Instagram.)
Marcela arrived in the country not long after another watershed moment, when Uruguay became the first country in the world to legalize cannabis. Today she creates and sells edibles under her Larica Uruguay brand, and runs a guest house in Ciudad Vieja, the city’s old town, where she hosts cannabis-infused dinners that draw from both Asian and South American culinary traditions.
Before she introduced Montevideanos to Japanese street food she introduced her Japanese friends to a particularly Nikkei interpretation of Brazil’s national dish. Feijoada, the porky bean stew was born out of the ingenuity of the enslaved, making use of offal and off cuts, and eaten with rice, collard greens, and toasted cassava flour, or farofa. Today long weekend lunches and celebratory occasions wouldn’t seem right without it, but in Oizumi her mother couldn’t always get black beans for feijoada.
She needed to be resourceful too, subbing adzuki beans, the red legume whose taste most Japanese associate with sweet bean paste-stuffed treats such as dorayaki or mochi. When Marcela moved out on her own she also relied on adzuki beans. “I used to make it when I needed to feel the power of Brazilian beans in my body,” she says, particularly when she was living on Okinawa, working at a telemarketing company. “This was my way to satisfy my hungry soul.”
Marcela had no access to chorizo, smoked Brazilian linguiça calabresa, or any of the collagen-rich cuts (pork ribs, snout, ears, tails) that lend the slow cooked stew its lip-sticky appeal. She subbed in bacon, and served the dish with Japanese rice and a large fried sardine, marinated kabayaki-style, in soy sauce, sake, mirin, and sugar. A friend in Oizumi sent her bags of Yoki-brand farofa, founded in Brazil in 1960 by Japanese immigrant Yoshizo Kitano. She ate her red feijoada with Japanese pickles as palate cleansers instead of the typical orange slices.
“I used to bring feijoada to work so my Japanese colleagues would try it with their regular food,” she says. “The sardine was a bonus I got from our staff mess.”
At first her coworkers declared “shoppai, ne?” or “salty, isn’t it?” With time they came around. “They would always welcome it with a smile of surprise followed by ‘oishii’ (‘delicious’) afterwards. I always called it ‘light.’”
Black beans are easy to come by in Uruguay, but adzukis aren’t, so Marcela rarely makes her Nikkei-style red feijoada anymore. But she still eats it with pickles. “Another important thing is that I like eating feijoada in a Japanese style bowl,” she says. “And I also enjoy misoshiru on the side.
“I think this dish is able to connect us, Brazilians, with our home culture. It doesn't matter where I am, I will always need feijoada. And I am willing to break any culinary rule to get as much iron as I can for my body.”
1½ pounds dry adzuki beans (soaked for 12 hours)
1 pound skin-on slab bacon, cut into ¼-inch lardons
2 bay leaves
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 large onion, diced
8 cloves garlic, minced
Shoyu or salt, to taste
Cooked white rice, for serving
Farofa, for serving
Collard greens, for serving (chiffonaded, and sautéed with olive oil and minced garlic
Shibazuke, or other Japanese pickles, for serving (available in Japanese grocery stores)
1 tin kabayaki-style sardines (available in Japanese grocery stores)
Place beans, bacon, and bay leaves in a heavy pot. Cover with water by 1 inch, about 8 cups. Bring to a boil over high heat, stirring occasionally. Skim any foam from the surface. Reduce heat, continuing to skim foam and simmer gently, about 1 ½-2 hours. Add water to keep it covered if needed, stirring occasionally.
When the beans are tender remove 1½ cups and puree in a blender. Return to pot.
Heat vegetable oil in a skillet over medium-low heat. Cook onion, stirring, until browned and caramelized, about 20 minutes. Turn heat up to medium-high, and add garlic. Cook, stirring, until the garlic is golden, about 3 minutes. Bring beans back to a boil over high heat, stir in the onion mixture, season to taste with salt and serve with white rice, farofa, greens, pickles, and sardines on the side.