Pinhão: the Araucaria seed Curitiba eats all winter, and how to buy it

Overview

Pinhão is a seed, not a nut in the botanical sense: the large, resinous seed of the Araucaria angustifolia, the flat-topped conifer that gives the whole southern highlands their silhouette. The tree drops enormous cones in autumn, each holding dozens of seeds the size of a large date, and those seeds — boiled or roasted — are what people eat. Cracked open, the flesh is dense, faintly sweet and starchy, closest to a chestnut crossed with a waxy boiled potato. It is filling in a way a snack rarely is.

This is honestly a regional food rather than Curitiba’s own. It belongs to the plateau of the Paraná pine — the Campos Gerais and the cold uplands that run south through the neighbouring states — wherever the Araucaria grows, and it is eaten across all of southern Brazil, not just here. What makes it a Curitiba thing is the city’s climate and calendar: this is one of the coldest state capitals in the country, and when the winter damp sets in the pinhão appears, sold hot on the street and cooked into the season’s heavy dishes. It is the taste of the city being cold, which is a real and specific thing here in a way it is not further north.

There is a fact worth carrying before you buy any. The Araucaria is an endangered tree, listed as threatened, and its seed is protected. In the southern states a federal environmental rule bars the harvesting of pinhão before 15 April each year, so the cones mature, the species can reproduce, and the forest’s animals — which depend on the same seed — are not stripped early. That date is not trivia; it is the single most useful thing to know about when and whether to buy, and it comes back below.

What to order

In the street and the market you will meet pinhão in two forms, and the words are worth having.

• pinhão cozido — boiled. Simmered in salted water until the shell gives, then sold hot by weight in a paper cone or bag. This is the default, the thing a vendor hands you to eat walking, and it is the version to start with.
• pinhão assado or sapecado — roasted, often on embers or a hot plate until the woody shell blackens and splits. Drier, smokier, a little more work to open.

To eat one, you crack the hard outer shell — with your teeth at the pointed end, or a knife, or by pressing two together — and squeeze out the pale seed inside. The shell is inedible and goes on the floor or a plate; a small heap of split shells beside you is the normal, expected mess, not bad manners.

Beyond the plain seed, pinhão turns up cooked into the cold-weather kitchen, and these are worth ordering where you see them: paçoca de pinhão, the seeds pounded together with dried or shredded meat into a coarse, savoury mash; and entrevero, a stew of pinhão with assorted meats and vegetables. Around the Festa Junina — the June festivals that are the high season for eating it — you will also find it beside quentão, a hot spiced cachaça, which is the traditional pairing and a good one in the cold.

What to avoid

The main thing to avoid is not a bad version of the dish; it is buying it out of season. Pinhão on sale in the southern states well before mid-April has almost certainly been harvested against the conservation rule — taken green, before the cones would naturally drop — and it is both immature and part of the pressure on a threatened tree. Early is not a bargain here; it is a red flag. The honest season runs from about mid- autumn through the depth of winter, and a vendor doing it properly is selling at the right time of year, not the wrong one.

Do not confuse pinhão with the small pine nuts sold for cooking elsewhere — the little pale kernels stirred into a pesto. They are seeds of different pines, a fraction of the size, and the two are not substitutes in either direction; a recipe calling for one will not work with the other. If something labelled “pine nut” is small and cheap and available all year, it is not this.

With the roasted kind, over-blackened seeds that rattle dry inside their shells have been cooked too hard and lost the point — the flesh should be soft and moist, not shrunken. And be wary of shelled, pre-picked pinhão sold loose and cold: the shell is what keeps it, and the labour of cracking is exactly what you are meant to be paying almost nothing for.

Practicalities

The clock on pinhão is a calendar, not an hour of the day. It arrives with the cold and the mid-April opening, peaks through the June festivals and the hardest weeks of winter, and thins out as spring comes — so the time to eat it is simply the time of year you are here, and in high summer you should not expect to find it fresh at all. A hot cone of the boiled kind from a street vendor or a market stall is an inexpensive thing, very roughly 10 to 25 reais for a portion to pick at; sold raw by weight to cook at home it is cheaper still, and a price far above that usually means you are buying convenience or a sit-down setting rather than better seed.

It is street and market food first, so a little cash is worth having for the vendor with a pot on a cart even though the city takes cards almost everywhere. Buy it hot and eat it warm: boiled pinhão stiffens and turns waxy as it cools, and reheating never quite brings it back. And give yourself to the cracking — it is slow, communal, faintly addictive food, the kind a table works through over an afternoon rather than finishes in a hurry, and rushing it rather misses what the season is for.