Umbu

A short boil with sugar is how most of the harvest becomes umbuzada, thick enough to eat with a spoon.

Whipped together, the tang barely survives — that is the whole point of the dessert.

Fat softens the sharpness the way it does for every acidic Brazilian fruit.

A regional spirit and a regional fruit; muddled it drinks like a sharper caipirinha.

Roasted goat with umbu sauce is the caatinga's own answer to apple with pork.

Heat against tang turns a plain fruit sauce into something closer to a chutney.

Floral sugar rounds off an acid that on its own reads closer to green mango.

A grape spirit built for sour fruit meets one it has never actually met before.

Sharp tropical acid against salt mould, the umbuzada logic applied to a cheese board.