There are many different diets you can follow to adjust your health and your lifestyle to meet your goals. One of the diets that gained popularity over the last decade is the ketogenic diet, also known as keto. It’s an extension of the low-carb diet concept, taking things to greater extremes of focusing on protein and fat over carbohydrates.
Sounds like you’ll be right at home in a churrascaria, right? After all, when our menu is primarily based around the delicious meats you can enjoy, you’re bound to leave satisfied without risking your diet.
If you’re taking keto seriously, though, you’ll want to know more than just the fact that meat is on the menu. So, let’s take a look at the keto diet and how a churrascaria like Texas de Brazil can be the perfect match for you.
Table of Contents
A Brief Overview of the Ketogenic Diet
If you’re already familiar with the ketogenic diet and the science behind it, feel free to skip this section. Otherwise, read on for a brief lesson.
Sugars like glucose are the easiest form of energy your body can use. They’re readily and easily available, abundant in our modern diets, and extremely easy for your body to process. Complex carbohydrates like fiber and simple carbohydrates like sugar both serve this purpose, though sugar is much easier for obvious reasons.
The downside is that your body is primed to not waste energy. As an evolutionary adaptation to survive times of famine, when you have a surplus of food (and especially sugars), your body will store some of it away. That stored energy takes the form of body fat.
When you aren’t getting enough food, and especially when you aren’t getting carbohydrates in your diet, your body still needs to get enough energy to fuel itself. When sugar is scarce, your body enters a state known as ketosis.
In ketosis, your body is primed to digest fat for energy and to burn stored fat for energy. Fat is converted into ketones, which can take the place of sugar for metabolic energy production. They can cross the blood-brain barrier and fuel your brain directly and can be used as fuel by your cells the same way sugar can.
You can trick your body into kicking off this process by reducing the number of carbohydrates you consume in a day. That means dramatically cutting back on or eliminating foods like grains, legumes, potatoes, candy, sugary drinks, fruit, and even sauces that contain sugar.
Your goal is to eat as little as 20 grams of carbs per day and no more than 50 grams per day. To put this into perspective, one cup of broccoli has about 6 grams of carbs, a cup of rice has 45 grams of carbs, and a single Snickers bar has 28 grams of carbs. You can see how it can be difficult to maintain this diet without paying a lot of attention!
While your goal is to eat as few carbs as possible, you can’t entirely eliminate them. Your body needs some level of carbs to function properly, and cutting out every source of carbs will also likely cause nutritional deficiencies. It’s technically possible but extremely difficult to sustain and potentially dangerous.
So, how does this fit in with a churrascaria?
What is a Churrascaria?
In brief, a churrascaria is a type of restaurant that serves churrasco, which is the Brazilian word for barbecue. Unlike American BBQ, which is typically slow-cooked or smoked and slathered in a sauce (which frequently includes sugar), churrasco is a celebration of meat itself. The traditional churrasco is meat crusted in salt and cooked over an extremely high flame, and that’s it. It’s an exploration of the flavors and textures inherent in different cuts of meat, not adulterated with sauces and spice rubs.
Modern churrascarias like Texas de Brazil do a bit more than just serve meat on skewers the way it’s been done for decades. We also have a variety of those “adulterated” meats because, let’s face it, they’re delicious too. Whether it’s barbecue pork ribs, spicy sirloin or picanha, or parmesan-crusted pork or chicken drumettes, there’s something for both fans of traditional Brazilian cuisine and more American sensibilities.
Exploring the Churrascaria Menu from a Keto Perspective
So, if you’re following a low-carb or ketogenic diet, what should you look for on the menu at a churrascaria, and what should you consider avoiding?
Let’s take it through each section of our menu as an example. While we’re obviously going to promote ourselves here, you can use a similar evaluation for the menus of other churrascarias if there’s no convenient Texas de Brazil location nearby (though, with locations all across the country, that’s not too likely.)
The Meats
First, you have the meat menu. Meats at a churrascaria are generally served in a rodizio style. That means skewers of meat are cooked over the grill, then brought out and circulated throughout the dining area by a gaucho (or Brazilian cowboy.) You can get a couple of slices or a couple of pieces of whichever meat is available before the gaucho carries on and gives others a chance to try it.
For larger cuts of meat, slices of the outside are cut and served, and the still-rare interior is returned to the fire to cook. For smaller pieces of meat, entire pieces can be served individually.
So, what should you get, and what should you avoid?
The truth is, you can get pretty much anything on the meat menu without worrying about breaking your diet. Even our spicy meats aren’t using a sugar-heavy barbecue sauce, so they’re perfectly fine for a ketogenic diet.
One item you might think you need to be wary of is the parmesan-crusted drumettes or the parmesan-crusted pork. Typically, any parmesan-crusted food item is also breaded, but that’s not the case here. These items are effectively zero carbs and won’t break you out of ketosis.
The only items on our meat menu that have any carbs at all are the barbecued pork ribs, the spicy sirloin, and the Brazilian sausage, and all three of these have less than 3 grams of carbs per serving.
The Salad Area
The salad area is where our guests can enjoy a wide range of food items that aren’t cooked on skewers over a grill. These can include salad fixings like greens, veggies, and dressings, but they also include Brazilian favorites like farofa.
This is where a keto diet can start to go awry. Veggies, in general, have a decent amount of carbs in the form of dietary fiber, and some of the salad area items are even more carb-heavy, like ciabatta bread and croutons for salad.
There are two good points about the salad area for those of you sticking to a keto diet.
The first is that it’s pretty obvious what is going to have carbs in it, as long as you’re at least passingly familiar with what nutrients are in foods. Veggies have carbs in them, so go light on the veggies. Bread, obviously, is high in carbs.
A few items are a little trickier. Our orange vinaigrette is one of the higher-carb items on the salad area menu because it’s made using fruit juices that are sweet because of their natural sugar content. Farofa, as much as we love to recommend it as a Brazilian classic, is also relatively high in carbs.
The ten items in our salad area with the most carbohydrates are the ciabatta bread, the couscous salad, the orange vinaigrette, the pineapple carpaccio, the Santa Fe salad, the beets, the artichoke hearts, the mint sauce, the potato salad, and the farofa.
Of course, high in carbs doesn’t mean it’s completely disallowed. While the ciabatta bread has 15 grams of carbs per slice, the farofa is only five grams per tablespoon, and you usually aren’t going to be eating a ton of it. Similarly, while the mint sauce has six grams per tablespoon, how much mint sauce are you going to be eating?
Meanwhile, items like cheeses, olives, shrimp salad, smoked salmon, prosciutto, and bacon have zero carbs, and the tomatoes, asparagus, salami, palm hearts, goat cheese terrine, and jalapenos are all just one gram of carbs per serving. You can enjoy these without risking your diet just fine.
The Hot Items
The salad area is for cold items that may be cooked but aren’t kept hot. The hot bar, meanwhile, is for the items that are best served hot. These include options like the pao de queijo (Brazilian cheese bread), fried bananas, potatoes like gratin and fries, soup like the lobster bisque, and bases for meals like rice, sauteed mushrooms, and our classic feijoada, or Brazilian black beans.
As you can likely imagine, almost all of this is fairly high in carbohydrates. Potatoes are high, rice is high, beans are high, fruit like bananas are high, and cream-based soups are high. A cup of cream of jalapeno soup is 11 grams of carbs, the lobster bisque is ten grams, and the feijoada is six grams. While you aren’t necessarily going to break your diet if you have a cup of soup, you get a lot closer.
Two items stand out as low carb in our hot items area. One is the sauteed mushrooms. Mushrooms – which aren’t, technically speaking, vegetables – have some carbs but are considered a low-carb food, and our sauteed mushrooms are only two grams of carbs per serving.
The other item is our moqueca de peixe, or fish stew. This is another traditional Brazilian stew, and the ingredients used in it are all either low or no carb, so it’s only one gram of carbs per serving.
The Desserts
Alright, let’s be real. If you’re on a keto diet, there’s a good chance you’ve already come to terms with the fact that you’re pretty much not going to be able to have desserts. Almost everything the average American considers a dessert is going to be practically made out of sugar.
Bad news: we Brazilians absolutely love our sweets as well. The lowest-carb item on our dessert menu is the crème brulee, and it’s 50 grams of carbs per serving. The carrot cake? 176 grams per serving. If someone else at your table orders something, maybe you can have a bite, but getting any for yourself is going to eat up your carb quota for several days.
The Drinks
Drinks are hit or miss on the keto diet. Some drinks have no sugar in them at all and are perfectly fine. Others are basically made out of high-fructose corn syrup and might as well be drinking pure sugar. The same goes for cocktails, many of which use syrups or sugar to liven them up.
A lot of the drinks on our menu are somewhere in the 20-40 grams of carbs range, with some clocking in at over 40, like the Rio Sunrise or the pitcher of sangria. All of our classic Brazilian caipirinhas are 39 grams each since sugar is a primary component of the caipirinha.
On the other hand, there are a few drinks you can get that won’t entirely break the bank, though they do have some carbs in them. The Manhattan, the Milky Way, the Brazilian Kiss, the Espresso Delight, and the Tiramisu Martini are all under ten grams. Individual glasses of wine are also under ten, and some other spirits are zero-carb.
Checking For Yourself
So, as you can see, you can have a very fulfilling meal at Texas de Brazil, and all you miss out on are the desserts, some of the drinks, and a few of the hot items and salad items that could push you over your daily limits. So why not come check it all out for yourself? We’re sure you’ll love the delectable meats, and since it’s a continuous dining experience where you can sample everything that comes your way, you’re sure to leave satisfied.
And, if you want to check out the nutritional information for our menu yourself, you can find it all here. We look forward to seeing you!
