About

Captain Bruk is out on the seven seas, looking for his next adventure. He has been gone a while, and nobody in the kitchen is waiting by the door.

The seal is his, kept since 2017, and the signature over the door is his hand. They are the two oldest things here. Everything else was made after he left.

For years the name was a trade: crates, paperwork, a seal pressed into wax on anything worth keeping shut. That has finished. What he left behind was the kitchen, and the kitchen is what the name means now — a place where food gets cooked properly, from the best supply the two of them can get their hands on.

Brukinho and Zita run it, and they cook constantly — between them across two enormous ranges of food. This site is what comes out of that.

The kitchen has moved with the times in exactly one respect, and it is the one that matters. A Thermomix TM6 sits on the counter. It weighs, chops, kneads, steams and holds a temperature for an hour without being watched, which turns fresh ricotta, pasta, bread dough, nut butter and risotto from a Saturday project into something that happens on a Tuesday. A good deal of what is on this site is here because of that — and every recipe has been checked to run on that machine, one at a time, never assumed.

Brukinho

The ship's cook, and the reason there is a Brazilian half to this site. He cooks across the whole country rather than one corner of it — the cheese breads of Minas, dendê and coconut down the Bahian coast, the grills of the south, the slow bean pots that take a whole Sunday — and he knows how each one is properly made, which is what happens when the same crew eats your food every day for months and notices the morning you take a shortcut. He is an admirer before he is an authority: he thinks Brazilian cooking is one of the great cuisines of the world, and takes it a little personally that most people outside it have met about four dishes.

Zita

The other end of the kitchen, and she cooks vegetarian and vegan food from everywhere — a Sicilian pasta, a table of mezze, a minestrone that eats like a meal, a banana bread worth the loaf tin — on the grounds that no one country has this worked out and most of them have been at it for centuries. She is vegetarian by choice and clear about why: she is an admirer of every form of life, and she thinks where humans are going involves stepping out of the cycle of eating other animals. She is equally firm that this makes dinner larger rather than smaller, which is why nothing on her side of the site is a substitute for something else.

How this site works

Every recipe here is a link, not a copy. A card gives you the facts — time, yield, difficulty, community rating, whether it runs on a TM6 — and a line of our own saying what the dish is and what its method is doing. The ingredients and the steps live at the source, always credited, one click away.

Cookidoo® shows anyone a recipe's ingredients; the method needs a Cookidoo subscription. That is Cookidoo's arrangement, not ours, and it applies to every link on this site. TM6 compatibility is checked recipe by recipe, never assumed; a handful of newer Cookidoo recipes run only on the TM7, and those are simply not listed here.

Nothing here is on a schedule. There is no news, no latest, no feed — the site is meant to be exactly as useful a year from now.

The disclaimer

This is a personal, non-commercial site. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or in any way officially connected to Vorwerk, the maker of the Thermomix. Thermomix®, Cookidoo® and Varoma® are trademarks of Vorwerk, used here only to say which machine a recipe runs on. The people behind Captain Bruk are Vorwerk customers sharing how they use the machine — nothing more.

No recipe is published on this site. Every card links out to the recipe where it actually lives — somebody else's today, and our own when we write them — and what sits here is the link, the factual metadata and our note. No ingredient lists, no methods. We have not tested these dishes in our own kitchen and we take no responsibility for them or for what comes of cooking them; whoever published a recipe is who stands behind it.

Two things are worth checking rather than trusting. Times, yields, difficulty and ratings are read from each recipe's public listing and may have moved since; and ingredients and allergens are stated at the source, not here, so read them there before you cook. If a card and its source disagree, the source is right.