Pão de queijo (pãos de queijo?) are a lot like gougères, but with a little less fat and zero gluten. Why’s that? Because they’re made from tapioca starch, a derivative of the cassava root, not wheat flour. This gives them a somewhat different texture, like a soft wheat bun when cool, like a hot air ballon made of molten cheese when warm. They’re really quite a delicious experience either way, no wonder they’re one of the national foods of Brazil.
READ ONOne of the more interesting quirks of the human brain (or at least MY human brain) is that once it starts down a path with the wrong set of assumptions it doesn’t return easily to the right track, even if that track is relatively easy to get onto. So it was with me and pão de queijo. Squaring the right technique (since there are at least three possibles) with the right cassava product (since there are at least three of those as well) took me the better part of a week. Thankfully with a little help from some of my readers, I finally arrived at the right recipe, cassava flour and technique. Whew! You’ll need:
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As home cooks and bakers get more sophisticated, they’re becoming increasingly frustrated by the limitations of their standard array of kitchen appliances, i.e. the contemporary quartet of refrigerator, freezer, oven and microwave. They see the results professional culinarians get from subtle manipulations of temperature and they want the same thing at home. Up until very recently, the vast majority of us have been completely out of luck on that front.
READ ON…asks reader Suzanne from South America (she didn’t tell me where). Suzanne, there are a lot of good substitutes for nuts, since they have no real functional purpose in a recipe other than to add texture and/or flavor. Thus you can replace them with lots of things. More flour is the most obvious choice. Maybe supplement with a little flavoring of some kind and…problem solved!
But then most people miss nuts more for what they bring to a recipe texturally. For these folks there are all sorts of things to choose from: ground up granola, wheat bran, soy nuts, toasted chickpeas or other legumes…the list goes on. Head to a health food store that carries bulk “veggie” snacks and you’ll find all kinds of things. Suzanne says she already uses ground up stale cookies, which is genius.
READ ONThat’s an excellent question, reader Clare. It something that’s surely on the minds of many whose Valentine’s bounty exceeds their capacity to consume it. Yes, there are those people out there.
But to the question: can chocolate be frozen? The answer is that it can be, but it must be frozen carefully, and even when it is frozen carefully, it can still be damaged (at least cosmetically). The reason is because freezing accelerates the crystallization process. Certainly for water, but also for other key chocolate components like fat and sugar. It’s crystallized fat and sugar that’s responsible for the “bloom” one finds on chocolate that’s been stored for too long.
READ ONThree more failed attempts at this ultra-simple bread and I’m starting to wonder if pão de queijo is possible without specially-ordered ingredients from Brazil. So far neither American-made tapioca starch nor Mexican-made manioc flour have performed as predicted/expected. Between the two the tapioca starch seems the more promising, but so far it’s not working in […]
READ ONIt’s popularly thought that the peoples of the New World knew nothing of alcohol before the arrival of corrupting Europeans. That may have been true of North America, but it most certainly was not true of South America. There the locals had been fermenting cassava mash into beer for thousands of years before white men […]
READ ONIf anyone out there has asked a question lately that hasn’t been acknowledged, please re-send and I’ll get to it. I’ve been under attack from some very clever spammers who either custom-wrote emails specifically for each post (impossible to believe) or have devised a fiendish algorithm that auto-fills blanks in pre-written messages. Either way, then […]
READ ONAn excellent question. I’ve received so much conflicting information on pão de queijo this week — from recipes to individual ingredients to history — I’m almost reluctant to post about it. But then a healthy dose of skepticism is required whenever you’re talking food history, since it’s often indistinguishable from myth.
READ ONForgive the lack of posts today. I was driving through a local park this morning and noticed a large pile of branches with a “Take Me” sign next to it. Clearly the park crews had been cutting back dead limbs and were giving away the trimmings. It was a nice mix of small diameter hard wood, most of it very dry. Perfect brick oven fuel, in other words. Since I’m one of the few Kentuckians without a pickup truck, I’ve been making lots of trips back and forth between the park and my garage. But hey, free wood is free wood.
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