Three 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.
READ ONTwo attempts and I can’t get a decent batter consistency. It ends up as a dough with the very absorbent, granular manioc flour…and a dough simply won’t puff up like it should. So I’m going to do what my trusted source made me swear I wouldn’t do: use tapioca flour. I can see no other […]
READ ONThough there are several cultivars of cassava out there, most cultures place the different species into one of two broad categories: bitter (sour) and sweet. And as you might expect, the bitterness of a cassava corresponds to the amount of cyanide-producing glucosides it contains, with the bitter ones containing up to 50 times more linamarin than the sweet ones.
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Mention the great agricultural gifts that the New World gave to the Old and most people think corn (those who aren’t chocoholics of course). Yet there’s another that’s at least as important, especially in the tropical and subtropical regions of the world: cassava, also known as yuca or manioc.
READ ONFor a cheese puff recipe it seems to be missing a couple of things. A leavener for starters. There’s no yeast and no baking powder. And then there’s the flour thing…there isn’t any. No wheat flour at any rate. Instead we have manioc flour, also known as the dried and ground starch of the cassava (also known as yuca) root. It’s the same starch that tapioca is made from, in case that helps.
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