(recipe follows)

I have yet to travel to Brazil, but from what I have heard, Pão de queijo, is often on the list of “you haven’t experienced Brazil unless you’ve tried them.” Pão de queijo, or pan de queso in Spanish, means cheese bread in English. Wheat flour-based yeast bread with cheese mixed in has nothing on this Brazilian snack, I was told. After searching around, I found that this bread originated in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais sometime around the 17th or 18th century but didn’t contain cheese at the time. Only later did one of the world’s greatest foods get mixed in. The two main ingredients that stand out are, obviously cheese and cassava starch. Cassava starch is like corn or potato starch and you really can’t tell the difference much while running it through your fingers.

I have wanted to make these for a long time but unfortunately, like many other items on the “to prepare list”, they ended up being sidetracked or lost in the pile. Recently, the time finally arrived with full dedication to get these doughy rolls of cheese on the table. However, the first attempt was a disaster for two reasons: wrong type of cassava flour and bad recipe. To cut a long story short, we used a recipe from a magazine when I should have searched online first. Lesson learned. Don’t trust those little 10-20 page recipe magazines in the news stands. When trying any unfamiliar recipe, always double or triple check with other sources just to make sure they have the basic ingredients right. Search online, in other cookbooks, or ask others who know.

Back to the drawing board. The second time I decided to search for an authentic type recipe that was in Portuguese and/or listed on a Brazilian site. That didn’t necessarily mean it would be right but a start nonetheless. I found quite few where all of the the ingredients were pretty much the same except for the swapping of or mixture of butter and oil. None of them that I came across had ricotta like that first recipe pulled from an Argentinean magazine. The easiest appealing one came from a Wikipedia page in Portuguese: Pão de queijo. Matched up well with the other recipes I found and the quantities looked simple too.

And simple to make it was. However, you really have to put some serious muscle work into kneading the dough. When the time arrived to pull the first batch out of the oven, they looked perfect. Then I took the first bite. The hot gooey mass within the crunchy exterior made me spew out “Uhh honey, is this how it is supposed to be???” Flashbacks of undercooked bread filled my head. First time I had a fresh one of these out of the oven mind you. “Noooo, these are perfect,” my wife said. Don’t get me wrong, they were delicious, I just wasn’t prepared. When cooled, the bread firms up a quite well as you can see in the picture below. While wheat-based cheese bread has a slight cheesy taste, Pão de queijo tastes like cheese with the texture of bread. If that makes any sense.

Recipe

1 Kilo Cassava starch
3 Cups Milk
1 Cup Vegetable oil
1 Tablespoon Salt
4 Eggs
500 grams semi-hard or hard aged cheese (Parmesan, Fontina, Reggianito, etc.)*

*I used 250g each of parmesan and fontina

In a very very large bowl mix together salt and cassava starch. In a sauce pan add milk and oil and bring to a boil. Pour about a quarter of the hot liquid into the cassava and stir a bit with a large wooden spoon or spatula. Pour in about half of the rest of the liquid and stir some more. Then pour in the rest and mix as best you can with the spoon. The easiest way, if you have someone laying around the house at the time, is to get them to continuously drizzle in the hot liquid while you stir.

Time to get your hands dirty. The dough will be quite warm, perhaps a little hot, so touch it a little with your hands to see if you are comfortable enough to work with it. If not then stir around some more with the spoon until you can. Knead with your hands until all of the cassava starch powder is totally worked into the dough. Then cover the bowl with a damp cloth and allow to cool. While that is set aside, grate the cheese and set that aside too. When the dough has cooled down a bit, add the eggs. The dough doesn’t have to be room temperature, just cool enough so that the eggs don’t start too cook when you add them to the warm dough. Before you add the eggs turn your oven on maximum heat. When you add the eggs, you’ll get the feeling that they’ll never blend in with the dough; it has the consistency of chewing gum. Just keep kneading and eventually they’ll mix. Next add the cheese and mix well.

Lightly grease a large shallow baking pan. With your hands, form little balls of dough about 5cm (2 inches) diameter. Lay them out on the pan so that there is at least 4cm (1.5 inches) space between them. Before placing them in the oven make sure that it has been on max for at least 15 minutes. Place in the oven and turn the heat down to medium. Cook for no longer than 30 minutes. Allow them to cool a bit before biting into them but not too much. Always enjoy them warm.

Note: A mixing machine with a dough hook may work wonders for mixing, I didn’t try it this time, but this stuff is tough so make sure you have one that can handle the task.

Hat tip to A Full Belly for pointing out this post: Throw Down.

Read it.

Being where I am, I don’t have the luxury of watching the Food Network so I wasn’t aware of this show until seeing those posts. Because I can’t watch the show, I’m not going to put too much judgment down. However, reading the description on the official site and various blogs, I think the concept is pretty clear.

From the Food Network:

Chef Bobby Flay is on a secret mission to challenge the absolute masters in one kind of cooking–award winning barbecuers, bakers, pizza makers and more–some with a roomful of trophies to show for it. In each episode, one of these cooks is made to believe that Food Network is shooting their profile for a show. What they don’t know is that Bobby is going to drop in for a surprise visit and challenge them to an unexpected cook-off .

Why am I posting this here? Well because something like this came up the other day. Not related to cooking an asado mind you. Basically, I know some old school cooking grandmas through my mother-in-law. You know the types. They sit around and drink tea on Sundays. Play some bridge or canasta. Each one brings a snack or dessert to nibble on while they talk and play some cards. If they wanted to toss down some beers and play poker, I might join them but that’s not the case. The point is that each one has a signature dish that they bring most of the time. These are their specialties and neither of them infringe upon the other. They may criticize each other on the outcome but none of them tries to out do the other on their specialty. For example, one is known for her tarta de manzana, or apple pie, and another is known for her scones. Before I tried them I was flooded with comments about how good they were, “She makes the best this, or she makes the best that! Try them!” When I tried them and said “Ohhh that’s good!”, they just beamed with joy.

Now, on some of these foods I know I could create some impressions. Not that my versions would be any better just that they would be different. Like for example, the tarta de manzana that many prepare here have nothing to do with the version many people eat in the U.S. Maybe they would like the typical U.S. version, maybe not. However, I would never think about preparing one of them and then all of a sudden appear at their card game and say “Try this! You’ll definitely have different thoughts on Marta’s tarta after this!” That, in my opinion, is what Bobby Flay is doing. I can just imagine poor Marta’s feelings after I serve out my pie and everyone asks for seconds while hers just sits there with hardly a slice taken out of it. The ideal way, if you want to gain some points would be to throw a dinner party and prepare the dish your way without a word or sign that you are trying to out cook the other.

Anyways, like I said, I never watched the show so who knows. Maybe most of these people like the challenge but why take the chance of ruining someone’s happiness at knowing that their dish is, or was, the best of the bunch.