Chipa

Paraguay's cassava starch and cheese ring, scented with anise and baked hot so the outside cracks and the inside stays chewy

Origin: Asunción & Paraguay

From the journey of Cassava.

Chipa is made from almidón de mandioca, cassava starch, rather than from flour, and that is what gives it its particular chew: cassava starch has no gluten and behaves quite differently in an oven, puffing and setting into something elastic rather than crumbly. Fresh cheese, eggs, fat, and milk go in with it, along with anise seed, and the dough is shaped into rings or small horseshoes and baked in a very hot oven for a short time. Paraguay makes a considerable number of named varieties, and they are not interchangeable. Chipa almidón is the standard ring; chipa guasú is a baked fresh-corn pudding and is not a bread at all; chipa so'o is stuffed with meat; chipa mbocá is wrapped round a stick and cooked over embers. The word is Guaraní and the family is genuinely pre-Columbian in its foundation, since cassava starch breads long predate the arrival of wheat, cheese, and eggs. It belongs to Holy Week above all. Paraguayan households bake chipa in quantity on Wednesday and Thursday of Semana Santa, traditionally in a clay tatakua oven fired the night before, and it is eaten through Good Friday when no cooking is done. The rest of the year it is sold from baskets by vendors who board long-distance buses at every stop, calling the word down the aisle, which is how most Paraguayans encounter it most often. The anise is what makes it Paraguayan rather than simply a cheese bread. It is a small quantity and it is unmistakable, and Paraguayans notice its absence immediately.

Ingredients

  • 500 g cassava starch (almidón de mandioca)
  • 400 g fresh salty white cheese, finely grated
  • 120 g lard or butter, softened
  • 3 eggs
  • 120 ml milk, plus a little more if needed
  • 2 tsp anise seed
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 1 tsp baking powder

Method

  1. Heat the oven to 220°C with a baking tray inside it.
  2. Beat the lard until light, then work in the grated cheese, the anise seed, and the salt.
  3. Beat in the eggs one at a time.
  4. Add the cassava starch and the baking powder and work the mixture with your hands rather than a spoon, adding the milk a little at a time.
  5. Stop as soon as the dough comes together smoothly. Cassava starch dough goes from crumbly to sticky in a couple of spoonfuls of milk and cannot be corrected by adding more starch.
  6. It should be soft, pliable, and just short of tacky, like a firm modelling clay.
  7. Roll pieces into ropes about 2cm thick and join them into rings, or bend them into small horseshoes.
  8. Put them on the preheated tray and bake for fifteen to twenty minutes, until they have puffed, cracked across the top, and coloured lightly at the edges.
  9. A hot oven and a hot tray are what make them puff. A moderate oven gives flat, hard chipa.
  10. They should stay pale gold rather than browning; cassava starch scorches quickly and goes bitter.
  11. Take them out while the inside is still soft and slightly chewy, since they firm up considerably as they cool.
  12. Eat within a few hours of baking, warm, with coffee or cocido.

Notes

Cassava starch, not cassava flour and not tapioca pearls; the bag is labelled almidón de mandioca and the sour variety, almidón agrio, gives more lift if you can find it. Add the milk gradually and stop as soon as the dough holds. A very hot oven and a preheated tray. Anise is not optional. Chipa is at its best within an hour or two of the oven and goes hard by the next day, which is why Paraguayans buy it from vendors rather than keeping it; day-old chipa is revived in a hot oven for three minutes.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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Ingredient originTrade or transit route
Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control
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