Pão de Queijo

The cheese rolls of Minas Gerais, sour cassava starch scalded with hot milk and oil and worked with egg and aged cheese into small loaves that are crisp outside and hollow and stretchy within

Origin: Ouro Preto and Minas Gerais, Brazil

From the journey of Cassava.

Pão de queijo contains no wheat and never did. It is made from polvilho azedo, the sour fermented starch of the cassava root, and it exists because the eighteenth-century gold rush pulled tens of thousands of people into the mountains of Minas Gerais, a long way from any port, where wheat was expensive and unreliable and cassava grew perfectly well. The starch comes in two forms that behave quite differently. Sweet polvilho is simply washed out and dried. Sour polvilho, polvilho azedo, is fermented in water for several weeks before drying, which breaks the starch down enough that it puffs dramatically in the oven and develops a distinct tang. That fermentation is what makes these rolls possible: made with sweet starch alone they stay dense. The method is a scalded dough, which is the other unusual thing about it. Milk, oil, and salt are brought to the boil and poured onto the starch, gelatinising it on the spot into a stiff, glossy, alarming-looking paste. Only when that has cooled do the eggs and the cheese go in. The traditional cheese is queijo minas curado, a hard aged cow's cheese from the same state. The result is now eaten at every hour across Brazil, sold from bakery counters and petrol stations, and it has become one of the very few genuinely great gluten-free breads anywhere. The interior should be hollow, moist, and elastic, which is the property of gelatinised cassava starch and has nothing to do with gluten at all.

Ingredients

Dough

  • 250 g sour tapioca starch (polvilho azedo)
  • 100 g sweet tapioca starch (polvilho doce)
  • 2 large eggs, at room temperature
  • 150 g queijo minas curado, or a mix of mature Cheddar and Parmesan, finely grated

Scald

  • 200 ml whole milk
  • 100 ml neutral oil, or 90 g butter
  • 1.5 tsp fine salt

Method

  1. Heat the oven to 190C (fan 170C, gas 5) and line two baking trays. Combine both starches in a large heatproof bowl.
  2. Bring the milk, oil, and salt to a full rolling boil in a small pan.
  3. Pour the boiling liquid over the starch all at once and beat hard with a wooden spoon. It will look curdled, lumpy, and wrong. Keep beating until it forms a stiff, sticky, glossy paste.
  4. Leave the paste to cool for fifteen minutes, until it is warm rather than hot.
  5. Beat in the eggs one at a time, working each in completely before the next. The mixture will loosen and turn smooth and elastic. Then beat in the grated cheese.
  6. With wet or oiled hands, roll the dough into balls slightly smaller than a golf ball and set them on the trays with a good gap between, since they spread as well as rise.
  7. Bake for twenty to twenty-five minutes, until well risen, pale gold, and dry to the touch. Do not open the oven for the first fifteen minutes.
  8. Eat warm, within an hour, when the outside is crisp and the inside still stretches.

Notes

Polvilho azedo is not optional and not substitutable. Sweet tapioca starch alone gives a dense, chewy roll with none of the characteristic puff, and cassava flour gives nothing usable at all. Queijo minas curado is sold by Brazilian grocers. A half-and-half mix of mature Cheddar and Parmesan is the usual substitute and is very close; a young soft cheese is not. The classic Mineiro test is that a properly made roll should be hollow enough to see light through when torn. The batter can also be made loose enough to pour, with an extra 100 ml milk, and baked in mini muffin tins, which is how a great many Brazilian households actually make it.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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