PÃO DE QUEIJO = Brazilian cheese bready-balls

If someone else were to put up a recipe for this dish—which is my screen name—, well, that would be embarrassing. Adri, the boyz and I discovered these little cheese balls in Brazil, where they are sort of a national food, and they fascinated us—really quite different in texture from anything I'd had before. Back home I started experimenting with method, and I ran variations of several different recipes before I settled on this. Again, my MO is not a traditional recipe. A new food is not the product of a sequence of steps but rather the outcome of some new combination of familiar and novel ingredients and (hopefully practiced) techniques. This is a great example.

The basic idea here is a pâte à choux, a.k.a. cream puff dough, except for the use of a mixture of manioc starches in place of wheat flour. Karen is a big proponent of the choux pastry, so I know she'll approve of this recipe. If you're not familiar with the technique, it's one of the most forgiving doughs on the planet, mostly because you actually want your starches to unwind with heat and become fully incorporated with the fats and other liquids. Almost impossible to screw up, you can reliably churn out impressive profiteroles without having to stress out about the dough. It's versatile, too--basically the same dough mixed with pureed raw pike is poached to make quenelles—a delicate French fish dumpling so light (when they're done right) you'd think they came from some gravity-free zone in outer space.

What makes the pão de queijo dough different is the kind of starch used. If you can't find these ingredients, forget this dish altogether (but go ahead and make profiteroles!) Use regular wheat flour for pão de queijo and the result is awful—sort of a cheese-tainted profiterole. Yuck. Here are the two critical pieces to the puzzle.



Polvilho azedo (almidón agrio in Spanish) is "soured" manioc starch. Basically the starch that is extracted from the sometimes deadly cyanogenic manioc (mandioca) root is allowed to go sour before it is dried and made into starch. This stuff has visible crystals of organic acids and smells faintly barfy. The sourness of this starch accounts for more than half of the "cheesiness" in the pão de queijo. Polvilho doce (almidón dulce) is regular manioc starch and is equivalent to tapioca starch. It's not really sweet—-the "doce" just distinguishes it from "azedo" or sour. This unsoured starch is needed to soften the acidity brought in by the polvilho azedo. I use about a 40/60 mixture of sour to regular.

Both of these starches are available through Internet sites (I rely heavily on amigofoods.com), but there may be a store selling Brazilian products store locally to where you live, and they would almost certainly have polvilho azedo and polvilho doce. Regular tapioca starch is also easily found at most Asian markets.

It's out of character for me, I know, but this time I can give approximate proportions of the dry and wet ingredients. [There are some things for which measurement saves a lot of time.] Into a saucepan goes 1 1/2 cup of "liquid," which should include about 1/3 cup of butter and the rest milk. This comes up to almost a boil and then a spot of salt and two cups of the 40/60 starch mixture goes into the pan. Yeah, the starch is a very fine powder, and you'll have a cloud of starch from this step that will settle out onto your fancy cooktop and you'll be cursing me but don't say I didn't warn you. Turning the heat down and mixing it all up vigorously the dough will soon start pulling cleanly away from the sides (if you added enough butter). Now off the fire and maybe in a mixing bowl, eggs can be added, one at a time, letting the dough get nice and smooth after each of three eggs. This part is a bigger pain in the ass than what it sounds like, unless you have one of those countertop mixers (which I don't).

Almost done now. Just have to add the cheese—finely grated pecorino romano is what I use, though traditionally you'd need a hard cheese from central Brazil. IMO, it's just got to have a sharp, cheesy flavor to complement the sour starch, and not having the Brazilian cheese (nothing special to begin with) doesn't really alter the flavor or authenticity. I throw in a nice big handful and finish the mixing with my bare hands.

At this point the dough can be piped from a pastry bag (or a heavy plastic bag with the corner cut off) or spooned or pinched by hand into domes a little flatter than half-ping-pong balls and spaced evenly on a cookie sheet lined with parchment. Then baked at 325-350°F they'll eventually (it will take more than 20 minutes) puff some and then start to brown on the bottom and maybe even have some color on top. They should be firm on the outside and they should not taste raw in the middle. If undercooked they collapse into dense blobs of undercooked dough.



This is a great afternoon snack with a cold tereré (or with hot mate, as shown in pic). If you use the plastic bag trick, you can pipe and cook one batch on day one and store the rest of the dough in the fridge for a repeat performance on day two.