Kids Make Pao de Queijo
October 1st, 2009 · No Comments · Posted in Ethnic, kids
Light, cheesy and gluten free
Quick, what’s the national snack food of Brazil?
It may be this simple cheese puff. When I told our Brazilian friend Michelle about the virtual world culinary tour we are taking in the food appreciation classes I teach at a local elementary school, she immediately recommended we make this savory treat made with manioc flour and cheese.
This is simple but delicious street food, nothing more. But I assure you, these puffy biscuits are quite addictive. How puffy? My wife, the baker, looked at the recipe and exclaimed that it is similar in many ways to the French pate a choux used to make eclaires and puff pastries. In this case, the finished breads are not entirely hollow–more like sponge surrounded by chewy cheese.
These are made with a sour manioc flour called polvilho azedo in Brazil. Manioc is another term for the cassava root, also called yucca. Worldwide, it is the third-most popular starch in the human diet, widely used in Africa, where it is the basis of foufou. We traveled some miles from the District of Columbia to a small Brazilian cafe and grocery store in the Maryland suburbs to purchase our polvilho azedo. Some recipes recommend tapioca starch, which is also made from the cassava root.
In either case, the starch in question is very fine, much finer than flour, and makes a very sticky dough. We formed it into snack-sized portions using a greased mechanical ice cream scoop.
Using an ice cream scoop to get the dough on the baking sheet
For 20 kid-sized cheese breads:
Pour 1 cup milk and 1/2 cup canola oil into a sauce pan. Stir in 1 teaspoon salt and bring to a boil over moderately high heat. Remove the pan from the heat and use a wooden spoon to stir in 2 cups polvilho azedo (sour manioc starch–if you can’t find it, try using tapioca starch). The dough will become very thick and sticky. Stir in two large eggs, then 1 1/2 cups grated cheese (we used half parmesan and half robusto, but almost any grating-type cheese would do).
Continue beating the dough for a minute until it becomes fairly smooth. Use a small, greased mechanical ice cream scoop to form the dough into balls. Deposit them on a greased baking sheet, leaving room around each to expand. You will probably need two baking sheets for this. (An alternate method for making the dough balls is using two spoons or greased hands.)
Bake in a 400-degree oven for 15 minutes, or until the cheese balls are lightly golden.
Don’t be surprised if the insides of the cheese balls are still a little gummy. They seem to become more bread like after they’ve cooled, but we enjoyed ours warm, fresh out of the oven. It’s hard to resist taking seconds.
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