Brazilian recipe
How to make Cheese bread
Pão de queijo
Minas Gerais
Small, warm balls of bread, crisp outside and soft and chewy inside, made with cassava starch, eggs, milk and cheese. It is eaten at breakfast and with coffee in the afternoon.
Ingredients
- 500 g tapioca flour (cassava starch; Brazilian shops sell sweet and sour polvilho, and half of each is best)
- 240 ml milk
- 120 ml vegetable oil
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 2 eggs
- 200 g grated cheese, such as half Parmesan and half mozzarella
Method
- Heat the oven to 190°C. Put the milk, oil and salt in a pan and bring just to the boil.
- Pour the hot milk over the tapioca flour in a large bowl and mix with a wooden spoon until smooth. Leave to cool for 10 minutes.
- Beat in the eggs one at a time, then the cheese, until you have a soft, sticky dough.
- With oiled hands, roll balls about 3 cm across and put them on a lined baking tray, a little apart.
- Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, until puffed and lightly golden. Eat warm.
Made it at home? Tick it off and it goes into your kitchen passport.
It is made with cassava starch, not wheat flour, so it contains no gluten. Cooks in Minas Gerais made bread from cassava as early as the 1700s; the cheese came later.
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