My wife recently found a recipe for cheese straws that didn’t call for any flour – just grated cheese, butter and spices. She wasn’t sure it would come out, and her fears proved well founded. We ended up with a cookie sheet covered in dark, bubbly cheese goo. Before she could throw it out, I declared it “browned cheese dip” and began eating it spread on rice cakes. Once it hardened, I snapped it into shards and declared it “cheese leather.” Delicious.
This is the time of year the body craves baked cheese appetizers, so don’t fight it. You know you will at some point during the season find yourself holding a drink in one hand and a hot cheese puff in the other, or quietly divesting a festive buffet table of all its cheese wafers.
You probably also have a failsafe recipe up your sleeve that you pull out only during the Christmas season. Well, I’ve got another to add to the repertoire.
Paõ de queijo are those warm little cheese buns you may have once inhaled by the dozen at a Brazilian churrascaria, such as Fogo de Chaõ. They are served hot and puffed, with a smooth, shiny surface. Bite in, and the texture seems poised between sticky and gooey. It would be a little weird if the rich flavor weren’t so immediately cheese-tastic.
The key ingredient is tapioca starch or tapioca flour, which behaves differently from wheat flour. Unlike traditional cheese puffs or French gougères, which get their structure from eggs beaten one by one into a sticky flour dough, paõ de queijo is more of dump-and-mix recipe. You end up with a sticky, bouncy dough that must be little different from the molten plastics used to make bendable action figurines. It is unwieldy.
But your mission is to merely get this business mixed up, separated into small blobs and onto a cookie sheet. Then the magic of tapioca and heat take over.
You might grab a small bag of tapioca flour the next time you’re in the DeKalb Farmers Market or a health food store and have it on hand for experimentation. Make the recipe once to fatten up your family against the winter chill. Once you see how easily it comes together, you’ve got your new favorite party appetizer.
Paõ de Queijo
Makes 24 pieces
Preparation time: 10 minutes
Cooking time: 25 minutes
These gooey cheese puffs are so easy to put together and so addictive that it’s worth your while to search out tapioca flour. Look for any package labeled “tapioca flour” or “tapioca starch” at farmers’ markets or health food stores.
- 1 1/2 cups tapioca flour
- 1 cup milk
- 1/4 cup vegetable oil
- 1 large egg at room temperature
- 1/2 cup finely grated Parmesan cheese
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Measure tapioca flour into a large heatproof mixing bowl. Combine milk and oil in a medium saucepan and bring to a rolling boil. Pour over flour and mix quickly with a wooden spoon.
When cool enough to handle, add egg, cheese and salt and thoroughly combine all ingredients with your hands. (If you use a mixer, outfit it with a dough hook rather than a whip.) This should take a couple of minutes, as the dough is very sticky. As you mix the ingredients, look for any clumps of flour. Drop by heaping teaspoonfuls onto an ungreased nonstick baking sheet, spaced 2 inches apart. Bake for 25 minutes, until puffed and lightly browned.
Per piece: 73 calories, 3 grams fat, 16 milligrams cholesterol, 65 milligrams sodium.
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