Brazilian Cheese Bread – Pão de Queijo

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Pão de Queijo Image Used Under Creative Commons License From Wikipedia

Citizens, there can be no doubt whatsoever that for the Gluten-Free, life is tough. There are so few recipes that are anything but a pale shadow of their former glutinous glory that it’s enough to drive you to despair.

Not this recipe, Citizens! Pão de queijo (“cheese bread” in Portuguese) or Brazilian cheese bread is a totally-gluten-free small baked cheese roll or cheese bun, a popular snack and breakfast food in Brazil.

It is a traditional Brazilian recipe, from the state of Minas Gerais. Though its origins are uncertain, it is speculated that the recipe has existed since the eighteenth century, although it became popular around the 1950s.

Pão de queijo originated from African slaves like many other Brazilian foods. Slaves would soak and peel the cassava root and make bread rolls from it. At this time, there was no cheese in the rolls.

At the end of the 19th century, more ingredients became available to the Afro-Brazilian community such as milk and cheese. They added milk and cheese to the tapioca roll making what we now know as Pão de queijo.

It is also widely eaten in northern Argentina and is inexpensive and often sold from streetside stands by vendors carrying a heat-preserving container.

In Brazil, it is also very commonly found in groceries, supermarkets and bakeries, industrialized or freshly made.

Despite being referred to as “bread”, the cheese bread is basically a type of starch tart cookie or sweet plus eggs, salt, vegetable oil, and cheese, with soft and elastic consistency and with a few variations.

Minas Gerais: Brazil’s Dairy Heartland

It’s no accident this recipe comes from Minas Gerais. The state is Brazil’s dairy country in the way Wisconsin is America’s — its high-altitude pastures produce Queijo Minas, a mild, tangy fresh cheese found on breakfast tables nationwide. Minas Gerais is also the birthplace of feijão tropeiro, the muleteer’s bean-and-cassava dish, and shares a lineage with Brazil’s other great legacy of combination cooking born from scarcity: Feijoada, the black bean and pork stew now considered the national dish. Pão de queijo and feijoada share the same origin story in miniature — enslaved cooks turning whatever was available into something that outlasted the circumstances that produced it.

With the discovery of mines near Ouro Preto around 1700, 1/5 of the Brazilian population, mainly slaves, occupied a vast territory, moving from the Northeast and shifting the economic hub of the colony towards the Southeast.

The mining cycle caused a huge impact and stimulus to the production of staple foods and this is when cheese bread was created. The Northeast and the nearest regions obtained beans, rice, corn and its cornmeal, pork and lard, milk and cheese.

More distant areas such as the gaucho pampa began to offer cattle meat instead. It is said that the cheese bread was offered by slave women to the farmers. At the time, wheat flour, the raw material of classical baking, was hard to find.

Typical of temperate regions, the ancient cereal never combined with the warmth of the Brazilian Northeast, and was then imported from Europe to Brazil to serve the King’s noblemen.

Creatively, Minas Gerais cooks replaced the non-existent wheat with starch derived from cassava tuber of Tupiniquim origin. They added cured cheese chips — hardened and grated — to the mass, and once taken to the oven, it turned out to justify being called “bread”.

Brazilian Cheese Bread is by definition gluten-free since it never had any to begin with. Made with Tapioca flour, it’s chewy, cheesy and deliciously addictive, especially with a splash of hot sauce (Brazilian, of course but Tabasco also works in a pinch).

A Global Family of Cheese Breads

Pão de queijo isn’t an isolated invention — it belongs to a family of starch-and-cheese breads that different cultures arrived at independently, usually because wheat was scarce or entirely absent. Colombia and Venezuela have pandebono and pan de yuca, built on the same cassava-starch logic; Turkey’s poğaça, linked above, reaches a similar cheese-bun destination with leavened wheat dough instead. The throughline is the same everywhere: cheese bread happens wherever a cook needs to stretch or do without wheat flour, and still put something warm on the table.

This recipe from Lifemadesimplebakes.com is the best I’ve found – I hope you enjoy it! Tapioca flour can be found in the baking aisle at most grocery stores with a natural foods section or a specialty store like Whole Foods. Bob’s Red Mill is the brand I like. To quickly bring eggs to room temperature, place in a bowl of warm water for 5 minutes, remove and use.

I am exceedingly fond of this recipe and the fact that it is also gluten-free is a Godsend for those sensitive to its digestive impact due to Celiac or intolerance.

Bake a batch this weekend, My Citizens, and taste for yourself why Minas Gerais has been guarding this recipe since before Brazil was even a country of its own!

Battle on — the Generalissimo
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