My daughter found a recipe for Brazilian Cheese Bread. I had never baked it before, so I thought we’d give it a try. It is quite different from regular bread. For one thing, it calls for Tapioca flour, which I didn’t know existed. Tapioca is a starch extracted from the cassava plant, found in Brazil, and though I have eaten tapioca pudding, I have never tried flour. Also, it does not contain yeast. So that in itself intrigued me. Ingredients are simple: tapioca flour, egg, milk, olive oil, salt, and cheese (we used Feta). You blend everything in a blender, which makes a milky liquid batter. You pour the batter right from the blender into a pan. We used a mini-muffin pan.
Then it went in a 400 degree oven for 15-20 minutes. I sketched the ingredients while they were baking. As the mixture baked, each bread began to rise up, but they broke free from the pan sides and looked like overgrown mushrooms, with a chunky stalk and rounded tops. They were kinda weird looking.
We baked them until they were a golden brown, then took them out of the oven. They seemed to have popped up past the edges, so were easy to remove to a cooling rack. We tasted them while warm, they were chewy and had a pleasant cheese flavor. They were good!
We ate some at dinner and saved the rest. But they seemed to get harder over time, so I’d recommend eating them when they come out of the oven, if you can.
I sketched quickly and added watercolor later. Here’s my finished sketch of Brazilian Cheese Bread. Yum!
