Pão de queijo
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| Type | Bread |
|---|---|
| Course | Breakfast or snack |
| Place of origin | Brazil |
| Region or state | Minas Gerais |
| Main ingredients | Cassava flour, cheese (usually Minas cheese) |
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Pão de queijo (Portuguese pronunciation: [ˈpɐ̃w dʒi 'kejʒʊ], "Cheese Bread" in Portuguese) or Brazilian cheese bread is a small, baked cheese roll, 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.
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 kind of beef meat. It is said that the cheese bread was offered by slave women to the farmers. By that time, it was hardly found the wheat flour, raw material of classical baking. Typical of temperate regions, the ancient cereal never combined with the warmth of the Brazilian Northeast, and was then imported from Europe to here to serve the king's noblemen.
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