Small round cheese breads made with cassava starch — crisp outside, chewy and hollow within.
What makes it pão de queijo
Cassava starch — sour polvilho, sweet or both — not wheat flour.
Scalded with hot milk and oil, then beaten with eggs and cheese.
Chewy, with a crisp shell and an airy middle.
Where it comes from
They come from the farms of Minas Gerais, where cassava starch, polvilho, was plentiful and wheat flour wasn't. It's often said that enslaved cooks first baked the starch left over from processing cassava, and that cheese and milk from the region's dairies came later; the details are hard to pin down.
They spread across Brazil in the twentieth century and are now eaten everywhere, warm, with coffee, morning and afternoon.