Cheese Bread (Pão de Queijo)

There are many variations on the basic recipe of bread, including pizza, focaccia, baguettes, brioche, challah, lavash, biscuits, pretzels, bagels, and others. Here we have the cheese bread, also called cheese bun and cheese puff, which is a small, cheese-flavored roll, that’s one of the most popular snacks in Brazil. There are pao de queijo stores everywhere, you also can find them in bakeries, snack bars, convenience stores, movie theaters, and frozen in supermarkets. They’re very cheesy and I always thought Americans would also love them. Nowadays you can find cheese breads in US at the Brazilian churrascarias (steakhouses), or frozen in some supermarkets, but they’re so easy to make at home that everybody should try! The only ingredient that can be harder to find is the tapioca flour (polvilho azedo in Portuguese). Another good thing about it is that Brazilian cheese bread is naturally wheat-free and gluten-free, making it great for individuals with wheat intolerance or celiac disease! Here’s the recipe:

1/2 kilo de polvilho azedo (tapioca flour)
3 cups of milk
1 cup of vegetable oil
1 tablespoon of salt
4 eggs
500g de Parmesan or other hard cheese, grated

Pre-heat the oven at high heat for 15 minutes. In a bowl mix the flour and salt. In a saucepan bring milk and oil to a boil. Pour the milk into the flour, stirring well until you have homogeneous dough. Let the dough cool. Add the eggs and mix the dough with your hands, until it becomes creamy but dry. Add the cheese and mix well. Place a little oil on the hands and round dough into balls. Arrange on a baking sheet. Bake at 375 degrees Fahrenheit until done, about 20 minutes. Serve immediately.

Bread

Bread is a staple food of many cultures in the world prepared by baking, steaming, or frying dough that consists of flour, water, salt ( in most cases) and usually a leavening agent such as yeast. Bread is one of the oldest prepared foods, dating back to the Neolithic era. The first breads produced were probably cooked versions of a grain-paste, made from ground cereal grains and water. Descendants of these early breads (called flat breads) are still commonly made from various grains worldwide, including the Mexican tortilla, Indian chapatis, rotis and naans, Scottish oatcake, North American johnnycake and Middle Eastern Pita bread. They’re delicious, especially the Indians ones, like naans. And this recipe from The CIA is great!

Naan Bread - Makes 8 flatbreads
14 oz/397 g all-purpose flour
N oz/9 g instant dry yeast
6 fl oz/180 mL water
2 fl oz/60 mL clarified butter, plus more as needed
2 oz/57 g plain yogurt
1 egg
1 oz/28 g sugar
1-1/2 tsp/7.50 g salt
2 tbsp/12 g poppy seeds or black onion seeds

Combine the flour and yeast. Add the water, butter, yogurt, egg, sugar, and salt and mix on low speed for 4 minutes. The dough should be very elastic but still wet. Bulk ferment the dough until nearly doubled, about 1 hour. Fold gently. Divide the dough into 3-oz/85-g pieces. Preshape the dough into rounds. Let the dough rest, covered, until relaxed, 15 to 20 minutes. (Note: Work sequentially, starting with the first piece of dough you divided and rounded.) Gently stretch each piece of dough into a round, 7 in/18 cm in diameter, so that the center is 1/4 in/6 mm thick and there is a border H in/1 cm wide all around. Pull 1 edge out to elongate each round slightly, creating a teardrop shape. Place the breads on parchment-lined sheet pans, brush them with butter, and sprinkle the seeds on top. Bake the naan in a 425°F/218°C deck oven until golden brown and puffed, about 10 minutes. Cool completely on racks. (Recipe from The Culinary Institute of America)

Black pepper

Americans are eating more spices, often in the forms of blends and rubs, than ever before. "We are living in a new golden age of spice," says Michael Krondl, a chef, food writer, teacher and culinary historian. Within the spices, dried ground black pepper is very popular in US and last year americans consumed more than 110 million pounds of it. Black pepper is one of the most common spices in European cuisine and its descendants, and may be found on nearly every dinner table in some parts of the world, alongside table salt.
Black pepper is a flowering vine in the family Piperaceae, cultivated for its fruit, which is dried and used as a spice and seasoning. The plant is native to South India and is extensively cultivated there and elsewhere in tropical regions. Vietnam has recently become the world's largest producer and exporter of pepper, other major producers include Indonesia, India and Brazil. Black pepper is produced from the still-green unripe berries of the pepper plant. The berries are cooked briefly in hot water, to clean and prepare them for drying. The berries are dried in the sun or by machine for several days, during which the fruit around the seed shrinks and darkens into a thin, wrinkled black layer, the result of a fungal reaction. White pepper consists of the seed only, with the outer fruit removed. Green pepper, is also made from the unripe berries but treated in a manner that retains the green colour. Pink pepper or red pepper consists of ripe red pepper berries preserved in brine and vinegar or they can be dried using the same colour-preserving techniques used to produce green pepper. Pink pepper from Piper nigrum is distinct from the more-common dried "pink peppercorns", which are the fruits of a plant from a different family, the Peruvian pepper tree, and the Brazilian pepper tree.
Too much of it can be irritant of the intestine wall, but some black pepper is good for you! It stimulates the taste buds in such a way that an alert is sent to to the stomach to increase hydrochloric acid secretion, thereby improving digestion. Hydrochloric acid is necessary for the digestion of proteins and other food components in the stomach. When the body's production of hydrochloric acid is insufficient, food may sit in the stomach for an extended period of time, leading to heartburn or indigestion, or it may pass into the intestines, where it can be used as a food source for unfriendly gut bacteria, whose activities produce gas, irritation, and/or diarrhea or constipation. Black pepper also has diaphoretic (promotes sweating), and diuretic (promotes urination) properties and has demonstrated impressive antioxidant and antibacterial effects. Not only does black pepper help you derive the most benefit from your food, the outer layer of the peppercorn stimulates the breakdown of fat cells, keeping you slim while giving you energy to burn.

Shopping

Everybody knows that women adore to shop... no, it’s not only a matter of taste; in fact it is a necessity, something undisputed and I believe even genetic! It’s no different with me, but the good thing is that I fulfill my needs making the gastronomic purchases for my events. Knowing how to buy is very important, and is where the work of a chef starts, since the final result depends on the used ingredients. But much people don’t give to account of the talent and necessary training for accomplishing this task. In the first days of cooking school in NY we were presented all the ingredients, had to observe their characteristics and make a chart. At that time this activity seemed silly, but in fact they made us begin attempting to the details and stimulated our senses; essential starting points for a good purchase.
Many popular rules exist to choose each product. For example, to know if the pineapple is good we must pull out a leaf, if it feels easy it means that the fruit is mature. It functions generically, but not with perfection, because there are some degrees of maturity, the fruit can be almost right or even starting to go bad. Therefore for me there are three pillars to detect the quality of the ingredients in the food world: smell, aspect and consistency. The taste would be important too, but normally we cannot eat stuff before we buy them. To use this rule you cannot be ashamed, you need to observe, smell and to touch everything! Another tip is to buy the products according to the seasons. And it’s good to know that to buy better you have to practice a lot, which is good to exorcise the avid consumer that exists in you!

Turducken

In US you have Thanksgiving Day coming, here in Brazil we are already heading for Christmas, but the concern is the same: what to cook? One thing I know for sure, I have to have turkey on my menu. I’m not a big fan so it’s hard to think about some recipe that excites me. I have to confess I’m out of ideas! That’s why I’ve been discussing the subject with some trustful taste buds’ people. So far nothing interesting… But at least I provided some fun for them when I talked about the Turducken recipe. Which is a de-boned turkey stuffed with a de-boned duck stuffed with a small de-boned chicken. The name is a portmanteau of those ingredients, turkey, duck, and chicken. I don’t know how well that is known in US but here nobody has a clue, they think it’s some joke and laugh about it. I found out about Turducken in Jeffrey Steingarten’s book. Now I researched the Internet to learn more and I found a lot of recipes and pictures! It seems a lot of people are doing it! Now I can prove it exists! I’m also thinking about putting it on my menu and probably I’ll be the first one to do it here!

Canapés

Inventing canapés is one of my favorite things to do in the kitchen. I feel free to attempt new recipes and I also adore working with miniature forms! Usually I serve about 5 kinds of canapés in a party, I choose 3 of them among the ones that already are a success in my repertoire and I create the other 2. That way I’m always presenting new stuff and incorporating the ones people like the most to my menus. In the old times canapés were very boring and people didn’t care much about them, but today chefs need to be creative and show who they are and how they cook from the canapés to the dessert. To be honest I see my small creations more as amuses-bouche than canapés. Amuses-bouche are served in restaurants before the meals for all the customers and are free of charge. The word is French and means: “to amuse the mouth”. The idea is that it should excite the taste buds and enchant the eyes, preparing the dinners for the wonderful meal that will come to follow. The celebrity chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten, already affirmed that amuse-bouche is the best way of a chef express its big ideas in small bites. But even if you’re not a chef and don’t have so many big ideas you can express yourself and create your amuses-bouche. You can think about the flavors you like, dishes you ate or recipes you saw and adapt, change the form, minimize and voilá!
The one at the photo was created a year ago and since then it has a captive place in my Asian menu. It is made with raw tuna, cut into strips, with Asian sauce made of: sesame oil, soy sauce, ginger, onion, rice vinegar, black pepper, chopped and mixed in a food processor and decorated with chives and sesame seeds.