Have you ever been to a Brazilian churruscaria? When our church launched three years ago, the core team was so sweet to give hubby (the pastor!) and me a gift card to Fogo de Chao. While the meat- which is what they are famous for- was delicious, the bread is what had my heart.
I asked the waiter what made it so unique and he told me it was made from yuca flour. I scoured the grocery stores in Houston, determined to recreate these little beauties at home. I couldn’t find it anywhere! I finally did some research online and found out it was also called tapioca starch, or tapioca flour.
I picked some up at an Asian grocery store for- get this- 89 cents! {a whole post coming soon on Asian groceries- love ’em!}
The recipe I use is here.
Here are the ingredients:
Tapioca flour, butter, eggs, cheese, salt, baking powder.
Pretty basic, once you find the elusive tapioca starch!
{If you don’t live in a big city, you can also buy it here. Yay Amazon!}
The recipe I follow uses all mozzarella. Four cups of it!
But you can also use 1/2 mozzarella, 1/2 Parmesan.
Mmmm…. cheese! Shred a bunch of it.
Anything with this much mozzarella has to be good, right?
Mix the ingredients together. The recipe says to use a food processor, which I don’t have. I used my hand mixer, and said at least four times while making it, “I need a food processor!”
The dough should be really smooth, like above.
Throw in the oven for about 7 minutes at 500 degrees, then broil for a few more minutes.
Pretend these are mine, since I can’t seem to remember to take a pic of my finished bread!
They are so good, y’all! Eat them right out of the oven, really really hot.
We had them for dinner Saturday night when we had friends over. They seemed to like them. 🙂 I think between the four adults and two kids present, we took down about 20 of them!
- Combine the tapioca flour, cheese, baking powder and salt in a food processor, blend to mix well.
- Add the butter and eggs
- Mix until small dough balls begin to form
- Remove the dough from the food processor and roll into a ball, you can make the dough ahead and store in the refrigerator for up to a day.
- Pre-heat the oven to 500 F .
- Make small round shaped breads with the dough and place on a cookie sheet with parchment paper.
- Bake immediately or store in the fridge until ready to bake.
- Bake for about 7 minutes and turn on broiler until the breads are golden, about 3-5 minutes.
About Kelli Hays
