Baked and breads
Pão de queijo
Brazilian cheese bread: chewy, crisp-shelled rolls of cassava starch and Minas cheese, eaten warm with coffee.
Pão de queijo is a small round bread from Minas Gerais in Brazil, made with cassava starch, eggs, milk, oil and grated cheese. It has a crisp shell and a chewy, stretchy centre, and contains no wheat. It is eaten warm for breakfast or with coffee in the afternoon, all over Brazil.
What goes in
- Minas cheese526%, Semi-cured, grated.
- Cassava starch737%, Sweet and sour polvilho.
- Milk316%, Heated.
- Oil211%, Scalded with the milk.
- Eggs211%, Bind the dough.
Rough parts by weight. The ring shows each ingredient's share of the dish.
Made step by step
Each drawing shows the operation for that step. Quantities and timings differ from house to house; this is one traditional way, in outline.
Step 1: Simmer Bring milk, oil and salt to the boil. Step 2: Knead Pour over the cassava starch and stir to a lumpy paste. Step 3: Knead When warm, knead in eggs one at a time. Step 4: Grate Knead in the grated cheese until smooth and sticky. Step 5: Knead Roll into small balls with oiled hands. Step 6: Bake Bake in a hot oven until puffed and lightly golden. Step 7: Serve Serve warm with coffee. Finished Pão de queijo, by share.
Minas Gerais
The bread is often traced to the farms of colonial Minas Gerais, where cassava starch was used in place of wheat flour, which was scarce and expensive. Cooks, including many enslaved women, made breads from the dried starch left over from processing cassava, and cheese was added as dairy farming grew. It became popular across Brazil from the mid twentieth century.
Starch and cheese
The key ingredient is polvilho, cassava starch, either sweet (doce) or sour (azedo), which has been fermented. Many cooks mix both. The starch is scalded with hot milk and oil, then eggs and cheese are kneaded in. The traditional cheese is queijo Minas, a semi-cured cow's milk cheese of the region, or queijo canastra. Parmesan-style cheese is often used elsewhere.
Where it is used
The cheeses in it
Also part of it, and being written: Parmigiano Reggiano (Parmesan-style cheese is common outside Minas.).
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Sources and further reading
Original text and drawings by the EveryCheese desk, written with AI assistance and checked against the sources above. The shares are a rough, illustrative ratio, not a recipe: every family and kitchen makes it differently. If we have something wrong, tell us.
Photo credits on this page
The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Minas cheese: The original uploader was Hellkt at German Wikipedia . ( Original text, Public domain, source
- Canastra cheese: [https://www.flickr.com/people/8100764@N03 Marcelo Costa ], CC BY 2.0, source