RECIPE - Brazilian-style French Rolls ( Pão Francês Caseiro)

For the benefit of those home bakers who'd like to try a hand at making Brazilian-style French rolls (click here to read about them) or for Brazilians living outside Brazil who are dying of saudade for the aroma, the crunch and the taste of  pão francês, we're publishing below a recipe for a home-made version of that iconic Brazilian bread.

We've not tried this recipe, so we can't vouch for how closely the end product will resemble the bread that hundreds of millions of Brazilians buy everyday from their neighborhood bakery or supermarket. The source of the recipe, however, is from a trusted Brazilian source, Terra Culinaria, a large internet collection of Brazilian recipes. The translation and adaptation is by Flavors of Brazil. If any of our readers makes this recipe, we'd love to hear about the results. Just leave a comment below if you'd like to critique the recipe.
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RECIPE - Brazilian-style French Rolls ( Pão Francês Caseiro)
makes 20 rolls

8 cups (1 kg) all-purpose unbleached flour
1 cup ice water
1 1/2 cups warm water
2 Tbsp dry active yeast
1 tsp granulated white sugar
2 tsp salt
1 Tbsp neutral vegetable oil
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Sift together the flour, the sugar and the salt. Place the sifted flour in a large mixing bowl. Proof the yeast in the 1 1/2 cup warm water, then add the vegetable oil. Slowly add the mixture to the flour in the bowl, mixing in each addition before adding more, using a wooden spoon. Then begin to add the ice water, again in small amounts, incorporating each addition before adding more, using your hands. When the dough becomes smooth and elastic, stop adding water.

Turn the dough out onto a floured working surface. Using floured hands, knead for 10 minutes. Alternatively, use a Kitchen-aid or similar home mixer equipped with a dough hook. Stop kneading when the dough is smooth, non-sticky, and springs back when poked with a fingertip. Form the dough into a large ball.

Put the dough in a clean large bowl, cover with a clean towel, and leave in a warm, undraughty place for 30 minutes.

Return the dough to the floured work surface. Divide into 20 equal-size portions. Roll each portion into a ball, then flatten it. Roll the flattened ball into an elongated, spiral shape. When finished, put the rolls on one or two non-stick baking sheets, well-separated, then cover with clean towels and let rise until they have doubled in size (normally about one hour).

Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 425F (220C). As soon as the rolls have doubled in size, using a razor blade or very sharp knife, cut into each roll in the long direction. Put them in the hot oven.

Fill a clean spray bottle with water. As soon as the rolls begin to brown, quickly open the oven door, mist the rolls lightly with water, and close the door. Continue to bake the bread until the rolls are nicely browned and, if tapped, sound hollow.

Remove the rolls from the oven and let them cool on wire racks.

Brazil's Daily Bread - Pão Francês

When Brazilians ask for "o pão nosso de cada dia" (our daily bread) as part of the Lord's Prayer, the vast majority of them are most likely thinking not of a loaf of sliced white bread, nor of a heavy rye bread. Not a wholesome 8-grain bread or a baguette, either. The image they have in their mind's eye is of a roll that fits neatly in the palm of a hand with a crisp brown crust and a light-as-air crumb inside. The bread that is generically known in Brazil as pão francês, or French bread.

For most Brazilians, pão francês IS in fact their daily bread. It is almost universally eaten at breakfast and often as part of a snack or a light supper, though almost never as part of almoço, the main meal of the day, eaten at lunch time. The typical Brazilian home breakfast is fruit or fruit juice, coffee, and one or two pieces of pão francês, either eaten simply slathered with margarine or cream cheese, or made into a sandwich with a slice of cheese or ham. At night, Brazilians eat pão francês as part of a supper that is smaller than standard North American or European dinner, again served with margarine or cream cheese, or made into a cheese or ham sandwich.

This pattern of eating pão francês every day dates from the early 20th Century in Brazil, when the style of bread we call French became known to Brazilian troops in Europe during the First World War, and was brought home with them when they returned from the battlefield. At that time, crusty rolls were more popular in France than long loaves (baguettes) and to this day, rolls are preferred in Brazil. Over the course of time the original French recipe became Brazilianized, and today most bakeries sell pão francês that has a pinch of sugar and a touch of butter or some other fat added to the original recipe for French bread dough.

Brazilians have come to prefer a roll that has a very airy and fluffy inside - pão francês is much less dense than French bread found in France or other countries. What is most important to Brazilians is the crust - it must be nicely browned and extremely crunchy. Brazilians love a roll that breaks into small sharp flakes when cut into. Because bread crusts do not remain crisp in Brazil's hot and often humid climate, Brazilians demand the freshest of bread on their tables. Many families buy bread from a supermarket or a bakery more than once a day - once for the breakfast bread, and again later in the day for afternoon or evening eating. Bakeries, by customer demand, are required to have fresh bread coming out of their ovens multiple times a day, so that when a customer comes in the bread is still warm from the oven. One bakery in Fortaleza that is a favorite of ours advertises that they offer 40 different bakings per day in order to assure the freshest possible bread.

Although Brazilians are united in their love for pão francês, the name that they call it varies tremendously from regions to region. For example, in São Paulo it's pãozinho (little bread), while in Ceará (home of Flavors of Brazil, it's called a carioquinha (little girl from Rio). Elsewhere, such varied names as pão massa grossa (thick dough bread - in Maranhão), cacetinho (little stick - in Rio Grande do Sul and Bahia), pão careca (bald bread - in Pará), média (medium - in the port of Santos), filão (long one - in Sergipe), pão aguado (watered bread - in Paraíba), or pão de sal (salt bread - in numerous regions) are all applied to this simple basic roll. It's a task for a foreigner travelling around Brazil to find out what to order in the bakery from one location to the next. Even Brazilians are confused when they travel domestically and find that the name they use at home is unheard of at their destination.

Next post, as a special treat for homesick expat Brazilians, we'll post a recipe for Brazilian-style pão francês for making in a home oven.

RECIPE - Bread Farofa (Farofa de Pão)

Over the past few days, Flavors of Brazil has been featuring a small sampling of the many thousands of recipes for a dish called farofa - a flavored and seasoned mixture of dry manioc flour (farinha) and some form of fat or oil. It's one of the most basic cornerstones of Brazilian cuisine and dates back to the time before the arrival of Europeans on these shores.

One difficulty for cooks outside Brazil who want to discover this versatile and unusual side-dish is sourcing the main ingredient - dry manioc flour. Those who are lucky enough to have a Brazilian food market in their community won't have problems, as every Brazilian market, large and small, in Brazil or outside, sells farinha. Those emigrant Brazilians who live in areas where there isn't a Brazilian community often carry farinha with them - hoping to avoid culinary homesickness.

Fortunately, there are a very few recipes for farofa that don't call for manioc flour, and those can be made easily almost everywhere. What these recipes don't have is the characteristic gritty feel of manioc flour, which Brazilians adore and some non-Brazilians find, to put it politely, less than wonderful. These recipes substitute dried bread crumbs for the manioc, but use the same basic cooking technique as the classic recipe. The flavor profile of the finished dish is very similar to classic farofa, and the dish can serve the same purpose as manioc-based farofa as a side dish. If farinha is completely unavailable to you, give this a try. It's next to "as good as the real stuff" good.
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RECIPE - Bread Farofa (Farofa de Pão)
Serves 6

6 day-old French rolls
6 cloves garlic, chopped
1/3 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1/3 cup butter
salt to taste
1/2 cup Italian parsley, chopped
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Preheat the oven to 350F (180C).

Cut the rolls into thick slices and lay out the slices on a baking sheet or cookie sheet. Place in the preheated oven and toast until the slices are completely dry and nicely browned.

Remove from the oven and let cool. Grate the bread slices on a box-grater, using the largest holes. Reserve,

In a large frying pan, heat the oil and butter together until the butter is melted and the fat is hot but not smoking. Add the chopped garlic and cook just until it begins to brown. Do not overcook. Add the grated bread crumbs in a steady stream, stirring constantly, until all the crumbs are moistened by the oil and heated through. Season with salt to taste and remove from the heat.

Stir in the chopped parsley and serve immediately, or let cool completely and serve at room temperature.

RECIPE - Yam Bread (Pão de Cará)

We all know that there's no bread like homemade bread, even if we don't often get a chance to make it or taste it. Homemade bread blesses both the baker and the consumer, and no matter how spectacularly good a loaf of storebought bread might be, it can't hold a candle to bread from one's own oven.

Brazilian home bakers often add pureed potato, sweet potato or yams to their bread dough, which gives the final product an unidentifiable light sweetness and a marvelously airy texture. This recipe calls for the type of yam Brazilians call cará, but the bread can be made equally successfully with mashed potatoes or sweet potatoes - though obviously the taste will differ depending on which tuber you choose.
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RECIPE - Yam Bread (Pão de Cará) 

5 cups unbleached all-purpose wheat flour, sifted
pinch of salt
1/2 cup demarara sugar (or other brown sugar)
1 Tbsp instant yeast
2 whole free-range eggs, lightly beaten
2 Tbsp softened butter
1 cup cooked and mashed yams
1/2 cup whole milk
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In a large metal or glass mixing bowl, combine the sifted flour, the salt, the sugar and the yeast. Mix well with a wooden or plastic spoon. Add the eggs, butter and yams, mixing in each ingredient as it is added. Finally add the milk in small quantities, making sure that each is incorporated before adding more.

Turn the dough out onto a well-floured work surface and knead it for 10-15 minutes, adding a bit more flour if required from time to time, or until you have a smooth, elastic and non-sticky dough. Form into a large ball.

Place the kneaded dough in a clean bowl, cover with a clean cloth towel and put it in a warm, non-drafty place. Let the dough rise for about one hour, or until it has doubled in size. Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 350F (180C). Return the dough to the working surface, punch down and form into loaves (large or small as desired). If you wish you can also cook the bread in prepared greased and floured loaf pans. If not using loaf pans, place the formed loaves on a greased and floured cookie sheet.

Bake the bread in the preheated oven for about 25-30 minutes, or until the loaves have a nice browned crust and sound hollow when tapped. Let cool completely on a wire rack, then store or serve.


Recipe translated and adapted from Cozinha Natureba.

The Increasingly Ubiquituous Brazilian Cheese Bun (Pão de Queijo)

Wait a minute... can something be "increasingly ubiquituous"? The title of this post claims increasing ubiquity for a Brazilian breakfast food and snack called pão de queijo, but second thoughts tell us that something is either ubiquituous or it isn't - just like "perfect", there are no degrees to "ubiquituous." But we think the title has a nice ring to it, so we'll keep it just as it is. In any case, readers of the blog will get the idea.

However you want to say it, though, these little round cheesy puffs of manioc starch are extremely popular - inside Brazil and increasingly outside the country as well. When I visited Vancouver in July, a city where Brazilian food is notoriously thin on the ground, I spotted a small hole-in-the-wall restaurant on the city's trendy Main Street strip that specialized in these Brazilian cheese buns. It was called Quejos and it appeared to market the cheese buns primarily to people with restricted diets. All of their promotional material and signage trumpeted the fact that their product was gluten-free, wheat-free, yeast-free and non-dairy. It's true that there is no gluten in  pão de queijo since it's made from manioc starch, not from wheat, but it seems to me that selling the product only on the basis of what it doesn't have is discouraging at the very least. The fact that the store either couldn't properly spell the Portuguese word for cheeses (Quejos instead of Queijos) or thought that the Canadian market couldn't handle such a foreign-appearing word was another sore point with me.

In Brazil, though, people don't eat pão de queijo by the handful because they're good for you or because you can't really eat what you want to eat so you'll eat pão de queijo rather than starve to death. They eat these little round balls because they love them. Properly made, they are wonderful - light as air, aromatic and full of flavor, satisfying without being heavy or greasy. They make a perfect accompaniment to fresh fruit and strong coffee at the breakfast table, or a few of them in a paper cup provide a great pick-me-up on a window-shopping spree, a day of museums, or just a coffee break from work.

Although pão de queijo means cheese bread in Portuguese, these morsels are really not bread, as they have no leavening agent at all. The ingredient list is short - manioc starch, milk, eggs, butter or oil and some sort of cheese. In Brazil the cheese is usually a white cheese known as Minas, from the state of Minas Gerais, but it can also be cheddar, mozzarella or parmesan. The manioc starch is strongly elastic and consequently small pockets of air trapped within the dough expand during baking resulting in pão de queijo's light and airy quality.

Although most Brazilian's buy pão de queijo from a bakery, or from one of the fast-food chains that specialize in these treats, such as Casa de Pão de Queijo, they are quite easy to make at home and many Brazilians make them fresh in the morning to eat for breakfast. They can be made from scratch or from a pre-packaged mix. All that needs to be done is to mix the ingredients, knead them in a mixer with a dough hook or by hand, roll them into small balls, and pop them in the oven on a cookie sheet. Pão de queijo is almost always good, but it's never better than when it just comes out of the oven, like most other kinds of bread.

If you live somewhere there's a significant Brazilian community, you're likely to find pão de queijo in ethnic bakeries and lunch spots, and if you want to try to make it at home, you can find the one exotic ingredient, manioc starch (called povilho doce in Portuguese) in Latin American markets. Unfortunately, though, unless you can source the starch, you really can't make pão de queijo at all. It's absolutely essential. For those of you who might want to try to make Brazilian cheese buns at home and who can locate some manioc starch, we'll post a recipe tomorrow.

RECIPE - Açorda

This utterly simple and wonderfully delectable dish is one of many that made its way relatively unchanged from Portugal to Brazil. In its home country it is associated with the mountainous Alentejo region which stretches southward from Lisbon in the direction of the Algarve. Here in Brazil, it's most well known in the state of Rio de Janeiro, where the Portuguese culinary influence remains strong, and in the mountainous interior state of Minas Gerais, whose climate of warm days and cold nights closely mirrors that of the Alentejo.

Açorda is true comfort food, warming and simple. Try it on a rainy evening, or if you're in a region where there are nights of snow, try it then. It needs be served only with a green salad and a simple dessert. If you want to make the meal authentically Portuguese/Brazilian, that dessert could be pudim (flan or creme caramel).

There are many variations of açorda - some with seafood, some with salt cod, some with meat. But this is the basic and most likely the original version.

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RECIPE - Açorda 
Serves 4

1 round loaf European-style peasant bread (Italian, Portuguese, etc.) - one or two days old is best
4 cloves garlic, peeled
1 cup loosely-packed chopped cilantro
salt to taste
extravirgin olive oil to taste
boiling water
2 free-range eggs, lightly beaten
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Cut a slice off the top of the bread, and pull out the soft bread from inside in chunks, leaving a hollow shell. Put the garlic cloves in a mortar, add a bit of salt, and using a pestle make a paste. (Alternatively, use a small bowl and wooden spoon).

In a large heavy frying pan, heat olive oil over medium heat, then add the garlic paste and cook just until it begins to brown. Do not let overcook. Add the bread crumbs, and cook for a minute or so, mixing so that all the bread is coated with oil.

Stir in half of the cilantro, and then begin to add the boiling water, about a half cup at a time. Stir and mix continuously, breaking up the bread as you go. Continue adding water in small quantities until the bread has broken down and forms a pap, or very loose paste. (See photo above for correct consistency). Be careful not to add to much water.

Add salt to taste, then add the beaten eggs, mixing and stirring thoroughly until the eggs are totally absorbed and cooked through. Remove from heat, then stir in the remaining cilanto.

Return the cooked açorda to the shell from the loaf of bread and serve immediately.