Pao de Queijo, Pork and Other Things Not Beginning With P

A while ago during Chinese New Year, I'd baked up a batch of fantastic Pao de Queijo but never got around to posting the pictures up. I'd promised the friend who introduced me to Elise of Simply Recipes' wonderful Pao de Queijo page, that I'd make both versions that were given there - one is a kneaded dough, the other is put together in a blender and poured into mini muffin tins. I didn't get around to the second one till much later, and life interfered so here are both photos and thoughts on both recipe versions.

Pao de Queijo, as far as I can dig up, is Brazilian cheese bread made from manioc flour, or tapioca starch. Manioc flour is apparently fermented and has a slightly sour taste to it, but that's not something I can find here in Malaysia at all. Tapioca starch however I can find in -scads-. It's also known as tapioca flour, confusingly enough, but they're both the same thing.

Elise lists down two recipes - one is the easy blender version, another involves no blender, a mashed potato, and kneading up the dough by hand.


The Kneaded Version



The first time I made this, I thought I'd made a mistake. While the dough came together fine after mixing up the milk, flour, oil potato and the cheese, the recipe instructions didn't say that the addition of eggs would turn it into a completely soggy, goopy mess that looked like a disaster area. And the dough was supposed to be very silky and mouldable! However, after a few minutes the tapioca starch absorbed everything nicely and what do you know, it DID turn out silky and mouldable.

And it baked up like a -dream-. My mother, who normally doesn't eat a lot of dairy or cheese, couldn't stop eating them. The flavour was amazingly wonderful, and so was the texture. I used a combination of cheddar and parmesan cheese for a very strong cheesy flavour, having read that the blandness of the tapioca needed it. By golly it worked! However, I think next time I would store leftover dough in the fridge rather than the freezer, because when it thawed out, there was far too much excess water and the dough became far too liquid. I'd make this again, no hesitation.


The Blender Version



The blender version of the recipe is very simple - all ingredients get thrown into the blender, whizzed into a batter, and then gets poured into a mini muffin tin to bake. It takes about 15 minutes, or less if you're faster than I am at measuring stuff.

It baked up fantastic too, rose like little puffy hats! The flavour was good - if I hadn't actually baked the kneaded version, I'd have been ecstatic with this. As it is, I think the flavour of the kneaded one is better. I'd also use a neutral-flavoured oil, rather than the olive oil - the olive oil flavour was very distinct and a bit strong.

Otherwise though, this was a very, very simple and very good recipe. I would definitely make it again, due to how little time it takes.




Another recipe that I'd been dying to try for a while was the Lisu Spice-Rubbed Pork from Beyond the Great Wall. When Leite's Culinaria posted the recipe last year, I decided to finally give it a shot but I only managed it about two weeks ago. Whoops. However, it turned out to be one of the easiest, most flavourful recipes I've ever come across. The pork was tender and moist, and all around -wonderful-. In fact, when I made it today and accidentally left out the allspice which I substituted for nutmeg (not having any), it STILL tasted amazing.




Recently a friend and colleague came back from taking the Youth Chamber Choir to Vietnam for competition (they won the category championship!) and all the talk about Vietnamese food and Banh Xeo (Vietnamese sizzling crepes) got me into the mood to make some.

I used Rasa Malaysia's Banh Xeo recipe, cutting the quantities down in half. The results? Wonderful! Crispy on the edges and soft in the centre, just like it was supposed to be. I didn't have bean sprouts or chillies, so I just used shredded chicken and some pork and the green onions for the filling. It was great regardless, and so easy - I am going to make another round of this -with- all the ingredients next time. There's a vegetarian version I've come across, which I plan to try one day - Winnie, you'd like that I know!

And yes, Banh Xeo really -is- that lovely bright yellow colour - it's the turmeric powder that does it.

I'm not posting the recipes I used; I've linked them for you so you can go read them for yourself. These cooks have done amazing work; they deserve all the credit for their wonderful recipes!

Next up, ie: when I get around to editing photos - Migas! And possibly soda bread (and a dozen other things that I really should get around to writing up eventually.)

Brioche and Bo Kho

Lord knows why I seem to be predisposed towards baking in the crazy hours of the morning. Like 2am, or even 3am and counting. Granted, it's a holdover from my university days when I had classes in the mornings, worked in the afternoons and evenings, and did all my homework and studying at night.

That being said, it was worth every moment of staying up to try out this gem of a gluten-free brioche on Aran's beautiful, inspiring blog, Cannelle et Vanille.

While I was a very good cook prior to my gluten-intolerance and am even better now thanks to all I've learned since my diagnosis, unfortunately the same doesn't hold true for my baking skills. I was a great bread-baker in days past. However, gluten-free baking was an animal of completely different temperament - after several rather expensive failures (gluten-free baking ingredients can be rather costly here), I didn't dare try anything else for fear of yet another jinxed recipe.

Zoe's brioche though? Absolutely amazing. More than that, it's surprisingly easy to whip up; it's the rising times that takes the longest at 2 hours and 40 minutes respectively. It is also incredibly forgiving of baker stupidity, which gets a HUGE thumbs-up from me - I forgot to take my agave nectar out of the fridge, so had to use it cold (I didn't have honey, and agave nectar substitutes out nicely for that.) One of the things that's been drilled into my head is that gluten-free baking NEEDS to have all ingredients at room temperature or it might not turn out right. Furthermore? The recipe had -yeast- in it, and I wasn't sure if the dough would rise after I just dumped a batch of cold stuff in to mix. I just covered the plastic container I mixed the dough in, shut it in the oven to sit in the requisite warm place, and left it after crossing fingers, toes, and eyes that it'd turn out ok.

Two hours later, the dough had inflated like the giant Pillsbury Dough Boy in Ghost Busters even -with- the cold agave nectar, much to my astonishment. It shaped up nicely for baking with the help of wet hands. While the recipe called for greasing the pans, I noticed that Aran's pictures of her brioche included one where she'd lined her pan with a sheet of parchment paper so she could easily lift the loaf out to cool when it was done. I greased only the two short sides of the pan, and cut parchment paper to hang over the long sides. In went the dough to rest for the required 40 minutes and by the time I came back, it filled the entire pan.

I don't normally eggwash anything that calls for an eggwash, simply because I think it's a waste of one egg and I don't need my bread to look so pretty-pretty - but I decided to be good and follow the recipe anyway. So I beat up one egg, brushed it over the surface of the dough, forgot to sprinkle sugar over the top of it, and stuck it in the oven to bake.

Both brioches came out picture-perfect, and that's a -rare- thing when I bake. The smell in the kitchen was intoxicating enough I wanted to bottle it. Great taste, fantastic texture, especially after it firmed up when cool. When hot, it reminded me -exactly- of the texture of a crumpet and I -love- crumpets. Haven't had them in years, and especially not since my diagnosis. I might need to figure out a way to replicate crumpets with this particular mixture of flours now.

I had to wait till two days later to take photos of the brioche in the daytime, and the taste and texture were still fantastic.





A day before that, I'd also decided to make a huge supply of Wandering Chopstick's amazing bo kho (Vietnamese beef stew). Since I'd lugged back a huge bottle of genuine Phu Quoc fish sauce back from Hanoi, I figured I'd try it to see what the big deal was all about - I'd read rave reviews from Andrea Nguyen and Bobby Chinn about the fish sauce off the little island of Phu Quoc. One drop on a fingertip to taste was all it took to convince me they were absolutely right. The stuff has a phenomenally complex depth to it that defies description. It's barely fishy at all. It's marvellous. I'm hoarding that bottle, I am. It's liquid gold.

I couldn't find the annatto seeds for the recipe even though I hunted for a few hours around all the shops I could get to in the area. So I substituted paprika instead. But then I thought I had bay leaves and it turned out I left them behind in the Great Move of Doom so I had to leave 'em out to my disgust and hope it would taste just fine.

'Fine' is not the word I'd use to describe this stew. 'Wow' might be better indicative of my first taste when the prescribed four hours in the crockpot were up.

In short: Just make it. You will not regret the time spent (and it's not that much time, since it mostly involves putting all the necessary ingredients in the crockpot.) This bo kho is amazing. After four days in my fridge, it's even more amazing. In the words of the Bloke, 'Beef stew - good. When you feel like making more, I'll help get the ingredients.'



(I'd have taken a photo of the stew bubbling in the crockpot but my camera battery died, and besides, WC has even better photos on her site of this marvellous dish.)

Notes:
For the brioche, I used agave nectar in place of honey as I didn't have the latter on hand. It works just fine, and keeps things vegan, if one's inclined that way.

For the stew, I still haven't found annatto seeds but a good dash of paprike will give the entire thing a pretty red colour as well. The absence of bay leaves didn't seem to detract much from the taste either, but I definitely want to try it with the next time to see what the difference is.