An excellent question. I’ve received so much conflicting information on pão de queijo this week — from recipes to individual ingredients to history — I’m almost reluctant to post about it. But then a healthy dose of skepticism is required whenever you’re talking food history, since it’s often indistinguishable from myth. …

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Forgive the lack of posts today. I was driving through a local park this morning and noticed a large pile of branches with a “Take Me” sign next to it. Clearly the park crews had been cutting back dead limbs and were giving away the trimmings. It was a nice mix of small diameter hard wood, most of it very dry. Perfect brick oven fuel, in other words. Since I’m one of the few Kentuckians without a pickup truck, I’ve been making lots of trips back and forth between the park and my garage. But hey, free wood is free wood. …

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Two attempts and I can’t get a decent batter consistency. It ends up as a dough with the very absorbent, granular manioc flour…and a dough simply won’t puff up like it should. So I’m going to do what my trusted source made me swear I wouldn’t do: use tapioca flour. I can see no other way forward. Sorry, (DELETED)! The good new is that if I get it to work more of you will be able to try it, since tapioca flour is a more common ingredient.

Though there are several cultivars of cassava out there, most cultures place the different species into one of two broad categories: bitter (sour) and sweet. And as you might expect, the bitterness of a cassava corresponds to the amount of cyanide-producing glucosides it contains, with the bitter ones containing up to 50 times more linamarin than the sweet ones.
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Mention the great agricultural gifts that the New World gave to the Old and most people think corn (those who aren’t chocoholics of course). Yet there’s another that’s at least as important, especially in the tropical and subtropical regions of the world: cassava, also known as yuca or manioc. …

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For a cheese puff recipe it seems to be missing a couple of things. A leavener for starters. There’s no yeast and no baking powder. And then there’s the flour thing…there isn’t any. No wheat flour at any rate. Instead we have manioc flour, also known as the dried and ground starch of the cassava (also known as yuca) root. It’s the same starch that tapioca is made from, in case that helps.
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Brazilians, I have ignored you too long. It’s time to make amends.

Or at least one of them, is Johannes Kepler. Like Linz’s least favorite son, Kepler wasn’t actually from there. Rather, he was born in Germany. Still he lived in Linz for quite some time, teaching mathematics and adding to his famous laws of planetary motion. Kepler did a lot in Linz, but the thing that captured my attention while I was reading about his exploits there this week was his participation in a debate about the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar.

Yeah sure Joe, sounds real interesting…click! Fine, but I’ve always found the topic fascinating — for what it says about the action of the solar system, but mostly for what it says about the all-too-common inaction of manmade political and religious organizations. For the Gregorian Calendar was officially instituted in 1582, but it took almost 500 years before it was finally, fully implemented around the world. And even today there are some holdouts. …

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