Brazilian — Breads & Pastry Techniques

Coxinha — little thigh — is Brazil's most iconic street food and salgado (savoury snack): a teardrop-shaped dough casing filled with shredded chicken, catupiry cream cheese, and aromatics, breaded, and deep-fried until golden. The name refers to the tearshape resemblance to a chicken drumstick. The dough is a cream puff-adjacent preparation: chicken stock is used to cook a flour dough into a thick paste, which is then filled, shaped, breaded, and fried. The catupiry cheese (a specific Brazilian processed cream cheese with a distinct sweet-tangy character) is inseparable from the authentic coxinha filling — it provides the creamy binding for the shredded chicken and its specific flavour.

Pão de queijo — Brazilian cheese bread — is one of the world's most texturally distinct bread preparations: small, round rolls made from cassava starch (polvilho azedo, the sour-fermented version) with eggs, oil, salt, and grated queijo Minas curado (aged Minas cheese), baked until the exterior is golden and slightly crisp while the interior remains extraordinarily chewy, elastic, and almost hollow — the unique property of gelatinised tapioca starch baked with cheese. The fermented cassava starch (polvilho azedo) provides a slightly sour, yeasty note that distinguishes professional pão de queijo from versions made with sweet polvilho. The texture is the entire point: the elastic, stretchy, cheese-flavoured interior has no parallel in wheat bread.