Colombian Cassava Bread (Pandeyuca), crispy gluten-free cheese bread

Two cassava breads, one starch apart: pandeyuca and pandebono get mixed up constantly, since they look alike, bake in the same hot oven, and both are made from cassava starch and cheese. But they’re technically different breads with opposite results: pandeyuca uses sweet (unfermented) starch and is meant to be crisp and dry, while pandebono uses sour (fermented) starch and is meant to be soft and airy. If you’ve made the soft one, this is its crunchy cousin from the same cassava plant.

How do you make pandeyuca? Sift sweet cassava starch with baking powder, work it into a dough with grated white cheese, eggs, and butter. Chill 30 minutes, form 30-35 g balls, and bake at 230°C (450°F) for 12-15 minutes until golden. Makes 16 crispy pieces in 60 minutes.

Pandeyuca vs pandebono, the difference nobody explains

Pandeyuca is crisp and dry, unlike pandebono or almojábana, which are closer to soft bread. That 1 difference defines everything else, and it comes down to which of the 2 cassava starches you use.

The same bread exists across South America under different names: cuñapé in Bolivia, biscoito de polvilho in Brazil, pan de yuca in Ecuador and Peru. In Colombia it’s pandeyuca, the same sweet cassava starch every time.

Ingredients, and why sweet starch is right here

This is where pandeyuca and pandebono part ways, so it’s worth getting the starch right.

Sweet cassava starch. Native cassava starch with no fermentation. It makes a firmer dough that bakes into a crisp crust at high heat. Outside Colombia it’s sold as plain tapioca starch or Brazilian polvilho doce (“doce” means sweet, the opposite of the sour polvilho azedo used for pandebono).

White cheese. Campesino, cuajada, or costeño all work, since pandeyuca has no single required cheese; any Colombian white cheese is fine. The cheese-to-starch ratio is about 1:1 by weight, more cheese than most conventional bread recipes. Outside Colombia, use unsalted Latin queso fresco or queso blanco; avoid mozzarella alone, which is too wet.

Butter. Adds flavor and makes the dough easier to handle, and gives a more golden crust. A small amount, but it shows in the final taste.

Baking powder. The leavening that, with high heat, drives the fast rise. Without it, pandeyuca comes out flat and dense.

The cold rest, the step most recipes skip

Pandeyuca dough has a high proportion of fat — butter plus cheese — which is soft and hard to handle at room temperature. A 30-minute rest in the fridge firms that fat and does three things.

First, it makes the dough easier to handle: the balls hold their shape and don’t flatten before they go in. Second, it sets up a temperature contrast — cold dough entering a very hot oven rises faster in the first minutes, and that’s what forms the crisp crust. Third, it improves the final texture: pandeyuca shaped from room-temperature dough tends to come out softer and less crisp.

Fitting it to your kitchen

• If you don’t have 30 minutes to wait — 15 minutes in the freezer instead of 30 in the fridge works the same
• If it’s your first time — start with simple round balls; the ring shape takes more practice
• If you want to freeze them — form the balls before baking, freeze on a tray, and bake straight from frozen, adding 3-4 minutes
• If you can’t find queso campesino — unsalted Latin queso fresco or queso blanco panela; avoid mozzarella alone, too wet
• If you’re cooking for 30 — double it; the baking time doesn’t change

What ruins pandeyuca

Confusing sweet starch with sour. Sour (fermented) starch is what goes in pandebono and makes a soft, airy texture. With sour starch the pandeyuca comes out too airy and loses its signature crispness.

Not chilling the dough. Soft room-temperature dough makes pandeyuca that flattens in the oven before the baking powder kicks in. The cold is what keeps them in shape.

A low oven. At 180°C (350°F) pandeyuca comes out pale and soft. It needs 230°C (450°F) so the crust forms fast before the inside dries out.

Dough too dry. If it cracks when folded it needs more milk, a tablespoon at a time. Too-dry dough makes a pandeyuca that crumbles when you bite it instead of crunching.

What to serve it with

The classic pairing is hot chocolate or black coffee; the crisp-and-hot contrast of pandeyuca with a hot drink is the breakfast of the Valle del Cauca and the coffee region, and at about 130 calories each they’re easy to stack on a plate. For a full spread of Colombian gluten-free breads, set pandeyuca next to the soft pandebono, the fried buñuelos, and a batch of cheese arepas, with a cup of aguapanela alongside.

Nutrition

Per pandeyuca (of 16): about 130 kcal, 14 g carbohydrate, 5 g protein, 6 g fat (3 g saturated), 220 mg sodium. They’re naturally gluten-free, just cassava starch with no wheat, and most of the protein comes from the cheese.

Pandeyuca was one of the first Colombian amasijos I learned to tell apart from pandebono, since at first I mixed them up because they look so similar. What finally made the difference click was biting into them: pandeyuca crunches, pandebono yields. That audible crunch is exactly what defines it. In Venezuela we don’t have quite this bread; we have the soft cheese bread, but not the crisp pandeyuca version. — Josnaisis.