Pan de Yuca

When I was 21, I spent a year in Quito, Ecuador. It was an amazing and formative and life-changing year that left me with a lot of great food memories. Nothing takes me back to those incredible days more than Just Like Heaven by The Cure, Zhumir Limon (an economical 60 proof aguardiente - sugarcane alcohol - that, I respectfully submit, is not destined for the export market) and pan de yuca.

Pan de yuca (yuca bread) is a snack food/breakfast food/light-meal food popularly eaten in Ecuador and, I recently discovered, Brazil (and I use “discovered” in the same way that Columbus and the Conquistadors used it how apropos). I’d say that pan de yuca is eaten in Ecuador the same way that Torontonians would eat doughnuts or muffins or biscuits, except for the inherent flaw in my analogy being that Torontonians don't typically eat biscuits, in truth I have no idea how anyone eats biscuits but am willing to google it, and also that there's actually nothing comparable about any place that would sell pan de yuca in Ecuador and any place that would sell a doughnut in Toronto. Beyond that we’re talking perfect symmetry.

Yuca is a rainforest tuber. It is also known as cassava and manioc and according to Wikipedia has dozens of local names in Africa, Asia and Central and South America. Apparently there is also a band in Vancouver called Yuca. An excellent choice, I say! Back to the tuber, yuca is used in food-making almost like a potato. After being cooked (it is toxic when raw), yuca can be mashed, turned into meal and baked or fried, deep fried as a chip, roasted or turned into chewy tapioca and puddings. I found this photo of raw yuca on the internet I hope that’s cool with whoever introduced this picture to the world.

Pan de yuca is made from yuca flour. In Spanish, the word for flour is harina, and yuca flour is sold as Yucarina. I mean brilliant. Who could help but fall in love with yuca now? The other ingredients are minimal - queso fresco, egg and baking powder. Queso fresco (fresh cheese – haha - confused you!) is a soft, mild and rubbery unripened Spanish cheese that is found everywhere in Ecuador and other parts of Latin America. It is so damn good it is almost irrational to blend it into a dough and here I go doing just that. I had actually really wanted to wait until my Dutch cheese press arrived and I had made my very own queso fresco to blog about pan de yuca but I just couldn't wait.

The pan de yuca-making process involved putting the ingredients in the food processor with a bit of water and baking little balls of the dough at 400 for 15 minutes. When these savoury biscuits are fresh and hot, they are chewy on the inside with a thin crispy crust. Very very good. The chewiness is actually not from the cheese but from the yuca itself which can make, like tapioca, naturally gummy foods. In our home in Ecuador (I lived with a family), we usually ate pan de yuca at around 8pm coupled with hot chocolate. I couldn't do that today because my milk had curdled (that's the picture of my sad milk) but that’s okay because pan de yuca need no bells or whistles.

This certainly won't be my last post on Ecuador: I'm an efficient eater at the best of times so you can only imagine what I was able to accomplish in a year. Let’s just say that pan de yuca is the inaugural kick-off to what will become relapsing nostalgia on this blog. The Cure is blasting, the Zhumir is flowing (a mildly unfortunate yet, fortunately, proverbial consequence of this reminisce) and I’m home.