Achiras, crispy cheese snack from Colombia

Have you every experienced this? You want to bake something you ate during your holiday, but then you can’t find the right ingredients. This is what happened to me when I tried to make achiras, this is a gluten free cheese snack from Colombia. My first problem was the cheese being used, it is called queso campesino and simply is not sold in Germany. Feta is probably the closest you will ever find, but it is firmer and much saltier. So I thought I couldn’t make achiras.

On top of that, Colombians use a special starch for achiras. It is extracted from the Sago palm. I was very certain that regular grocery stores in Germany wouldn’t offer Sago starch. At least this is what I thought.

But when I was happily walking through our local grocery store, I suddenly read “pearl sago” somewhere between the cornstarch and semolina. Really? Was this for real? So I checked and learned that indeed I could buy starch made from Sago, however, it was only sold in pearls as you can see below. So I thought why not process these pearls in a food processor and see if it works? Unfortunately, the result wasn’t the best. So the next time I went to an Asian store, I asked whether they sold sago starch. The lady nodded and gave me a pack of tapica starch! I had to laugh, so obvious! Colombians have another cheese snack called buñuelos and this one is prepared with tapioca starch, I should have known! So now I felt I really had to give achiras a go. The next problem I had to tackle was the cheese.

Since queso campesino is much creamier than Feta, I thought I would mix in some cream cheese to give it the right consistency. Colombian cheese tends to be the fresh kind, so I firgued cream cheese might do the trick. But then the second batch was still not right either, I hadn’t gotten the ratios right and the achiras still looked wrong and didn’t taste as expected. But you know how it goes, the third time’s the charm, when I was almost giving up hope, I finally whipped up the perfect batch of achiras. Produced in Germany with German ingredients! And as an extra bonus I can tell you that they are prepared rather quickly. So if you are in for a crunchy cheese snack, which happens to be gluten free, why not give these traditional Colombian achiras a try?

Credit: Slighty adapted from the Youtube video by Colegio de Cocineros (in Spanisch)

Print Recipe

Achiras, gluten free cheese snack from Colombia

Serves: About 45, depending on size

Cooking Time: 20min preparation + 35min of baking

Achiras, gluten free cheese snack from Colombia

Ingredients

• 20 grams of butter
• 100 grams of feta cheese
• 150 grams of cream cheese
• 150 grams of tapioca starch or sago starch (not the pearls though)
• 1 egg yolk
• 1 teaspoon of baking powder
• 1 pinch of sugar

Instructions

1

Preheat oven to 180 degreese Celsius and line a baking sheet with parchment paper.

2

Melt the butter.

3

Cream the two cheeses with a mixer, then add all other ingredients except for the butter. Once everything is combined, add the butter. The dough will be a bit wet and sticky, that's OK.

4

From three long and thin strings with the dough on a surface floured with the tapioca starch, cut each string into 1.5cm little pieces and place these on the baking sheet.

5

Bake for 15 min, the reduce temperature to 160 and bake for another 15-20min. The achiras should be crunchy from the outside and the center should be dry.

Notes

No idea what to do with the leftover egg white? Check out see this blog post including how to freeze them properly.

Would you like to try some more Colombian recipes?

From left to right:

Colombian flatbread with cheese filling (arepa boyacense)

Fried cheese balls (buñuelos)

Meringue with berries (merengón)

Sweet yeast rings with guava filling (roscónes con bocadillo)

Puff pastry with custard and whipped cream (milhojas)

Milk custard (postre de natas)