Biscoito Globo

The biscuit is a type of biscoito de polvilho, the puffed cassava-starch cracker long made across Brazil. The Rio beach icon is the trademarked 'Biscoito Globo', made by Panificação Mandarino. By the documented account the Ponce brothers learned to make polvilho biscuits at a bakery in Ipiranga, São Paulo, around 1953, then brought them to Rio for the 36th International Eucharistic Congress held there in 1955, where they sold out; the brothers settled in the city, and the name honours the Globo bakery in Botafogo where they were hired. The company was formalized in 1963 with the Portuguese baker Francisco Nunes Torrão. In 2012 a Rio municipal decree (no. 35.179, signed by mayor Eduardo Paes) declared the activity of the beach vendors of mate, lemonade and polvilho biscuit a Carioca intangible heritage — the protection covers the vendor tradition, of which the biscuit is the emblem, rather than the brand itself.

A light ring a few centimetres across, pale and dry, that crunches once and then dissolves as its thin hollow walls collapse against the tongue. The salty version is cleanly, faintly salty; the sweet one is lightly sweet, with no artificial flavour. It is barely there, which is why one bag empties fast. Best eaten warm from the vendor's bag with a cup of cold mate to wash it down.

The lightness comes from the puffing property of polvilho azedo, sour fermented cassava starch, the same mechanism that lifts pão de queijo. The starch is partly gelatinized, often by scalding the dough; in the oven the water in it flashes to steam and inflates the partly-set starch matrix, which then crisps into a rigid hollow shell. Fermentation matters: weeks submerged with sun exposure lower the pH and build the organic acids that give the sour starch its high puff power and faint tang, where unfermented sweet starch stays denser and flatter. Fully gelatinizing the starch destroys the expansion, so hydration and technique decide the result.