Discover the secret to making crispy, gluten-free Cacio e Pepe bites with America’s Test Kitchen in this quick, delicious recipe tutorial.
Deliciously Crunchy Gluten-Free Snacks Inspired by the Classic Italian Dish
A dead-simple, gluten-free, cheesy bite that promises to be the highlight of your next gathering is the Crispy Cacio e Pepe Bites. This delightful recipe showcases the perfect blend of flavors and textures, making it an ideal choice for entertaining. The combination of crispy exterior and cheesy interior offers a satisfying snack that appeals to a wide range of palates.
America’s Test Kitchen (ATK) has built a reputation as a leading multimedia cooking resource since its inception in 1992. With an emphasis on empowering home cooks through tried-and-true recipes and culinary techniques, ATK employs a meticulous team of test cooks and editors who rigorously refine each recipe to ensure optimal results. Their commitment to quality and community makes them a trusted source for cooking inspiration and expertise.
Transforming Tradition: Crunchy Delights with a Gluten-Free Twist!
– Crispy, crunchy bite-sized croquettes are one of my favorite things to snack on. I like to order them as an app too. And I thought had tried them all until today. Because Dan’s here, we have a very peculiar, but I’m really interested, type of croquette to make. – This is such a fun recipe and it’s a little bit different.
In the croquette world for sure. – Okay. – So this recipe actually comes from Sasha Marx, who’s a colleague that we used to work with here, and he worked at this restaurant in Chicago called Parachute, which is really great. Korean-American, but just really inventive. And these are tapioca-based croquettes. So we’re gonna start off.
With some milk in our sauce pan over here. We’re gonna heat it up. And before we do that, I’m gonna spray it with a little bit of vegetable oil spray. – Okay. – If you ever worked with milk and you’re scorching it for bread or for making hot chocolate, you know how hard it’s to scrub off the bottom of the pan,.
Right? – Yes I do. – So all these little micro scratches and stuff in the pan, the milk settles in there and as you bring it up, the protein sets and it’s very, very tricky. So just a quick and very light spray of veg oil spray will take care of that problem. – Great.
– Now I have a quart of whole milk and we’re gonna bring this up to a boil over medium high heat. All right, so we’re up to a boil. We’re gonna add our tapioca. So we’re adding two cups of tapioca pearls. And this is the same stuff you’d use for pudding. You don’t want to use minute tapioca here, you want the long cook stuff.
So we’re gonna stir this in and bring it up back to a boil, which usually takes about 30 to 60 seconds. Now, tapioca is fascinating. I don’t know how much tapioca pudding you ate when you were younger or even now. – I still do. – You still do? – I love tapioca pudding. – It’s so good, right?.
The starch that you get from tapioca has really unique attributes to it and it makes a gel that’s really stretchy and chewy. And we’re gonna take full advantage of that in this recipe. – Okay. – Okay, great. So we’re up to a boil here. We’re gonna simmer this for six to eight minutes and it’s gonna get thicker and thicker. We’re gonna stir constantly.
’cause it can really stick to the bottom. And we’re looking forward to really absorb all this milk and have that texture get nice and thick. Beautiful. So this is thickening up considerably. This is looking like the pudding that you were wanting. – Absolutely. – So six to eight minutes is not long enough to fully hydrate and cook through tapioca pearls. It takes a lot longer than that,.
But we’re actually, this is perfect at this point. So I’m gonna turn off the heat. We’re looking for them to be tender on the outside, but a little bit of bite inside. You can think of it as maybe al dente. – Mm. Okay. – And that leads into the flavor profile that we’re working with here, which is cacio e pepe. – Oh, okay.
– So it’s really nice. You know, this has kind of has like an arancini sort of texture to it. So we’re kinda playing into that. And this Roman combination is just incredible. So off heat here, I’m gonna add one and three quarters of a cup of Pecorino Romano. We’re not going shy on any of the seasonings.
These are really gonna… You know, every single bite’s gonna really pop. Five teaspoons of black pepper, which is a good amount of black pepper. – Uh, yeah. – Yep. You know, if you’re really sensitive to it, you can cut back on it. But if you like that cacio e pepe balance, this is the perfect amount.
I also have two and a half teaspoons of kosher salt. So we’re gonna stir this in, make sure it’s nice and incorporated. So we’re gonna work quickly here and transfer it to an eight-inch baking pan that we’ve sprayed really heavily with a vegetable oil spray. So we’re gonna let this cool on the counter for about 20 minutes.
Then it won’t be steaming. We’ll wrap it in plastic and pop it in the fridge. And you need at least two hours in there for it to really set up. But you can do it up to 24 hours. At Cook’s Illustrated, we’re food nerds. That’s why every recipe we develop involves research, cooking science, and rigorous testing by our team of expert test cooks.
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Of our tapioca starch down here just so we don’t have any sticking. – There we go. – So we’re gonna cut this into 49 squares. And so I’m just gonna measure in. We start here with an inch. Okay, so now that I have that one, I’m gonna split this section in half and then each of these into thirds.
Okay. So now I’m just gonna slice down on my marking there. Cut a nice row. Okay, and then I’m gonna do the same thing here. So we’ll have 49 squares total. Okay. Beautiful. – Absolutely amazing. I do wanna point out something though. – Yeah. – I’m gonna have to break apart your square here.
Just for a second. – Yeah. Yeah. – ‘Cause look, the inside, look at these little dots of tapioca still in there. – Yeah. – Hasn’t completely dissolved. That’s what you meant by al dente. – Exactly. So now we’re gonna dust them in a little bit of tapioca, a few at a time.
– It’s the strangest rice crispy treats I’ve ever seen. (Dan laughs) – Okay, great. So after they get dusted in it, I like to shake ’em a little bit and we just get any excess off. As a party food, you wanna be able to kind of make them ahead and have everything ready.
And these can be refrigerated at this point for up to three days. So I’ll continue with the rest of these until they’re all nice and coated. And then we’ll do a little cleanup and it’s time to fry, which I know is your favorite time. – It is my favorite time. It’s always fry-day. – I brought a quart of oil to 375 degrees, and so it is time to fry.
– Like motor oil or some other kind? – This is vegetable oil. (Bridget laughs) This is vegetable oil. So I’m gonna add a third of our beautiful little squares. Okay, great. Now we’re gonna cook stirring relatively frequently here until they’re nice and brown all over, which takes two to four minutes. – Okay.
– So a quart of oil, it’s not a lot for deep frying, but it’s just enough as you can see that covers them. So that’s all you need. So as you can see, they brown really quickly. They’ve got the milk proteins. That’s really the thing that browns the fastest. The starch is a little bit slower, so you just wanna keep an eye on them, keep stirring them pretty frequently here.
And then if any of ’em look like they’re ready, pull ’em out. – Okay. – Okay. Those are beautiful. Now, before I get the next batch in, I’m just gonna quickly hit them with a little bit of salt. Now we’ve got a lot of cheese in there, so you don’t need a ton on here, but it’s nice to season fried food with a little bit of salt.
And doing it quickly really matters. There’s still a little bit of moisture on the surface from the steam, and that’s what makes the salt really stick. So before the next batch, we want to return the oil to 375 degrees. And I’m gonna finish this up in two more batches. Okay, so we finished frying our batches. I transferred them right to a platter.
We want these nice and hot, and then I’m gonna sprinkle them finally with a little bit more of the Pecorino Romano. – Such great party food. – It really is. It’s so fun to serve up. And people are, you know, a little confused like, “What is this?” at first. But then they’re the first thing gone at the party every time. – Yeah, I believe it.
– All right, I’m gonna let you dig in. – Okay. Finger food, right? – I think it’s finger food. – Mm! Mm! – It’s good, right? – Hang on. (Dan laughs) Nice and warm, as cacio e pepe should be. But that cheese is gorgeous too. It’s nice and toasty. The texture, though. You’re right about that al dente.
– The pepper acts as the kind of counterpoint to all the richness, right? You’ve got the milk and the cheese and that spice helps kind of clear things out. – We hope you enjoyed this video as much as we enjoyed making it. – Don’t forget to hit that “Like” button and subscribe to our channel. – And if you’re ready to take your cooking to the next level.
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