Cheese Puffery Part VI

The Chef will think nothing about walking the seven miles from our house in Morngingside Heights to Astoria to purchase two loin lamb chops from his favorite Greek butcher. But ask him to walk a few blocks out of his way, while there, to purchase Colombian cheese bread, and boy does he moan! Yet, good man that he is, he brought me back one loaf of pan con queso and two small cheese puffs, pan do bono, and it turns out he had good reason to moan: this errand sent him home on a subway misadventure throughout Queens as one station after another was out of service!

I first was introduced to Colombian cheese bread when my friend Johanna (mentioned in the account of this Astoria outing) kept peppering our texts with them. “I indulged in one of those Colombian cheese bread rolls tonight,” she confessed, and I was as interested as if she told me she had just watched a particularly steamy movie. When we next went to Astoria, I beelined it to the bakery she mentioned, cheery rough and tumble La Gata Golosa (roughly translating to “Sweet Tooth Cat”), so near the Broadway station that it seems to shake when the train goes by. I bought a small loaf of pan con queso ($1.75) and, be still my heart, two Colombian cheese puffs! Round pan de bono ($1.50/ea) are made with cassava flour, like the pao de queijo at O Cafe, the item that started me on my quest for cheese puffery.* Gata even has donut shaped plain ones or ones filled with guava. In Colombia tradition you eat these treats with a rich cup of hot chocolate!

I froze the bread and had it for breakfast the next morning. When I cut open the pan con queso…surprise! Where was the cheese? The bread had deep hollows in the middle with a small slab of mild farmer’s cheese resting in the bottom of one hollow. I was glad it wasn’t the ooey gooey cheesy mess of Georgian khachapuri bread, which is a meal in itself. I like my breakfast breads light and airy, as this was. And the pan de bono was also lighter than the O Cafe version. Because I’d seen that La Gata Galosa serves them with guava jelly (which I don’t like), I put some raspberry jam in the warmed, chewy ball. It was a perfect combination of sweet and savory. This gata has a “golosa.”

La Gata Golosa
30-18 Broadway (near 31st street)
Queens
718-806-1493

*Click on the tag “cheese puffs” and you’ll see the other posts in the Cheese Puffery series!