Making Tapioca from scratch

Have you ever made fire the old fashioned way? You know, by rubbing two sticks together or using some other cunning bush-craft technique? I haven’t done it myself, but it appeals to me greatly. I like the idea of doing it at least once just to prove that I can and also to experience the magic of what is really quite an amazing process when you stop to think about it. After that I expect I’ll be happy to go back to using a lighter or matches.

I’ve noticed recently that my will to do things from scratch has been extending into the culinary world too. I’m not quite ready to butcher a cow’s carcass, but I wouldn’t rule it out one day. For now I’ll content myself with smaller achievements – like tapioca extraction!

For those who don’t know, tapioca is the starch that is extracted from the cassava root. Cassava goes by many names – manioc and yuca are two of the most  common and in Brazil we have (at least) three: mandioca, aipim and macaxeira. Tapioca starch can be used to thicken sauces in much the same way as corn starch (known as ‘cornflour’ in the UK, fécula or amido de milho here in Brazil). It can also be used to make a delicious pancake known as beiju de tapioca or just tapioca. They’re a big hit with most people who try them.

Most of us buy our tapiocas from street vendors or market stalls – whether topped with something sweet or savoury, it’s a delicious and satisfying snack (you can also buy the hydrated starch powder in supermarkets so you can make your own tapiocas at home). Until recently there had always been a missing step in my knowledge and experience of this operation – how do you extract the tapioca starch from the cassava?

Turns out it’s pretty easy and rather a fun little project – here’s what you do:

Extracting tapioca starch from fresh cassava roots

Cassava roots – the top two are in their natural form, the bottom one is coated in wax.

• Buy a good number of cassava roots (I used around 6 good-sized pieces and this produced enough tapioca to make 2 pancakes). Sometimes the roots are sold with a wax coating which apparently keeps them fresh for longer.
• Peel/remove the outer shell from the roots. I used to do this with vegetable peeler until I discovered the massively satisfying technique of peeling the outer skin off in one go. Cut 2-3mm into the skin with a sharp knife and trace a spiral from top to bottom of the root (as seen in this nifty video clip which was coincidentally posted by someone on a Facebook group yesterday morning. Sorry – I can’t find who it was now to give credit. Tracy S M maybe?). Then either peel the skin off with your fingers or get a knife in there to ease the shell away from the centre. Put the peeled centre sections into water while you peel the others to stop them from discolouring.

Easing the skin/shell away from the central section.

• Once all the cassava roots are peeled, chop them into smallish chunks and blitz them in a food processor with water until you have a really smooth, creamy paste.

Chop the cassava into smallish chunks (left) and then blitz with water in a food processor or blender until really smooth and creamy (right).

• Now we want to separate the starch (tapioca) from the rest of the vegetable matter. Get a clean cloth and secure it fairly tightly over the top of a large mixing bowl or saucepan (I tied a drying-up cloth around a saucepan using some string). Now ladle some of your cassava mixture onto the centre of the cloth and move it around a bit using a large spoon. Add some more water and mix it around with the rest of the mixture. The idea is that you encourage the starch to dissolve in the water and then drip through the cloth into the bowl below. Continue doing this for a little while and then remove the string and carefully bring the four corners of the cloth up and over so you can squeeze the remaining pulp and wring any remaining starch water into the bowl. Then discard the pulp and tie the cloth back onto the bowl to repeat the process.

• Once you’ve followed the previous step for all the cassava mixture, you’ll be left with a large bowl of milky liquid. Put it somewhere out of the way where you won’t have to move it and leave it for at least 3 hours to settle. Now pour off the water and you’ll find a thickish layer of starch on the bottom. Congratulations – you have successfully extracted tapioca! Starch is weird stuff – push it or squish it and it acts like a solid. Leave it alone and it goes back to acting like a liquid:

• Now it’s just a matter of partially drying the tapioca mixture so it’s at the right consistency for making tapioca pancakes. I left mine in the fridge for about a day and kind of dabbed at it with kitchen towels occasionally. You can also do it more quickly by kind of squeezing the water out of it or laying the tapioca on top of a layer of kitchen towels. However you do it, you want to get the starch to the point that it has stopped acting like a liquid and is more like a solid lump.

Partially dried tapioca, ready for the next step.

• Now you want to push the tapioca through a sieve. If you have it at the right consistency then it will be almost like grating it. As you move the lumps back and forth over the inside of the sieve they will break up and pass through as a slightly damp powder.

Sieving the tapioca to form a hydrated powder.

• And now you just need to follow the standard steps for making tapioca. Mix a little salt through the tapioca and then sprinkle a layer (5-10mm thick) into a pre-heated small non-stick frying pan (don’t add any oil or other liquid). As the powder heats up, the particles gel and stick together to form a single pancake type structure – shake the pan gently from side to side to get a feel for when this has happened.
• Flip the pancake once and continue to cook for a minute or so. Then flip it back and top with cheese and oregano or pretty much anything else you like. If you can find queijo coalho or Halloumi then you can put that (grated) on the tapioca before flipping it the first time – those cheeses grill rather than melt which means you don’t get a molten cheesy mess when it is cheese-side down. Another filling that works really well is left-over Bolognese and cheddar cheese – heat it through until the cheese melts – yum!

After you put the powder into the pan, use the backs of your fingers to smooth the powder into an even layer.

With ‘melty’ cheeses, I’ve found it’s best to add the cheese after both sides of the tapioca have been cooked. Then you just fold the tapioca in half and serve.

I like my tapioca served with a fiery hot sauce and home-made HP Sauce.

Tapiocas don’t look very exciting when they’re folded in half, so here’s what it looks like if you open it up!

Now that I’ve followed the process through from start to finish, I’ll probably just do it the easy way in future. Still, it was a fun and fairly easy process and at least I can say I’ve done it!