Cassava

Anyone that is into permaculture and lives in the tropics, will have heard of cassava. It's a well known addition to a food forest and is used for it's edible tuber and to chop and drop. When I used to do the markets in Rocky, Frankie next door to my stall, used to sell it and I'd often be given some to take home, but by the time I got around doing anything with it, it was a bit dried out and to be honest I didn't think it was worth the bother. However, recently we visited a friend in Monteville and had a tour of her food forest. She urged me to take some, so Maitland pulled up a heap of roots. We ate some that night cooked like mashed potato. I didn't peel it properly as it was very fresh and soft. That was a mistake, as the outer bark remained quite fibrous and didn't mash very well, but otherwise definitely a good substitute for mashed potato. I decided to make some flour out of the rest of the roots, so this time I googled a how to video.

Peeling the root - just cut into it with a knife and the outer layer comes off quite easily. I didn't actually weigh the amount I started with, which would've been useful information.

After washing all the root pieces, they are chopped small to enable processing in the thermomix (or blender or food processor). Water is added to the processor first and then blitzed to quite a fine dice - almost paste like. You can't add too much water - it comes out at the end anyway. You can also grate it by hand on a fine grater, but that sounds like way to much effort for me.

 

I followed the video and did the first strain through a sieve, but next time I would just strain the whole lot through cheese cloth a little at a time, giving it a good squeeze. You keep this cassava to cook with later on. 

I made bammy with this strained cassava. I made little ones, as I had trouble getting them to stick together. 

Take note of this bowl of liquid above, as this is what it looks like straight after straining.

Bammy is twice cooked. I'm assuming that this is so that they stay together better. Then, when you soak them in the coconut milk for the next frying, they don't fall apart. 

I really liked the bammy, which we had with a Jamaican Goat curry, but I also think they'd work as a dessert with some honey drizzled over them.

Now, back to the tapioca flour, because that's what it's called once it becomes flour. The bowl of white liquid, once it sits for an hour or two, settles out. You end up with some dirty looking water sitting on top of a solid layer of wet starch. If you've mixed tapioca flour with water to thicken something and not put enough water in, you'll know what this white layer is like. It's really thick! (I forgot to take a photo before I poured off the water, which incidentally was very easy to do). The bowl was full, so you can see how much starch you get from all that cassava!

I dried the cassava paste in a 100 degree oven.

After it was dry, I gave it a whizz in the thermomix to make it all fine and fluffy and then I did use a sifter to make sure there were no lumpy bits. The final product was 205g of tapioca flour.

We have one very small cassava tree growing already, but I took some cuttings to propagate some more. I would like to have access to a lot of this food source. It's very high in starch, but I do wonder if once you take the flour/starch out, whether the resulting fibre is just fibre. Fibre is good for the gut. Cassava is also a resistant starch so easier to digest than some starches. I'd like to play around with the pulp and maybe make some different flatbreads, maybe by adding eggs and seeing if I can make them rollable. One thing is for sure, it's easier to make tapioca flour from scratch than wheat flour (growing and harvesting wheat is very difficult on a small scale) It'd be nice to have a good easy bread substitute that we could grow here.

I've done some cuttings (3) straight into the pot and the other 5 pots have a horizontal piece under the soil. I've grown them like this in the ground before - we'll see which one works best. If you've got any recipe or other ideas for cassava, please comment below.