What is tapioca and, most importantly: how do you use it?
Tapioca: ever heard of it? You can come across it in various forms, and it has long been more familiar in Asian cuisine than in the West. But that seems to be changing quickly, because this wonderful stuff comes in particularly handy in all kinds of kitchens! What is it?
Tapioca is extracted from the root of a plant that has plenty of delicious things to offer itself: cassava! Cassava is used, for example, to make telo, a kind of frites on steroids: thicker, crispier, and with beautiful grooves that hold on to any sauce even better… Be sure to try telo by star chef Soenil Bahadoer**! Cassava chips may also be familiar to you, from the toko or the Asian aisle at the supermarket. And tapioca is also some particularly special stuff.
One name to bind them all
It is a starch, and is interchangeably called tapioca flour or tapioca starch. Admittedly, starch is different from flour: starch is obtained through separation processes, while flour is the term for something that is ground in its entirety. With tapioca, however, both terms are used interchangeably. Unlike, for example, wheat flour (sifted wheat meal), it has no floury taste, and you do not need to fry it first if, for example, you wanted to make a roux base. It can be used in the same way as all-rounder Maizena, you can also bake gluten-free with it, and it has the advantage (if desired) that it makes a sauce or gravy slightly less cloudy after cooking than corn starch. Both are snow-white in their pure starch form.
Bubbalicious
So it can be used to thicken, but also as a cheerful addition to bubble tea! There you will find it as pearls: transparent chewy balls that do not taste of much by themselves but do add a different texture. If you buy them dried to add to homemade bubble tea, read the instructions carefully on how to cook them until soft. Don’t be alarmed: that almost-black color only appears after the light-brown balls have been cooked. The pearls (in various colors) are also incorporated into some savory dishes, such as curries.
In short: on your next trip to the toko, after finding ginger and galangal, you now know where to find tapioca too, so you can experiment with it to your heart’s content in the kitchen!
Also read:
- Delivery review: Floor’s Surinamese catering meal delivery
- Recipe: plantain guacamole
- Toko tip: mango from the freezer
