One of my favorite desserts is tapioca pudding, a gooey vanilla flavored concoction laced with chewy little nuggets of goodness. Up until recently, I never wondered what those things were and how they came to be.
Let any question lie around long enough, however, and I’ll start looking for an answer. With tapioca it happened the other day when I was loading the dishwasher and noticed a single tapioca pearl stuck to the bottom of my dessert dish. It was enough to get me wondering.
Tapioca comes from the cassava root, a starchy carbohydrate cultivated in Africa, India, Southeast Asia, South America and the Caribbean. Most of it comes from Thailand, with Brazil coming in second.
I’m amazed tapioca ever became a food in the first place since the outer skin of the root is loaded with something called linamarin, the stuff chemical companies use to make cyanide. The name comes from the word, “tupioka,” which describes the process Brazil’s Tupi Indians were using to separate the good stuff from the bad when Portuguese explorers first came to the country.
The Tupis ground the roots into pulp and then squeezed the liquid into pans and dehydrated it in the sun to create a floury powder resembling corn starch. The next step was to make a paste and push it through a sieve, creating tapioca pearls.
The Tupis along with other indigenous groups still make tapioca this way although the stuff we get in the supermarket probably comes from big machines operated by people in sterile white coats and hairnets.
Another surprise is all the things tapioca is used for. In Brazil tapioca flour is fried into pancakes. In Venezuela it’s made into tortillas and flatbread. People in Southeast Asia somehow manage to detoxify the root and make French fries and potato chips from it.
The flour is universally used as a thickener in soups and sauces, and some French chefs add it to parfaits. In Nigeria and Ghana tapioca is a popular breakfast cereal, and in India it is used as an easily digested staple in nursing homes for the elderly and infirm.
Thousands of people in Southeast Asia survived on tapioca during drastic food shortages in World War II. Understandable, since the cassava plant grows so fast it can be harvested every two months.
In the West Indies tapioca is processed into toothpaste and on some islands it is fermented into alcohol. In Sri Lanka tapioca is commonly used as laundry starch. And one enterprising chemical company now converts the stuff into a polymer resin to make biodegradable plastic bags.
Good news for sure. But as for me, I’ll stick to tapioca pudding.
