Not tapioca pudding, just tapioca. Tapioca is a starch that comes from cassava root. (Cassava root is also known as manioc or yuca - which is totally different than yucca.) For many people, the only way they will consume tapioca will be as a pudding. Or in bubble tea, which is prepared using tapioca balls.
But tapioca can be used for so many more things beyond pudding and bubble tea. You can use tapioca in pies as a thickener. It can be used in shrimp bisque. Cook tapioca with pineapple for a sweet dessert. If you travel to certain Latin American countries like I did last month, you'll probably eat a lot of manioc, the whole cassava root, usually prepared boiled. You can make gluten-free cookies with tapioca flour, or go international and make kue bangket cookies. (Here's an alternative recipe for those cookies here.) Keeping with the international flair, you could have a Brazilian tapioca omelet for breakfast, have tapioca pudding or cassava fries with lunch, boil the cassava for dinner, and then have a tapioca cake. If you follow that, you'll have eaten tapioca in 5 different ways from 5 different countries.
With all these different ways of eating tapioca, maybe it's time I ventured beyond the bubble tea and boiled root. Variety is the spice of life, no?
No comments:
Post a Comment