Farinha de Mandioca

The toasted cassava meal of the Amazon, the grated bitter root pressed dry in a woven tipiti and roasted on a hot plate until it is gritty, golden, and will keep for a year

Origin: Rondônia and the Southern Amazon, Brazil

From the journey of Cassava.

Farinha de mandioca is the oldest cassava food there is, and it is the reason the plant could be eaten at all. It is not a flour in the European sense: nothing is baked from it. It is a coarse toasted meal, scattered over food at the table, stirred into broth, worked into meat juices, and eaten by the handful, and a Brazilian plate without it is regarded as unfinished. The process is a piece of chemical engineering worked out in Amazonia thousands of years ago. Bitter cassava carries linamarin, and the plant keeps the enzyme that converts it into cyanide in separate cells. Grating ruptures every cell and puts the two together deliberately, which is the opposite of what a cook normally wants. Pressing in a tipiti, the woven palm-fibre tube that lengthens and squeezes as it is weighted, drives out the liquid carrying the poison. Toasting on a hot plate finishes the job and dries the meal to something that keeps for a year in a humid climate. The two things drawn off along the way became foods in their own right. The starch settles out of the pressed liquid as tapioca, whose Tupi name tipi'oka means the thing squeezed out and therefore names the press. The liquid itself, boiled long enough, becomes tucupi. This version uses sweet cassava, which is what is sold in Western shops, and therefore leaves out the detoxification the traditional process exists to perform. That is stated plainly rather than glossed: the method below reproduces the texture and the flavour, not the chemistry, and bitter roots must never be treated this way.

Ingredients

Root

  • 1.5 kg sweet cassava (yuca), peeled and the woody core removed

Seasoning

  • 1 tsp fine salt

To cook

  • 1 tbsp neutral oil, for the pan

Method

  1. Peel the cassava thoroughly. The skin has two layers, a thin brown outer one and a thick pinkish inner one, and both must come off. Split each root lengthways and pull out the woody cord running down the centre.
  2. Grate the peeled root on the fine side of a box grater, or pulse it in a food processor until it is a wet, coarse pulp.
  3. Pile the pulp into a double layer of muslin, gather it into a bundle, and twist hard over a bowl to force out as much liquid as you can. Then weight it under a heavy pan for thirty minutes and twist again.
  4. Break the pressed cake apart with your fingers and rub it through a coarse sieve or colander so that it falls as loose crumbs rather than lumps. Toss with the salt.
  5. Wipe a wide heavy frying pan with the oil and set it over a medium-low heat. Add the crumbs in a layer no more than a centimetre deep and toast, stirring and scraping constantly, for twenty-five to forty minutes.
  6. The meal is ready when it is dry, hard between the teeth, pale gold, and smells nutty and faintly biscuity. Cool completely on a tray before storing.
  7. Store in a sealed jar. It keeps for months. Serve scattered over beans and rice, alongside grilled meat, or worked into farofa.

Notes

Use sweet cassava only. Bitter varieties are genuinely poisonous and require prolonged soaking, pressing, and fermentation. Nothing sold as fresh yuca in a European or North American shop is a bitter variety, but it matters that the distinction is understood. Frozen cassava works and saves the peeling, though it gives a slightly wetter pulp that needs longer pressing. The starch that settles from the pressed liquid is tapioca. Pour off the water, dry the white sediment on a tray, and crumble it; that is goma, and it is what beiju is made from. Farinha is sold ready made in Brazilian and Portuguese shops as farinha de mandioca crua or torrada. Making it is worth doing once to understand what the meal is, and buying it is entirely reasonable thereafter.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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