Supposedly this is a great replacement for wheat? Anyone got tips or a thumbs down on this product?
i am completely intolerant of wheat, rice and oatmeal now.
I’ve used tapioca flour to make Brazilian cheese bread (Pao de queijo) and it works great. They are delicious.
They are more like cheese puffs (or French gougere), very similar procedures too. But very cheesy and would help fill any bread craving if you’re having that. I think the small size and cheese helps mask any textural difference the lack of gluten may create.
There are tons of recipe variations out there. I’ve only made a few and the differences were minimal in the final product IMHO. I would guess people like whatever version they grew up on.
yep, i have made that numerous times and it’s a great little snack.
tapioca and cassava come from the same plant but are not the same product.
Tapioca is just the starch, whereas cassava flour is yuca which is dried and ground to powder. It’s like potato starch vs potato flour.
I’ve only used cassava flour in a smaller amount to replace potato flour in a recipe where it was used for its moisture absorption.
And I tried it in jeon batter since I had it for playing around. It honestly had a similar effect to tapioca because of the chewiness that comes from yuca/cassava. It produced a crispy result, but I needed very little because even in small amounts it makes for a chewy texture in something like a pancake (which I like).
I’ve seen people use it in batters for things like fish and it looked great, so I would start there or similar (like jeon which is not too different from a tempura batter). I think something like a batter is generally a good place to start because there aren’t too many variables and you’ll get a usable product even if the texture might not be exactly what you want on the first try, so it’s easy to test and come up with adjustments.
You can also use it to make things typically made with grated yuca, like Dominican empanadas and chulitos (fritters that look like hush puppies and are stuffed with meat or cheese). For that you need to cook a small portion in water so it becomes sticky and serves as the binder for the dough.
i rarely batter food, so was hoping for experience with applications like brownies or cookies.
there’s a bag of potato flour in my freezer too, lol.
They don’t work on their own for most baked unless you want the texture of yuca or potato. Any baked good made only with cassava flour will have a chewy and stretchy texture similar to mochi. In fact the famous pon de ring donuts that people call mochi donuts are made with tapioca. Likewise potato flour on its own is not a substitute for flour. You have to combine with other flours and starches to get something to resemble wheat flour. But they’re going to be minor players because you typically only need a small amount of them, while ingredients like rice flour and oat flour are used in much larger amounts.
With brownies you can skip flour altogether or use almond flour or other nut meal easily. Potato flour in such a small amount might be ok in a brownie, but I’m fairly certain the cassava would give you a mochi texture in them, which isn’t bad (mochi brownies are a thing), but it’s very different from your standard brownie.
I just bought cassava bread
because i couldn’t find bammy to go with my salt fish. In the process I found a comparison to wheat flour.
This one made it sound pretty good
…but another I can’t find right now seemed to say it had its share of sugars.
More about cassava bread
