How to ferment cassava?

Beyond Singkong Goreng and Tape Singkong

Cassava, or Singkong, is an overlooked ingredient when it comes to baking. We grow plenty of them ourselves and we make tape singkong and singkong out of it, but we don’t usually bake with it.

Recently however, with the coronavirus pandemic, we have experienced shortages in wheat flour. Wheat is not produced of our tropical country but it is an essential ingredient in many of the food we enjoy, like bread, cake, pizza, pancake and many more. The flour shortage (along with plenty of stay home time) led us to researching Brazilian cuisine which is based a many of their bread and pastry dishes on tropical-plant flour like coconut, taro and cassava.

This gave us a new insight into how we can use the plants available in our farm and expand the possibilities of our kitchen.

 

Can cassava be used like flour?

Yes! And no. Cassava star cannot directly be used as substitute for flour, as it does not have gluten and does not stretch and rise like wheat flour.

That said cassava flour is moist and delicious in its own way, and it is suitable for gluten-intolerant individuals. Once you have learnt how to ferment it, you will be surprised at how versatile and delicious cassava starch is. In subsequent posts, we will be writing recipees on how to use your fermented cassava to amp up your meal, but first - in this post we will be teaching you how to extract and ferment cassava to get freshly fermented cassava starch and fermented cassava juice.
 

How to Ferment cassava

	STEP 1  Wash and peel cassava
	STEP 2 Cube cassava and blend it with water. As a general rule, you can use about 400-500ml of water per kilo of cassava.
	STEP 3 Put your blendered cassava out in a large bowl, and cover. Leave it to ferment in room temperature for 24 hours.
	STEP 4 4 - After 24 hours, the cassava broth will be bubbly and smell sour. But don’t panic, this is as it should be.
	STEP 5 Use clean kitchen towel and sieve through the blendered cassava. Keep both the starch and the juice.
	STEP 6 Now you have your fermented product: Above: Fermented cassava juice - this can be used in cooking to make tucupi and to add savory vinegar notes in broth or stews. Below: Cassava starch which you can use for baking. If you let this water sit for an hour or two, you will get a sediment of fresh cassava flour (tapioca flour) which you can also use to bake or to thicken sauces.

   

Now what?

To give you an idea what you can do with your cassava ferments - these are a few delicious dishes that uses fermented cassava meal or cassava juice. We will be posting some of these recipee soon and posting their links below!

Pão de Queijo Cassava Bread and cheese This is our favorite Pao de Queijo recipee that you must try this! As with most of the recipee online, they uses cassava flour. When you do the steps above, what you get is basically hydrated and fermented cassava flour. If using this fermented cassava blend as substitute for cassava flour, reduce water/oil from the recipee

Pancake Singkong Cassava Pancake As per above, please subsitute cassava flour with fermented cassava with hydration levels in mind.

Tucupi Brazilian style broth  The recipe in this link uses shrimp, but you can use the recipe just for the tucupi preparation. I just realize there is no english tucupi-only recipe out there! Something we can write about and add to the web!

Moqueca Brazilian style fish stew  You will need tucupi for this recipe