Culinary Success!

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I am turning this blog into a food blog for just a bit to help out all of my readers who fell in love in Northeastern Brazil.

That is... fell in love with tapiocas in Northeastern Brazil.

For those of my readers who have not had the gastronomic pleasure of eating a hot tapioca on a crowded street corner, let me first inform you that a tapioca is not a pudding. Nor is a tapioca the pearls you find at the bottom of your boba tea. Imagine an omelet-type food only without eggs. To the uninitiated it may sound weird and not worth the effort of mustering up enough Portuguese to place your order, but you would be wrong.

Please don't be offended by that.

The other reason I am turning this blog into a food blog for a moment is because my husband, also known to readers as my S.O.S. (Significant Other, Sweetheart) is too excited by his culinary success to bother with sitting down to inform the world about this important breakthrough.

S.O.S. has, since he first tasted tapioca goodness on the sea breeze filled streets of Porto De Galinhas, wondered how he could survive a return to the tapioca-less shores of California. Many a trip to a new grocery store has involved him disappearing from my carefully charted course as he seeks to find the necessary tapioca ingredients. This of course is a little tricky, since we never saw the necessary tapioca ingredients in any packaging that we could attach appropriate names to.

It became a tapioca emergency. There were no restaurants within driving distance that served Brazilian tapiocas. The closest thing S.O.S. could find was tapioca starch, also called tapioca flour. But after purchasing, he discovered it was too fine and dry to possibly be what he wanted.

And so for months, the opened bag of Bob's Red Mill Finely Ground Tapioca Flour sat in our pantry, scaring me frequently with the uncanny resemblance of Bob to my father.

But yesterday, after days of concentrated efforts to make promising headway, S.O.S. found this website with directions on how to make dough for tapiocas from cassava starch (also known as manioc starch... and tapioca starch!). With the good help of Google translate, Google Converter, and additional Google searches, S.O.S. set off to turn Bob's Red Mill Finely Ground Tapioca Flour into manioc dough.

After three hours of soaking, three hours of drying, and a few rounds in a Parmesan cheese grater: Success!

S.O.S. was caught so unaware of his breakthrough that he was unprepared with the necessary fillings and so created his first tapioca with peanut butter and Nutella. But no matter, success was so sweet that his taste tester nearly didn't let him get any.

I'm told that there will be tapiocas soon with the more traditional fillings of coconut, plantains, sweetened condensed milk and also the savory options of cheese and meat.

Looks like one is about ready. I've got to go. I've got to go convince S.O.S. that when it comes to tapiocas, a taste tester's job is never done.

Comments

lasselanta said…
Three cheers! Now all three of you need to come to TX. (Teaching us to make tapiocas is as good an excuse as any.) :-)
3:21 PM
Emily (Laundry and Lullabies) said…
You have my permission to become a food blog, as long as all posts are this entertaining. :)
4:36 PM
caedmonstia said…
Sounds a wee bit labor-intensive, but cheaper than flying down here to order one ready-made. Not to make either of you jealous, but I had a ready-made one last night at a booth outside my husband's alma mater. It had banana, cinnamon, and coconut in it (I can't have cheese because the Small One doesn't do well with dairy products :( )
5:14 PM
Brian said…
This is your father, a.k.a. "Bob." It does sound labor intensive, but the world has many labor intensive compulsions far less savory than tapioca. (I had not intended it as such, but "savory" works as a pretty good description of the experience of standing on a street corner watching one's tapioca browning on first one side, and then the other.) The key here is if S.O.S. has enough of the compulsion to perform the laboric intensiveness, I can think of a number of people ready to enjoy the savory part. Which corner will he be setting up on?
6:05 PM
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