New Ingredient: Cassava

I had never heard of this ingredient until my Aunt gave me a piece to try.  It looked like a boiled peeled potato.  It tasted a bit sweater than a potato and more dense but plain it was pretty good.  She is from the Philippians so I assumed this was a Philippine fruit/vegetable.  Since then I have looked and looked for it to no avail.  My local grocery store produce guy who has been in the business for 20 years never heard of it.  I even went to my local Asian market so see if I could find it there but had no luck.  When I visited my aunt the next month she had purchased me a couple of them to take home and try.  She told me to peel it and steam it until you could pierce it with a fork.

That evening I gave it a try.  I started steaming it and then questioning myself I decided to look it up on the Internet and the first article called it one of the top 10 most dangerous foods.   Then I found this description, click here.  I immediately ran into the kitchen and turned off the steaming pot and started to panic ever so slightly.  What I read was scary.  This arsenic filled vegetable could kill you and it needed to be cooked properly so at that point I began looking up recipes.  I did find recipes which was promising but they all called for boiling it to remove the toxins.  Since I didn't want to kill us both I decided to switch to boiling it.

When the vegetable was fork tender I removed it from the water and began to try and mash it.  One thing my aunt didn't tell me was that this vegetable has a woody root down the middle of it.  It should have been removed prior to boiling it because it made it difficult to mash.  I had to sift through it with my fingers to try and remove all the woody pieces.  It would be like hitting an egg shell in scrambled eggs if I didn't get it all.

Not feeling really great about this vegetable I decided to put it away for another day.  I didn't however want to give up on it and feeling that it couldn't be as dangerous as I read I did a bit more research.  I read more about the article on top 10 most dangerous foods and found that the next one on the list was coffee, so how bad could this vegetable really be.  That gave me courage because I haven't died from coffee yet. 

After going through the vegetable one more time to make sure I got all the woody roots, I proceeded to treat it like a potato and make mashed potatoes with butter and milk.  I decided to reheat it in the microwave for a couple of minutes first because it seemed a bit hard.  Even after that it was still hard to mash so I wondered if I didn't boil it enough.  I added my butter and milk and mashed away.  I wouldn't recommend to treat them in this manner. Although they didn't taste bad they were extremely dense, not fluffy  like normal mashed potatoes.  The next time I try these, and I will, I will try it chunked in bite size pieces in a stew, treating it more like a carrot or parsnip.

BTW - when I try it next time I will purchase a Yuca or Yucca.  The Cassava looked just like a yucca, these are in my grocery stores and even though the linked article says it is not the same maybe it is similar enough.  If not it will just be another experiment gone awry.