Tapioca Pearls Before Science

Last Updated (Tuesday, 10 August 2010 12:59) Written by Raymond Nakamura

Have you ever wondered about tapioca? I keep coming across it in pudding served at Chinese restaurants. Kids always think they're fish eyes or frog eggs. But I've seen those things and tapioca pearls are not them. Still, I didn't know what they were. Hence this.

Tracing Their Roots

It was easy to find out that Tapioca pearls come from the starchy, yam-like root of the Cassava plant, Manihot esculenta, which also goes by Manioc or Yuca (not the same as Yucca). It has a bunch of other names because it's grown in so many tropical and subtropical countries. It originally came from South America where people cultivated it in prehistoric times. In the 1600s, the globe-trotting Portuguese spread it from their settlements in Brazil to Africa and presumably other parts of the world. Here I was thinking tapioca was an obscure novelty item and it turns out to be a staple food of growing importance in many places all over the globe.

One Person's Dessert is Another's Poison

In the Tupi language of the native people in what is now Brazil, tapioca means "to squeeze out the dregs." Turns out that unprocessed roots contain cyanogenic glucosides. Plants use them to deter bugs. People who have too much, can get a paralytic disease called konzo from cyanide poisoning. So the root has to be processed first, which generally involves grinding, washing with water and drying.

More Starch, Please

I bought some tapioca flour to find out what it was like. It's a gluten-free starch and when I mixed it with water, I realized it shows the same weird, non-Newtonian fluid behaviour as corn starch. If you try to make little balls with just the tapioca flour and water, it starts hard but then goes liquidy. It's fun to play with. 

I read that the moist flour is heated in shallow pans, so I microwaved some and it started to get gummy and translucent. It's then supposed to be pressed through a mesh. I didn't have anything suitable so I just cut it up into cubes. 

Having a Ball

Finding out how the uniformly round pearls are created was a stickier proposition. The Indonesian gangsor method is supposed to involve throwing tapioca starch lumps back and forth inside a long cylindrical twill cloth bag. This results in more or less uniformly sized balls, depending on the skill of the practitioner. I tried rolling the cubes back and forth in a long flat plastic food container, but they just all clumped together.

Still Milling About

In the industrial method, some kind of milling is supposed to result in the pearls. I tried putting some in a pan and shaking it around, but that didn't do much. I tried putting them between two plates and rolling the one top but that just produced more flour. So I still don't know. I am not much of a baker or a very good experimentalist, but it has been fun to explore. If anyone has some insights on how the pearls are actually made, the world is your oyster.