The mystery of tapioca

I love tapioca pudding.  My mother used to make it whenever I was sick as a child.  I remember the small, rectangular, red box.  It looks almost exactly the same today as it did forty years ago.  I have a box in my cupboard somewhere, I’m sure, but I have never actually made it myself.



What exactly is tapioca anyway?  I asked myself one day.  The box offered me no enlightenment.  Under ingredients it simply lists: pearl tapioca.  So what the heck is that, I wonder. 



I found references to tapioca flour when I searched which made me wonder if it was a grain of some sort like wheat.  It reminded me of rice, so was it something made out of rice?  I asked around, and nobody seemed to know.  No one I talked to had ever thought to question it before.  So now I have a bunch of people who are just as curious as I am and they are a little bothered by the fact that I even brought it up.  It seemed to be a general mystery of little importance, but it was bugging us just the same. 



It was several years ago when I first raised the question, before the Internet was so easily searched for obscure subjects so I never learned the answer.  Eventually I just let it drop.  That was until tonight when I was eating rice pudding at a restaurant on our tame version of a “girls night out”.  I was raving about how wonderful the pudding was and how I liked the texture of rice pudding when someone said, “ I like tapioca better than I like rice pudding”. 



“What is tapioca, exactly?” I asked.  The three of us were silently perplexed. 



“You mean you haven’t had tapioca pudding?”



“No, I mean I don’t know what a tapioca is, where does it come from, what is it made of?”  I tried to explain.  I brought up my ideas about whether it could be made from rice or whether it was like wheat or maybe even corn.



None of us had a suitable answer so when I got home I decided to try the Internet again and I looked up tapioca first.  Wikipedia had a very short entry that stated that the most commonly used form is pearl tapioca.  It also had my answer.



Tapioca is the flour made from the starchy tuberous root of the cassava plant.  It is the third largest source of carbohydrates for human food in the world.  It is native to South America and Africa is its largest center of production. 



To make pearl tapioca, tapioca flour is soaked and then formed into the small “balls” packaged in the tapioca pudding boxes.  Instant, or Minute tapioca is actually a partially cooked form of the pearl tapioca. 



Tapioca flour is used to thicken foods such as gravies and pie fillings.  Pearl tapioca can be soaked in liquid for five minutes prior to using it to thicken foods.  This allows the pearls to soften and bled in better.  Tapioca is gluten free, and nearly protein free.



The mystery is solved and now you know what tapioca really is.