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Roots and tubers from Latin America

Cassava bread (casabe) - boundary entrycasabe

Cassava roots are peeled and grated, and the pulp is squeezed in a woven press to extract its juice, which can carry cyanide-forming compounds. The meal is sifted, baked on a hot plate into a hard cake and dried in the sun. Grace describes no fermentation step, so it is in the atlas as a contrast to gari, attiéké and farinha.

Fully documentedRoots and tubers

Recipe

No fixed amounts recordedTraditional process with no fixed amounts in the sources used here. The bread is baked from sifted cassava meal in a layer about 5 mm thick (Infante).
Cassava rootsPeeled, soaked and grated; the pulp is pressed to extract the juice[infante2013][fao-grace1977]
WaterThe peeled roots are soaked before grating; Infante gives no amount or time[infante2013]
Start
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What changes: Starting material: cassava roots, peeled and grated

Step 1 of 5
Peel, soak and grate the roots
Time
Not documented
Temperature
Not documented
Salt
None given
Acidity
Not documented

Infante lists soaking between peeling and grating and gives no time. Grace's account has only peeling and grating. Output: wet grated cassava.

Flavour
Not documented
Texture
Not documented
Colour
Not documented

Microbes at work in this step

Not documented for this step.

Method

Measured measured in a studySet fixed by a specification or tested recipeReported one source reports itTypical a general value, not sourced for this fermentUnconfirmed not yet checked against a source

At a glance

Cassava roots are peeled and grated, and the pulp is squeezed in a woven press to extract its juice, which can carry cyanide-forming compounds. The meal is sifted, baked on a hot plate into a hard cake and dried in the sun. Grace describes no fermentation step, so it is in the atlas as a contrast to gari, attiéké and farinha.

What makes this one different

Cassava bread is a boundary entry. In Grace's account its possibly poisonous juice is pressed out and the pulp baked hard, with no souring step. Farinha, by contrast, mixes in a little pulp fermented for three days, and gari and attiéké are soured before they are cooked.

Related ferments

Variants

  • Farinha de mandioca (Latin America)The pressed meal is mixed with a little pulp that has fermented for three days, then stirred on a pan for 3 to 4 hours into a granular, only slightly roasted product instead of a bread (Grace).

Safety

Cassava can cause cyanide poisoning, and pressing does not remove everything. Insufficiently processed cassava has caused poisonings, some fatal (EFSA 2019). Grace says the tipiti press extracts the greater part of the possibly poisonous juice of the cassava pulp. In Infante's description of the Venezuelan method, the cyanogenic glucosides are leached out with a press before the meal is sifted and baked. A 2025 review of Latin American indigenous food biotechnology calls grating and pressing cassava with a tipiti an effective way to remove cyanide, and says soaking the roots alone removes over 90 % of the cyanogens, but it gives no soak time. FAO calls a 4-hour soak ineffective and says 18 to 24 hours can halve cyanide. No source we read measures cyanide in the finished bread, so this page records a method and is not a recipe to follow.

History and sources

Every number is labelled with how it is known. How this atlas is made

Infante and colleagues describe cassava bread as a tradition of many centuries among the indigenous peoples of Venezuela, and a major source of carbohydrate for many tribes. Grace says the graters of South American Indians were boards set with small flints in wax.

Starter
The sources we found do not say how its fermentation begins.
Microbes
No study we found names its microbes.
Process times
The sources we found give no figure for how long any of its steps take.
Temperature, salt and pH
The sources we found give no temperature, salt or pH figure for any of its steps.
  1. [fao-grace1977] Grace M.R. 1977, Cassava processing, FAO Plant Production and Protection Series No. 3, FAO Rome, chapter 6 (farinha and cassava bread, couac)gov
  2. [infante2013] Infante R. B., García O. O., Rivera C. 2013, Characterization of dietary fiber and pectin of cassava bread obtained from different regions of Venezuela, Revista Chilena de Nutrición 40(2):169–173paper
  3. [villanueva2025] Villanueva-Flores F. et al. 2025, From forgotten to frontier, vindicating Latin America's indigenous biotechnology, Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine 21 (cassava detoxification by grating, soaking and pressing with a tipiti)paper
  4. [efsa2019] EFSA CONTAM Panel 2019, Evaluation of the health risks related to the presence of cyanogenic glycosides in foods other than raw apricot kernels, EFSA Journal 17(4):e05662gov
  5. [fao1990] FAO 1990, Roots, tubers, plantains and bananas in human nutrition, ch. 7, Toxic substances and antinutritional factors (cassava toxicity)gov