Cassava Noodles

Let me first just say that I'm positive these still need work, practice, and a great beef gravy to go along with them.  Cassava flour (from the yucca root) is technically not paleo by most standards for various reasons I'm not going to get into.  You decide if you want this to be part of your diet.  If Groc and his fellow hunter/gatherers ate this stuff raw, a different species might be dominating the food chain, but at some point, however, someone got hip to the fact that if they boiled them, it released the toxins and was then edible.  And here we are...

Rather than bore you with the process of detoxifying the Cassava, I'll get to creation of the noodle.  So I did quite a bit of reading up on this and found a local farm in Ohio that sells all kinds of flour, cassava included.  Links are at the end for those of you interested in purchasing some. 

Again, don't make this a staple, but if you want to have something reminiscent of the Beef with Egg Noodles, this might (and I mean MIGHT) get you there, or at least provide you with a fun science experiment in the kitchen.

I haven't made these in bulk, but that's because I don't have a pasta machine. (imagine that!) This is my test run with just a small amount of flour to test it out and make a few noodles.

Bring a large pot of water to a boil

I used about 1/4 cup cassava flour with a pinch of finely ground sea salt and added a teaspoon-at-a-time of water and stirred until it formed a dough ball.    I pressed the dough down on a sheet of wax paper with wet fingertips until it was about 1/8 inch thick and used a pizza cutter to slice it into fat noodles.   If you can get the noodles off the paper in one piece, drop them into the boiling water for about 3 minutes and remove them.  The result is a thick, sticky noodle that is basically tasteless.

I may try these in a beef gravy recipe someday, but I wanted to accept this challenge from Roxanne to make pasta, and not spaghetti squash :) If you try these, please share your experience with me!

Here's the link:

Buy Cassava Flour