Baked cassava chips

I am taking a little break from my Ecuadorian trip to post a couple of recipes that might be useful over the holiday season.  This first one is related to Ecuador, as cassava is a staple of the Ecuadorian diet and we had it in many forms on our trip.  But one of my favourites was cassava chips.

Obviously these would normally be deep fried, but as I usually try to avoid deep frying in my kitchen, for so many reasons, I decided to bake them. This did work, but it requires vigilance as they can burn in an instant. So you do need to be hovering around the oven while they are cooking, and not get distracted by the Internet or a phone call, as so often happens in my kitchen.

The cassava is a little intimidating when you buy it, but I had seen them cook cassava in the Amazon and so it had been a little demystified for me.

This cassava was not nearly as fresh as the one in the Amazon which we saw dug up and cooked with in an hour, but it is what is available in Canada in December.  There was a wax coating on it which I have read is for preserving it.  So obviously the first thing to do was peel it, which I did with a sharp knife as the peel seemed to be too thick for my potato peeler.

Then I cut it in to 2 large chunks and placed it in a bowl of cold water. This is what I saw the woman do in Ecuador, so I imagine it would discolour quickly if not covered in water.

Cassava bread In the Amazon

One day while we were in the Amazon we went to visit a village a further 2 hours up the river to where our lodge was.  The people living here were still living as their ancestors had for centuries, with the addition of some electricity and Internet.  Given these additions I wonder how hard it will be to keep the children of the village continuing this life style.

One of the staples of their diet is cassava.  The cassava plant grows easily here and matures in about  10 months. At the time of digging up the root tubers, a shoot is replanted, so that there will be another plant ready for harvesting in less than a year.  I do not have any pictures of the digging up of the cassava root as I was distracted by chickens and lost my way through the village.

I took this picture as they headed off, the next time I looked up there was no sight of them.  After what seemed like 30 minutes (probably closer to 5) I along with the monkey that had adopted me found them but missed the whole digging up demonstration, the tubers were peeled and sitting in a bowl of water. But I was relieved that this was not the last picture ever of my husband.

The young women demonstrating for us now took the tubers and grated them, using home made graters in a beautiful hollowed out length of mahogany.