Adventures in Foreign Cooking

The word of the day is: YUCA.

Which, by the way, is not the same as "yucca", which is a cactus we have in the U.S., and which we generally don't eat unless, I guess, we're trapped in the desert, dying and in desperate need of sustenance. And even then I feel like I'd think really hard about it.

Yuca (pronounced YOO-ka), or cassava as it's known in the U.S. and other parts of the Caribbean, is a staple of Panamanian cooking. It's a tuber, that is cooked similarly to potatoes and used in all sorts of dishes, particularly the soup called sancocho.

Last week, I obtained two giant yuca roots (in a manner which I will tell you about in my next post). They are the two giant root-looking objects in the picture (go figure). Not surprisingly, I have no idea how to cook these things. Thankfully, a kind gentleman with a machete showed me how to peel the dang things, so that got me started. From there I just had to decide what to make out of ten pounds of peeled yuca.

This is sort of a commitment because after spending 30 minutes peeling the cursed beasts, I really didn't want to waste it. I decided to stick with something I was relatively familiar with:

¡¡YUCA FRIES!!

Step one: peel both the brown and the pink outer membrane off of the yuca--place any yuca you're not going to use immediately into cold water or in a ziplock bag and into the freezer. Wash it pretty well.

Step Two: Slice the yuca into 2"x .5" slices and boil in salted water for 15-20 until the fries can pierced with a fork. Do not boil them too long! They will completely fall apart. But they definitely need to be boiled, so don't skip this step even though I skipped taking a picture of it. (It wasn't that cool looking, sorry.)

Step three: drain the boiled yuca slices and let them dry. I put mine in the fridge for a few hours.

Step four: heat oil in deep pot or deep-fryer, enough to cover one layer of fries completely. When the oil is hot you can begin cooking the fries until they're golden brown. As with any deep frying, don't heat the oil too hot or over-load it or be crazy. This is coming from someone who likes to catch things on fire. Seriously. Be careful, People.

Step five (THE GOOD PART): remove fries from hot oil and sprinkle them with the following:

• 2 parts salt
• 1 part paprika
• 1 part fresh ground black pepper

If I had had cumin, I probably would have used it. But I didn't. So.... bully.

Then dip them in this amazing aioli:

• 1/4 mayonnaise
  
• Juice of 1 lime (less if you don't like things too lime-y)
  
• dash of salt (I can't help it)
• couple of healthy dashes of cayenne pepper
• 2-3 finely chopped garlic cloves

Mix ingredients and refrigerate while you're frying the yuca fries.

Then watch them disappear. Yuca has a sweeter taste than potatoes and is really pretty delicious despite it's pain-in-the-butt factor. I'll admit I'm pretty proud of myself for cooking something that fancy-schmancy DC restaurants sell for way-to-much-money, but that just grows in the ground here like it ain't no thang. They totally sell yuca in a grocery store near you in that section of stuff you sometimes look at and say "what is this stuff and who eats it?"

You, my friend. You could totally be the person who eats it.
Sorry this picture is poor quality. I was hungry and is was noshing time.