Cassava Flour
What it is
The whole cassava root, dried and ground — not the extracted starch. This is the entry that exists to bust the most common confusion in this section: cassava flour ≠ tapioca starch. Tan/cream, slightly fibrous. Gluten-free.
How it's made
Cassava roots are peeled, dried, and milled whole, so the flour keeps the root's fiber and behaves like a flour. (Tapioca, by contrast, is only the starch washed out of the root — fiber and pulp discarded.) Proper processing also neutralizes cassava's natural cyanogenic compounds.
Flavor profile
Mild, earthy, slightly nutty — more "flour-like" than the neutral, glossy tapioca starch.
Culinary uses
A leading 1:1-ish wheat-flour substitute in grain-free and paleo baking, because as a whole-root flour with fiber it absorbs liquid and provides body more like wheat flour than pure starch does — used for tortillas, flatbreads, cookies, and batters. You cannot freely swap it for tapioca starch: tapioca is a glossy, clear thickener/elasticity-builder; cassava flour is a denser, fiber-bearing baking flour. Substituting one for the other in a recipe will fail.
Regional variations
Related to a huge family of West African and South American whole-cassava products — gari, fufu, farinha de mandioca (Brazil), attiéké (Côte d'Ivoire) — that are processed differently but share the whole-root principle. Western "cassava flour" (e.g., Otto's) is a refined grain-free baking product.
Cultural & historical context
Cassava is a staple feeding hundreds of millions across Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Its whole-root flours and fermented products are central to West African and Brazilian cuisines, the result of long-developed techniques to detoxify and preserve a difficult but life-sustaining crop.
Reference notes
Tags: `flour`, `gluten-free`, `cassava`, `whole-root`, `grain-free`, `paleo`. Related ingredients: [Tapioca Starch], [Sorghum Flour]. Related cuisines: West African, Brazilian, modern paleo. Suggested links: → Tapioca Starch (the key distinction), → Gari & fufu, → Grain-free baking.