From plant to flour “Cassava roots”

From plant to flour “cassava roots”.
When Peter (my husband) and I first started talking about food security, one of our concerns was access to a good healthy gluten free flour. The two flours we use the most, in our household are almond and cassava.
Almonds I am still thinking about. I would have to find the perfect microclimate spot for it, or it won’t grow here. Almonds are picky. They don’t like drying out and they don’t like sitting in water. It’s also a bit hot for them here where we live.
It’s different with Cassava. Cassava is a root in the yucca family. They love water, and they love the sun and heat even more.
This experiment started a couple of years ago. I keep getting better, but are still not getting a lot of roots. I  planted 4 plants in February and 4 plants in Maj. The ones I plants in February never rooted, and we didn’t get very large roots on the others, which leaves me to conclude several things from the observations I have done since planting. I will need to start them indoors, so they get a longer growing season without the exposure to frost. Once they have settled in, they had no problems with the light frost we got in December and January.  I will also make sure there are looser soil with more organic matter, to add nutrients and make it easier to spread out.  I also planted the other plants with them, and that restricted them as well. I won’t do that next time. I am also going to do some more research to figure out if there are anything else I can do.
Anyway, we did get about 2 pounds of roots, and I bought an additional 15 pounds of roots, so I could go ahead and make flour.  I wanted to do it now, before I committed to growing more, to see how tough the processing would be.
It was interesting to see that the sender had dipped the roots in wax before shipping to extend shelf life. I am going to make a note of that. Normally they go bad pretty quick.
The roots were first peeled and then boiled. Once cooled down, we mashed them and froze them on trays and then freeze dried them for 30 hours on 150F.
Then I broke it into pieces and ground them up in my grain mill.
“Note that you can’t use a stone grain mill. You need one of the ones that has a steel blade”
Last I ran them through a shifter to get any little bits and pieces out of the flour.
Then all that was left, was to pack it in a Mylar bag with a Selica bag and an oxygen absorber, and put them in the freezer.
All research I did, said that the flour will go bad unless you store it in the freezer. Now, keep in mind, that I used a freeze dryer. All the tutorials I could find online used a dehydrator or an oven to dry the roots. I don’t know if freeze drying will extend the life of the flour, but I hope it will.
Conclusions:
I will need to start the roots inside, as soon as I have harvested roots outside, and then plant them out in April/May when there no longer are any risk of frost damage.
Make sure the roots get plenty of water. We didn’t always do that, and they suffered for it.
Dip the roots in wax, if you can’t process them right away
The boiling and mashing method works really well for making a nice flour. At some point I want to try the raw method, where the roots are fermented instead of boiled.
You can definitely with very little work grow your own cassava roots for flour, if you life down south in grow zone 10+. We are in grow zone 10a, people in zone 11 or hotter won’t get any frost, and will not have to start the plants indoors.
The processing wasn’t too bad. Most of my problems was from not knowing my grain mill well enough yet. I am also very happy I bought an electric shifter. It would have taken way too much work, shifting it all by hand.

Thank you for sharing this with everyone, it is quite the undertaking.

Can I ask why you chose to freeze dry in your process? Was it more convenient towards the process or was extending storage in mind? Just curious

Great photos as well!

Timothy Norton wrote:Thank you for sharing this with everyone, it is quite the undertaking.

Can I ask why you chose to freeze dry in your process? Was it more convenient towards the process or was extending storage in mind? Just curious

Great photos as well!

I had to dry it, in order to get flour, and my freeze dryer wasn’t running anything. It was also a lot faster than if I had used my small dehydrator, and I wanted a lower temperature than the oven will give you, to lock in nutrients. Cassava root are notoriously fast to expire. Normally they have to be processed within 2 days of harvesting. Also, all of the research I have done, says that unless you store in the freezer,  it goes rancid within 3 months.
All of this had information lead me to choosing freeze drying before I milled it. My hope is, that the freeze drying process will extend the shelf live of the flour. The cassava flour I buy, doesn’t go rancid, so commercial farmers must be doing something to extend the shelf life.