16 Must-Try Tapioca Flour Recipes for Gluten-Free Cooking (2024)

FAQs

What does tapioca flour do in gluten-free baking? ›

Adding just the right amount of tapioca flour to your baked treats will create a light, airy, crispy and chewy texture. Perfect for adding to bread, cookies, brownies and pie crusts, tapioca flour is a great way to ensure that your ingredients bind together without using gluten!

Tapioca helps add crispness to crusts and chew to baked goods. Tapioca flour is an extremely smooth flour, which makes for a great thickener in sauces, pies and soups since it never discolors and contains no discernible taste or smell.

Tapioca starch is gluten-free, so it's a good choice if you have celiac disease. It's also easy to digest because it's low in FODMAPs (fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols), a type of carbohydrate that's hard for your gut to process. It's a heart-healthy choice.

When eaten, tapioca takes longer for the body to break down into sugar when compared to other grains or carbohydrates. This might help lower blood sugar levels after eating. People use tapioca for prediabetes and other conditions, but there is no good scientific evidence to support these uses.

Tapioca flour features in a number of recipes and has a variety of uses in both cooking and baking. Tapioca flour is an effective thickener of sauces, is a useful addition in gluten-free baking, and also works well as a coating before frying.

People on a carb controlled diet and those who are concerned about the effect of starches on their blood sugar levels may see tapioca as unhealthful. However, for people who do not need to monitor their intake of carbs or starches as carefully, tapioca can boost health in several ways.

Gluten-free products - almost all -- contain some sort of starch -- rice flour, potato starch, corn starch or corn flour, tapioca flour - these all spike blood glucose very high. Blended fruits - like in those smoothies we drink. Be careful not to add too many high-glycemic fruits to your morning smoothie.

The nutritional benefits of these starches are almost mediocre, with none of them being nutrition packed. However, among the three starches Tapioca starch contains more calcium and vitamin B-12 making it a better option. It is also low in calories and easy to digest, preferable to use in cereals.

When processed properly, tapioca does not seem to have many negative health effects. Most negative health effects come from consuming poorly processed cassava root. Furthermore, tapioca may be unsuitable for people with diabetes since it's almost pure carbs.

Tapioca Starch, A Resistant Starch

This distinct quality makes tapioca starch stand out as a possible ally in helping a healthy intestinal ecology. Resistant starch gets its name from its ability to withstand the small intestine's normal digesting process.

Is tapioca an anti inflammatory? ›

A starch which comes from the cassava tuber. Tapioca caused an increase in anti-inflammatory bacteria and a decreased in pathogenic bacteria when fed to an animal model. However, this growth in beneficial bacteria may still be too much for patients with IBD.

Gluten-free flours often contain fine starches, so they absorb more liquid than conventional flour. To address this, gluten-free recipes usually call for more liquid and produce looser batters. They may also call for a larger quantity of leavening, like baking powder, to help add volume and lighten the texture.

2 teaspoons of baking powder per cup of gluten-free flour is necessary to ensure proper leavening. Baking soda and buttermilk can be used to leaven instead of baking powder, but 1-1/8 teaspoon of cream of tartar should be added for each 1/2 teaspoon baking soda used.

If you're in a pinch, you can swap all-purpose flour evenly for tapioca flour in most recipes, but keep in mind that all-purpose flour contains gluten. The swap may affect the texture of baked goods slightly—they'll have a little less chew and be slightly more dense.

While you can use either for thickening sauces, tapioca starch makes sauces slightly translucent with a glossy finish, whereas cornstarch makes sauces opaque with a matte finish. Temperature tolerance: Cornstarch is tolerant of high temperatures, making it ideal for recipes with a long cooking time.