Chinese Cooking Ingredients

Tapioca Starch

Many Chinese dishes need to have their sauces thickened. We will often use tapioca starch for this purpose. Tapioca starch is a product made from the manioc or cassava plant. We mix the starch with water and add it slowly and carefully to the sauce when in the final cooking stage. One friend trying it on his own for the first time added too much too fast and his sauce set up like a solid blob of paste. We like to use this starch to thicken the pork sauce put on top of the Chinese noodles (Mian Tiao).