Jamaican · Bread
Bammy
- Advanced
- 40 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with richness that coats and comforts.
Ingredients
- 1 kg sweet cassava (yuca), peeled
- 2 tsp salt
- 250 ml coconut milk
- 0.5 tsp salt, for the soak
- 30 ml coconut oil
The skills inside
Dry-pan toasting: spices, seeds and nuts
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Peel the cassava right down past the pink underskin, split each root and pull out the woody central cord, then grate it finely.
- Wrap the gratings in a strong cloth and wring hard over a bowl until the juice stops running and what is left feels crumbly and almost dry. Throw the juice away.
- Rub in the salt and push the meal through a coarse sieve so it falls as loose crumbs rather than lumps.
- Press a fifth of the meal into a 15 cm ring in a dry pan over medium heat and cook about 5 minutes a side, until it knits into a firm pale disc that lifts in one piece and feels dry to the knuckle. 5 min
- Soak the finished bammies in the salted coconut milk for 10 minutes, then fry in coconut oil until spotted gold. 10 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Dry-pan toasting: spices, seeds and nuts 70 recipes
- A single layer on dry metal with nothing added: no fat, and nothing else sharing the pan or the tray and competing for the heat.
- It is kept moving: shaken, stirred, or turned. Anything left still scorches on the face touching the metal while the rest of it is barely warm.
- It is judged by smell before sight: once it is fragrant there are seconds left, not minutes, and the nose reaches that point well before the colour does.
- It leaves the pan the instant it is done, onto a cold surface. A hot pan keeps toasting whatever stays in it, and carryover here is the difference between done and ruined.
- The colour is even and light rather than patchy, with nothing black at the edges: one scorched piece taints the whole quantity it is ground into.
Where it goes wrong It was left alone for a moment while something else was attended to. Dry heat has no margin: the pieces against the metal go from fragrant to acrid inside a minute, and the bitterness cannot be picked back out of a ground mixture.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Grüner Veltliner
- Also Right
- Vermentino or dry Chenin
- From the Taps
- Saison
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with citrus & herbs
The vegetable whisperers: peppery, high-acid whites that flatter greens, roots, and grains without bullying them.
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