How to Make Cassava Flour

Cassava flour is made from cassava pieces that have been dried, then crushed. For producing good cassava flour, cassava that used must be good and old enough. Cassava that harvested after 6 months cultivation have still very high water so that the flour substance is only a little. Cassava flour is commonly used as ingredient to make many kind of foods.

High quality cassava flour is simple unfermented cassava flour. The IITA production process minimizes the capital investment requirements for flour production by making use of simple equipment already used for gari processing.
Production of high quality unfermented cassava flour
 in Nigeria.
This technique is suitable for preparing cassava flour from both sweet and bitter varieties.

Mini-chippers were also tried in place of the mechanical grater but were found to be unsuitable for bitter varieties because the concentration of cyanogenic glucosides was not reduced sufficiently during processing.


Equipment 
Grater
Press
Dryer
Pin mill
Stitching machine
or

Knife
Bowl or pan
Chopper (cutting board)
Winnowing
Sieve
Pestle (mortar and pestle)

How to Make Cassava Flour
Peel the cassava, wash and dry in the sun
Put dried cassava into mortar, and then mashed
Then sifter with a fine sieve
Mash the rest of the sifting once again, and sifter back until smooth
Dry the flour in the sun. If rain, the drying is done in a room with artificial heating, such as using stoves or oven.

Under optimal conditions (dry sunny weather for sun drying), the IITA technique enables small-scale primary processors to produce high quality unfermented cassava flour that meets the specifications of industrial users within one day.
Drying has been identified as the major tool for expanding processing of cassava into high quality cassava flour.
Various options have been considered so far in the cassava project at IITA.

Natural drying
 Local processors expose cassava mash on a polythene sheet directly to the sun. This is referred to as “sun drying”. The project observed that drying at rural or domestic levels cannot be done artificially because of the high capital investment in equipment and energy required and hence, natural sun drying is done.

Sun drying is beset by several inherent drawbacks, such as susceptibility to damage due to inclement weather, slow drying rates, and contamination. Because of these limitations and the high cost and low utilization of more efficient traditional dryers, the adoption of a modified sun drying process, solar drying, has been considered for drying HQCF in rural areas.

Artificial drying 
 If a controllable source of energy is used for drying operations, the process is referred to as artificial or mechanical drying. There is a further classification in which the air used for drying is heated, either by solar means or controlled means such as electricity, renewable fuels, or fossil fuels. These methods are referred to as hybrid drying.

Rotary dryer 
 IITA is building up a coalition of local fabricators to mass produce an already tested locally fabricated rotary dryer for use by the rural processors of high quality cassava flour. The dryer could be fired by charcoal or gas and rotated by a diesel engine. The dryer consists of an insulated drying chamber (drum-like). The dryer is cost effective and user friendly.

Flash dryer
 IITA modified the design and fabrication of a locally fabricated flash dryer with Peak Products, Abeokuta, Nigeria. The flash dryer (3t/day capacity) is well insulated with the product contact surface made of stainless steel and a semiautomated feeder. It could be operated with combined kerosene/spent oil. The dryer is user friendly and will encourage greater cassava flour production.

Uses Of Cassava Flour

Food Industries
The food industries are one of the largest consumers of starch and starch products. In addition, large quantities of starch are sold in the form of products sold in small packages for household cooking. Cassava, sago and other tropical starches were extensively used for food prior to the Second World War, but their volume declined owing to the disruption of world trade caused by the war. Attempts were made to develop waxy maize as a replacement for normal noncereal starches; but the production of cassava starch has increased considerably in recent years.

Unmodified starch, modified starch and glucose are used in the food industry for one or more of the following purposes:
(a) directly as cooked starch food, custard and other forms;
(b) thickener using the paste properties of starch (soups, baby foods, sauces and gravies, etc.);
(c) filler contributing to the solid content of soups, pills and tablets and other pharmaceutical products, fee cream, etc.;
(d) binder, to consolidate the mass and prevent it from drying out during cooking (sausages and processed meats);
(e) stabilizer, owing to the high water-holding capacity of starch (e.g., in fee cream).

The Glucose Industry
According to Whistler and Paschell, Abu Mansur, an Arabian teacher and pharmacologist, about 975 A.D. described the conversion of starch with saliva into an artificial honey. In 1811 Kirchoff discovered that sugar could be produced by the acid hydrolysis of starch. Glucose, or dextrose sugar, is found in nature in sweet fruits such as grapes and in honey. It is less sweet than sucrose (cane or beet sugar) and also less soluble in water; however, when used in combination with sucrose, the resulting sweetness is often greater than expected.

The commercial manufacture of glucose sugars from starch began during the Napoleonic Wars with England, when suppliers of sucrose sugar were cut off from France by sea blockade. Rapid progress was made in its production in the United States about the middle of the nineteenth century.
At present, glucose is usually produced as a syrup or as a solid. The physical properties of the syrup vary with the dextrose equivalent (DE) and the method of manufacture. Dextrose equivalent is the total reducing sugars expressed as dextrose and calculated as a percentage of the total dry substance. Glucose is the common name for the syrup and dextrose for the solid sugar. Dextrose, sometimes called grape sugar, is the D-glucose produced by the complete hydrolysis of starch.