No sure if you all have Panera Bread in your area, but I was in there the other day and ordered a frozen drink (sans tapioca bubbles) but they’ve jumped on the wiide straw bandwagon…same straw, but I couldn’t see a reason…other than to suck up larger chunks of ice.
My son read in some factoid rag (yes, Virginia, that is not a reputable GQ cite, and if called on it, I’ll gladly conceed the point) that some restaurants are switching to larger diameter straws so that consumers drank more soda quickly without realizing it, and then buy more.
ditto for Venezuela. Deep fried is also very popular.
I guess this is not the right thread to say this, but I like Tapioca Pudding.
This might make sense except that I can’t remember the last time I was in a restaurant that didn’t have free refills on soda. 
Around here, Burger King has free refills and small straws and McDonalds has no free refills and big straws. I don’t know if that’s true in other places.
Haven’t you been to La Tour d’Argent in Paris? I would like to see the face of your sommelier if you belched loudly and said “fill up my Diet Coke, garcon!”
You will probably find that, if you ask, the McDonald’s will refill for free, even if the fountain is behind the counter. In the era before the fountain moved out to self-serve locations, McDonald’s franchisees had usually acquiesced to this move, with the exception of high schoolers trying to get a lot of soda for a little money. :eek:
The big straws are usually in the places that serve shakes. Sometimes to save money they only hand out the large ones for the shakes. Trying to suck a shake through a narrow straw is impossible.
It comes out to that most of the Caribbean Basin and Northern South America (its original range) are big on “yuca” a.k.a. manioc, a.k.a. cassava root. One seriously starchy root veggie, a big staple for the Arawaks and Caribs (strictly, “cassava” was the matzolike biscuit that natives used to make from the manioc/yuca root). The plant is now harvested in tropical Africa and Asia as well
“Tapioca” is essentially a form of processed manioc/yuca/cassava meal.
I have asked for refills at McD’s and always been given them freely. But I did have to ask. As DSYoungEsq said.
I like tapioca, myself, but only with whaaaaay too much whip creme. It’s a bland, sweetish starch, which can be made with a fun texture.
The thing is, raw cassava root is toxic - it contains cyanide compounds. So how did people get from a toxic root to the source of 1/3 of the worlds starch :dubious:
So when your wife offers you really fresh tapioca… :eek:
Si
I love it too. Kozy Shack makes it and it is homey comfort food. Reminds me of Grandma’s house!
And if you put some squares of semi-sweet choc in the bottom of the pan when cooking tapioca pudding you get tapioca food of the gods.
Damn, that sounds good. Now I want to go have some spit-roasted chicken or fried fish with a couple big chunks of deep-fried yuca. Damn. Off to Whole Foods tonight… 
I believe there’s a fair bit of variability in the toxicity - some of which is caused by environmental conditions and some is inherent of the plant variety - apparently the toxicity is associated with bitterness. I don’t suppose we’ll ever know who worked out how to process it to make it safe - perhaps people were already mashing and baking the roots they found to be sweeter and noticed that the discarded pulp from roots that were rejected the previous day as too bitter had sweetened as they dried out, or something…
The process to remove the toxins isn’t terribly sophisticated - you can basically grind it into a flour or pound the crap out of it and soak it to leech out the toxic compound. The cyanide compounds are also bitter tasting, so it is one with making the stuff palatable. Somewhat like the Native Americans use of acorn varieties that have too high a tannin content to be edible raw. If the food items available to you are limited, you are going to figure out stuff like that.
Don’t worry TD, I laughed.
If you just so happen to pass by the garlic butter aisle, well. I’ll just leave that up to you.
Yucca, or manioc as we call it, is quite popular in Africa. The favorite preperation where I am is to pound it, wrap it in leaves, and leave it to ferment for several days. Then when you want a snack, you just unwrap one of the gummy, smelly tubes. It grows on you.
Exactly. They weren’t originally soaking it to “remove cyanide compounds”, they were soaking it so it doesn’t taste like ass.