We went to lunch last week and had some crispy fries with our sandwich - but they weren't made out of potato. They were labeled "yucca" fries on the menu, and a sharp-eyed friend pointed out that this had to be wrong.
The potato-like starch that you find in Latino cuisines and in some trendy bistros nowadays is cassava or Manihot esculenta, a native of South America and consumed in large quantities throughout Latin America, Africa, South Asia and the Caribbean. Yuca – pronounced yoo-cuh - is the root portion of the plant. Tapioca flour and pearls are made from the powdered root, along with many other common foods - check out this Wikipedia article for just a few of the hundreds of uses for cassava.
Yucca, on the other hand, is an ornamental plant:
I had fried yuca on Tuesday night at a great Peruvian restaurant in Indianapolis... They served it with aji sauce - a revelation for me.
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