Making Kwak

Kwak is the Grape Nuts of the Amazon. It is made from bitter cassava, a poisonous variety of the staple food on the Tapanahony River. With these seven easy steps, you too can make your own crunchy yellow goodness for an essential part of your complete breakfast.

Planting: Cassava is a soil-intensive crop and, given thousands of years of dense growth, planting in the Amazon Rainforest requires extensive fertilization or slashing and burning a new farm every year for decent cassava. After planting, set your timer for a year, and the cassava is ready to harvest.

Peeling: Cassava is a root, and it should be pealed before soaking. With a large batch, this takes little effort and a lot of time. Group storytelling or singing can relieve the monotony.

Soaking: To soften the cassava, and partially to dilute the poison, the tubers should be soaked in water for a couple of days until slightly mushy. This can either be done by placing tubers in an old burlap rice sack and depositing them in your local river, or by placing directly in a gigantic basin.

Milling: While traditionally cassava is grated with flattened pieces of metal punched with holes and nailed to a board, this step is much easier with a cassava mill. Simply grate as with cheese, or drop tubers into the cassava mill and watch it work. Caution: cassava mills are like wood chippers; they grind to bits any object or bodily appendage placed inside.

Draining: Bitter cassava is poisonous, or at least the liquid inside it is. After milling the cassava into a fine mush, it should be packed into a mahtape, a long, thin basket that when stretched presses the water from the cassava. Cassava presses have been invented, of course, but they are just as much work, louder, and not nearly as pleasant to the eye as a good mahtape.

Roasting: After being drained, the cassava has been naturally compressed into large chunks. Place chunks onto a large metal surface heated by a wood fire, as shown in the picture, and stir with small light hoes until the kwak breaks down into tiny Grape Nut-sized pieces. With a large batch of cassava, roasting can last all day. When you get tired, convince young children that stirring kwak is fun and let them work for you.

Enjoy: A bowlful of yellow goodness can be enjoyed with water and bushmeat for lunch or with milk, as I often eat it, for a tasty breakfast. Another healthy option is to mix it with fresh podong (called assai in Brazil and the States). Kwak should never be eaten dry or it will absorb your body fluids and give you a nasty stomachache. In fact, Kwak is so absorbent that within a few years it will be used to keep everything from shoes to greeting cards waterproof.

For more pictures of the Kwak-making process, see my Suriname album at: http://picasaweb.google.com/michael.brannagan/Suriname