No, this isn't about the 3 starches that come with Colombian meals (like potatoes, platano and rice) but about the refined starches that a lot of Asian recipes call for.
A week or so ago I made Maangchi's Sweet and Crunchy Tofu, which calls for Potato Starch to dust (dredge) the tofu with. She says it makes it much more crispy than corn starch but that corn starch will do if you don't have the potato kind. I didn't have potato starch and we don't have any Korean supermarkets nearby so I had to make do with corn starch. However, this past weekend we went to Columbus where I bought the potato starch to complete my pantry. If I had just checked Amazon, I could have had it with one-day free shipping!
Then yesterday I was reading Carolyn Phillips' At the Chinese Table, a memoir about her life in Taiwan in the 70s and 80s, and her first recipe is Taiwanese Fried Pork Chops. Does she use potato starch? No, she uses Sweet Potato Starch and she says that it is preferable to any other type of starch. There are also two kinds of sweet potato starch, a fine and a coarse, and you need both... So add those to my Strip District shopping list (we haven't been there since before the Pandemic). China Sichuan Food says that sweet potato starch is more stable after cooking so it doesn't dissolve as much in water. But not so good as a thickener.
And then of course there is tapioca starch or almidon de yuca that they mix with cheese in Colombia to make pan de yuca and pan de bono. We also have that on hand in the deep freeze.
And what about Mochiko? Sweet Rice Flour that looks almost like rice starch. The one you use for making mochi. Does that count? Should we have that on hand?
And don’t forget the arrowroot and sure jell (what? That doesn’t count?)
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