Carol,

You must be very good in Chinese cooking as you mentioned you actually make the dim sum wraps yourself!!! WOW!!! Until now, my kill in this culinary art still considered as "emementry", (as my mom calls it...) he he he...

I don't know about other people, I found it's far better to use tapioca flour to "velveting" meat, esp. in Chinese cooking, because it keeps the "saucy" result even if the dish becomes cold. It's a better choice compaired to cornflour (cornstarch) in this type of cooking. If you pay attention to my previous posts, you'd find that I often mention that "if you can't find tapioca flour, use cornstarch instead" (when it comes to marinate meat.) I think in Asian cooking, the tapioca roots are more versatile than the flour. We make desserts and soup, and dim sum out of tapioca. I am not a big fan when it comes to "root veggies" but Chris' mom can do wonderful stuff with this food.

Tapioca has an international reputation for digetibility and so, as one Spanish book says"es aconsejable para los ninos". Children do not always find it so advisable, and many adults will remember tapioca pudding with horror (but I quite like it). It can be used in soups in the same way as pasta or pearl barley. A classic Brazilian pudding is made in the same way as English tapioca pudding but with red wine or grape juice substituted for milk. The result is served cold with a vanilla-flavored cream. (Sorry I don't have the recipes for you...)

Scientfically speaking, this is what I know about tapioca:
It is a starchy food made by peeling and grating cassava root, expressing the juice, and soaking the redisure in water. The pulp is then kneaded to release the starch grains, strained to remove the fiber, and dried to a paste. Finally the paste is heated on an iron plate until it fomrs into the typical balls, flakes or perls of tapioca. It may also be ground into a flour.