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This dish has been a favorite at my Peruvian Food Orgies, among vegetarians and carnivores alike. It’s sort of like eating potatoes with molten peanut butter than has been flavored with garlic and onions. Delicious.

Summary

Recipe Archetype

At its most basic, papas con maní is as simple as preparing an aderezo (seasoning base) of onions, garlic, and ají amarillo (Peruvian yellow hot peppers) in oil; then you add ground peanuts and stir until the flavors have combined; and then you start adding milk to the mixture—stirring constantly—until the peanut mixture turns creamy and soft. Separately (and even the day before, if you like) you boil potatoes, slice them into thick medallions, and then cover them in the maní sauce. It’s that simple!

Recipe Overview

There aren’t many variations to this recipe, so the recipe archetype above is pretty much a complete description. You can fiddle with the proportions of peanuts, milk, hot peppers, garlic, and onions to get varying intensities of flavor, although I’d suggest following my proportions the first time you make this, before you start adapting the recipe. Some recipes use peanut butter instead of ground toasted peanuts; the traditionalist and the slow-foodist in me kinda sees this as cheating, but I suppose this is OK if you’re in a hurry or you don’t have a food processor to prepare the peanuts. Using peanut butter changes the texture and the fat content of the recipe, though, so you’ll need to make some adjustments (see “Tips” below). I can also think of a few additions that you could make to the recipe, such as adding a bit of sweetness (molasses, maybe?) or some herbs (basil, rosemary, thyme, oregano, etc.) or sprinkling the finished product with chives or green onions…but the recipe itself is quite simple and should really stay that way.

Tips

• Using Peanut Butter as a Shortcut:
  • Use “crunchy” style peanut butter, which will help you obtain a texture similar to the traditional recipe.
  • You should substitute the same weight of peanut butter for peanuts, rather than volume. Otherwise, things will be waaaay too dense.
  • Peanut butter already has extra fat to give it that velvety texture, so you should reduce the amount of olive oil you use by maybe 25%, and be prepared to use less milk to finish the sauce.
• USE WHOLE MILK. Avoid the temptation to be “healthy” and cut the milk-fat here. The sauce won’t become as creamy as it should be, it would taste the same, and you’ll still be filling yourself with tons of calories. Do it right and just eat a smaller portion.
• Finding or substituting AJI AMARILLO:
  • like I’ve said in previous recipes on here, ají amarillo is a crucial flavor base to Peruvian cuisine, but there are a few things you can do to improvise if you can’t find the real stuff
  • you can often find ají amarillo (sometimes called ají mirasol or ají escabeche) in grocery stores that specialize in South American foodstuffs. In Chicago, for example, I can find these peppers in frozen, canned, and paste form at La Unica latin grocery at 1515 West Devon Avenue, Chicago, IL, 60660-1313
  • if you can’t find whole peppers, substitute a couple of tablespoons of the paste, which is often easier to find
  • if you can’t even find the paste, then use jalapeños or some other medium-hot peppers (I find peron/locoto peppers to also work well, when I can find them).

Ingredients & Equipment

• a food processor or grinder (keep in mind that peanuts get stickier as they are ground, so a vase-mount blender is a bad idea; stick to something with horizontal blades)
• if you have a big mortar and pestle and are feeling athletic/traditional, toss a bit of coarse salt in the bottom of your mortar, add the peanuts in batches, and pound away until you have a fine powder or paste.
• a large, wide-bottomed pan / skillet
• 1/2-cup of oil (I use olive oil, but any mild-flavored oil will do)
• 1/2-kg. (500 g. / approx 1 lb.) of peanuts, toasted and ground (if you buy them already toasted, make sure they’re UNSALTED)
• 1 medium onion (any color, really), diced as finely as you can
• 3-5 cloves of garlic, crushed or diced finely
• 2-3 ají amarillos (Peruvian yellow hot peppers), de-seeded, de-veined, and diced finely
• A LOT of whole milk. The amount you’ll need can vary, but you should have at least 2 litres (1/2-gallon) of milk on hand

Serve With

• potatoes (preferably waxy ones that keep their shape), sliced thickly (as wide as your finger) or diced into large cubes
• garnish with hard-boiled eggs, sliced in half

Instructions

1. Heat the oil in the pan over medium heat and add the onions, hot peppers (ají amarillo), and garlic. Sprinkle lightly with salt (to draw out juices and help prevent burning). Mix until everything is coated with oil, and then leave to simmer over medium-low heat while you prepare the peanuts.

2. Time to prepare your ground peanuts! (If you’re using peanut butter, just wait about 10-15 in sheepish silence while your aderezo of onion, garlic, and pepper cooks in the pan.) Put the peanuts in a food processor or grinder and grind down to a rather fine powder. To avoid turning it into a sticky goo and jamming up your food processor, I recommend starting with relatively small batches of peanuts (about 1 handful) and using many short pulses to grind, rather than constantly keeping the blades moving. What you want is something similar to the second picture below.

3. By now, your aderezo should be looking something like this. If it’s become too dry, add a bit of olive oil. You need excess oil to incorporate the very absorbent ground peanuts.

4. Add the peanuts and mix until well combined. Allow to cook over medium heat, stirring frequently, until the peanuts have absorbed the oil and are beginning to stick a bit to the bottom of the pan.

5. Begin adding milk, about 1 cup at a time. Stir this constantly, as the milk will scald and burn to the bottom very easily. When you first add milk, a strange thing will happen: the peanuts will create an emulsion between the oil and the water in the milk, and everything will suddenly thicken until it’s practically solid. Your job is to keep adding milk and stirring until you have a sauce with a creamy consistency. As the peanuts cook, they absorb more and more liquid, so the creamy texture will quickly return to super-thick. Just keep adding milk until it stays creamy. You’ll be surprised by how much milk it takes. If you run out of milk, some warm water will do.

6. As soon as you have a creamy texture that you could imagine pouring over potatoes, remove from heat, stir in any remaining liquid, and leave to settle for about 5 minutes.

7. Serve over boiled and sliced potatoes. The potatoes can be cold or hot, although I prefer when they’re hot, as that keeps the sauce warm, too. The maní sauce can be kept refrigerated and re-heated as needed for a few days, but by the 6th or 7th day, it’ll start to go off. Also, the sauce can be easily frozen, but you’ll need to stir it well when you re-heat it.

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I remember that once, years ago when I was barely a teenager, my mother invested in an old-fashioned, hand-cranked food grinder and immediately went about making pastel de choclo; she was able to use the grinder to prepare her own ground beef as well as grind her own fresh corn. I’ll admit that the texture that a hand-cranked grinder gives to the corn makes for a more solid and dense cake, but I have to admit that I just grind the corn with an electric food process and it turns out just fine. You can even use bags of off-the-cob frozen corn kernels. The only things to avoid are cans of corn or creamed corn; the liquid used in the canning process increases the moisture levels of the corn and messes with the proportions for this recipe.

Summary

Recipe Archetype

A pastel de choclo is a dense savory cake made from ground corn layered with seasoned ground beef. The ground beef filling is prepared first by browning it in a skillet with spices and aromatics. While the meat is left to cool, the corn is ground into a paste and then cooked in a skillet with butter and sugar until thickened. The corn paste and ground beef are layered into a casserole dish or earthenware bowl and then baked until bubbling on top.

Recipe Overview

There are lots and lots of possible substitutions and alterations to this recipe. To begin with, this recipe can be made vegetarian by omitting the pino (ground beef filling) and instead making a solid block of corn cake. The recipe can also be made gluten-free by not using flour to absorb some of the grease in the ground beef, but instead draining the grease before cooling. The pino usually is made up of garlic, onions, ground beef, cumin, and some paprika. The spices can be substituted (for example, the paprika could be replaced by ground chili peppers or some aji rocoto paste), and some recipes also add raisins, diced hard-boiled eggs, or olives. The beef can also be substituted with other ground meats (lamb, pork, turkey) or even vegetarian substitutes. The corn paste is usually sweetened with some sugar and pre-cooked in butter; it is sometimes flavored with basil leaves. Also, you may need to add corn meal and/or corn starch to the corn paste if you’re using regular American yellow corn, since it is less starchy and more moist than the white choclo that the traditional recipe uses (see the Tips section below). The corn can be replaced by potatoes or yucca (cassava), but I’ve never tried it; I don’t see the point in making a pastel de choclo without corn, but my mom insists that it’s a valid variation. The traditional arrangement of the pastel involves a single layer of pino covered by a single layer of corn paste, but I tend to put a thin layer of corn paste at the bottom of the casserole, which I find helps it cohere when it is cut into pieces. The assembled pastel is often dusted with sugar and sesame seeds before baking.

Tips

• VEGETARIAN version: leave out the pino and make the whole cake out of corn (or use a vegetarian substitute for ground beef).
• GLUTEN-FREE version: do not add flour to the pino to make it thicken, but instead drain off most of the grease.
• choclo vs. american sweet corn: the original recipes all assume that you’re using white, large-kerneled choclo,which is a kind of corn that is drier and more starchy than American sweet yellow corn.
  • You can sometimes find bags of frozen choclo in South-American food specialty stores (especially ones that specialize in Chilean, Bolivian, Peruvian, or Ecuadorean foodstuffs).
  • If that doesn’t work, you can use regular yellow corn, but you’ll need to add some corn meal and some corn starch to help the corn paste bake into a solid mass. In the ingredients list below, I’ve included the amounts of corn meal and corn starch that you would need if you were using yellow corn; if you manage to find some choclo, adjust or eliminate these thickening agents, according to the proportion of choclo to yellow corn.
  • DO NOT try to use canned corn or creamed corn as a substitute. They are far too watery and you’ll end up with a sort of runny porridge instead of a savory cake.
  • See the image below for a side-by-side view of yellow corn vs. choclo.

Ingredients & Equipment

• a food processor (you can also use an old-fashioned meat-grinder, but that’s a LOT of work; immersion blender or stand blenders are less efficient, but also possible)
• a large, wide-bottomed pan / skillet
• a large casserole dish or earthenware bowl (cast-iron could work, too)
• 1 kg (2 lb) of fresh or frozen UNCOOKED corn kernels (if you’re buying ears of corn, you’ll need about 12 ears)
• IF you are using yellow corn instead of white choclo:
  • ½-cup (125 ml) of corn meal
  • 2 tbsp of corn starch
• 6-10 tablespoons of granulated sugar (depending on taste; start with 6 and then add more as necessary)
• 1 stick of butter (4 ounces / 120g)
• sesame seeds (optional garnish)
• 1 kg (2 lb) of ground beef
  • IF the ground beef is rather fatty, you may need 2 tbsp of flour to thicken it later
• 1 large onion, chopped finely
• 3-4 cloves of garlic, crushed or minced
• 2-3 tablespoons of freshly ground cumin (to taste)
• 1-2 tablespoons of paprika (or something else that is red and imparts the taste of peppers)
• salt and pepper to taste

Serve With

• nothing. Often eaten cold as a snack or a form of street-food.
• as an appetizer (cut into small squares)

Instructions

1. If your corn is frozen, thaw it out by leaving it at room temperature for an hour or two (preferably in a sink or a bowl in case water leaks out). If it’s fresh on the cob, cut it off the cob and put it in a large bowl.

2. I cheated in this recipe and used two bags of frozen cut corn: one of yellow (American) corn, and one of white (Andean) choclo corn. As mentioned earlier, yellow corn has less starch than white “choclo,” so you’ll be adjusting for this later by adding corn starch and corn meal. Make note of the proportion of yellow to white kernels (roughly, you don’t need to count them!)

3. Pino (the filling): In a very large pan over medium heat, place the ground beef and the finely-diced onion and garlic. Don’t bother with any oil, as the fat from the beef will provide all the grease you need. Break up the meat with a wooden spoon and mix with the onions and garlic.

4. Take the cumin seeds and grind them finely in a mortar or a spice grinder. Add to the pino and mix.

6. Allow the pino to cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally to break up clumps of meat, until the beef is well-browned (see picture).

7. Unless you bought extra-extra-lean ground beef, there’s probably a fair bit of grease in your pan now. You have two choices. You can drain most of the grease out of the pan (gluten-free-friendly option), or you can sprinkle about two tablespoons of flour over the meat, mix thoroughly, and allow about 5 minutes for the flour to cook and absorb the fat. Repeat if necessary, until the pino is relatively dry; then, move it to a large bowl and allow it to cool.

8. Rinse your pan and place over low heat. Place butter in the pan.

9. While the butter melts, puree the corn in batches with a food processor.

10. Place the corn puree in the pan, add the sugar, corn meal, and corn starch, and mix well. If you are using only yellow corn, use the proportions of corn meal and corn starch listed in the ingredients above. If you’re using a 50/50 mixture of yellow and white, reduce these proportions by half. If you’re using only white corn, do not add any corn meal or corn starch.

11. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the corn begins to get shiny and translucent. Remove from heat.

12. In a large, deep, oven-safe dish, place a little less than half of the corn mixture and smooth along the bottom to create a flat layer.

13. Add the pino to create another layer, leaving at least a finger’s width of space for another layer of corn mixture. (In this picture, I’ve replaced the meat layer with corn on one side for my vegetarian guests.)

14. Carefully lay the final layer of corn mixture by placing them in evenly-spaced dollops and then smoothing out with the back of your spoon. Sprinkle the top lightly with sugar and sesame seeds (optional).

15. Cook at 375ºF (190ºC) until the top of the corn mixture is bubbling gently (usually 40 mins). Then, turn the heat up very high and check every 1-2 minutes until the top begins to turn golden brown. Be careful! This can burn very easily.

16. Remove from heat and allow to cool. The “pastel de choclo” can be served warm or cold.

Aaaanyway, here’s my anticuchos recipe, which comes mostly from my mother’s version, with a few adaptations from the cookbook, ¿Qué cocinaré hoy? In a nutshell, anticuchos is a grilled meat dish, made by marinating cubes of beef heart in a strongly acidic marinade and then grilling them on skewers.

Summary

Recipe Archetype

Anticuchos are grilled meat skewers, most commonly beef heart (anticuchos de corazón). The heart is cleaned and cut into relatively large cubes and then marinated overnight in a marinade of acidic liquid and aromatics. The cubes are then skewered and grilled to desired doneness.

Recipe Overview

Anticuchos require meat, some rather acidic liquid, and a blend of aromatics. The traditional Peruvian meat for anticuchos is beefheart. The acidic liquid of choice is cider vinegar, with the optional addition of dark beer for a malty, caramel, slightly bitter taste. For aromatic ingredients, I’m using garlic, cumin, a mixture of dried and fresh oregano, and a LOT of ají panca (which is a ground paste of a pepper that grows in Peru that has the smoky taste of a hot pepper without actually being hot); you can use exclusively dry or fresh oregano depending on what you have available in your kitchen. My mother also likes to add achiote (annatto), which lends an orange-yellow color and a very faint aroma of nutmeg (which I find overwhelmed by the other ingredients, which is why I don’t both putting it in).

Tips

• Meats:
  • You may need to order the beef heart ahead of time from your local butcher. If you order ahead, you may be able to ask your butcher to trim off the fat and artery valves for you, which saves some time.
  • The heart of a full-grown cow or steer is really the best for flavor and consistency. If you can’t find it, though, many Mexican/Latino stores sell calf/veal heart; you may need to buy two of them to match the size of a full-grown beef heart.
  • The meat is most commonly beef heart (at least in Peru), but can be substituted with other cuts of beef, chicken, or even seafood; if you use more fatty or tender cuts of meat, you will only need to marinate the meat for a few hours, instead of all night.
  • I imagine that this would work well with various types of game and venison.
• Acidic liquid:
  • You can substitute other sorts of vinegar, but I would avoid fruity or sugary vinegars (like raspberry or balsamic), which might mess with the balance of aromatic ingredients or burn over the fire.
  • The marinade needs to be rather acidic to properly tenderize the meat, so avoid low-acidity vinegars (or, fortify them with some white vinegar).
  • I could imagine using citrus juice instead of vinegar here, but you would need to use mostly limes to get sufficient acidity.
• Aromatic Ingredients:
  • You can find ají panca at your local latino food shop (or, if you’re lucky, your Peruvian import store), usually as a paste.
  • If you can’t find ají panca, you can create something similar by buying dried Mexican pasilla peppers, rehydrating them in very hot water, removing the stems and seeds, and then blending with a bit of olive oil. (You can do this as well if you find dry ají panca rather than the paste.)
  • If you also don’t have access to dried Mexican peppers, you can substitute a heavy dose of paprika (mild, otherwise you’ll be inhaling aerosolized capsaicin as you cook).
  • If you’re using a non-red meat (chicken, pork, seafood, etc), you may want to choose milder aromatics.

Ingredients & Equipment

• a large non-metal bowl
• a storage container for marinating (either a cover for the bowl, a “tupperware” container, or a gallon-size, zip-top freezer bag)
• 15-20 skewers (if you’re using bamboo skewers, soak them for a few hours in water)
• a barbecue or a kitchen broiler. (A grill-pan can work in a pinch, but I find the results disappointing.)
• 1 whole beef heart (or 2 calf/veal hearts), weighing at least 1kg
• 1 tablespoon of garlic paste (or crushed or diced)
• ½ teaspoon of ground cumin (preferably freshly-ground)
• 2 tablespoons of dried oregano (and a few sprigs of fresh oregano, if available)
• ½ cup of cider vinegar (but you might need more on hand)
• 1 cup of dark beer (optional)
• 4 tablespoons of ají panca paste
• Salt & pepper to taste

Serve With:

• nothing, just on a skewer as a form of street-food
• with chimichurri or another spicy herbal dipping sauce
• with a dipping sauce made of ají panca and olive oil
• with a piece of boiled potato on the end of the skewer

Instructions

1. Wash the heart out thoroughly pouring cold water into the cavities and pumping it back out to remove any blood from the interior.

2. Clean and cut the heart into 3cm x 3cm cubes (approx. 1″ cubes). This is a bit hard to describe, so I’ve included several photos below. Essentially, trim off the hardened fat and arterial valves near the top. Then, you cut the heart lengthwise and start cutting it into thick strips. Then, you take each strip, press it against the cutting board with your palm, and then slide your (very sharp) knife parallel to the cutting board to remove the thin layer of fat and veins on the outside as well as the heart-strings and papillary muscles on the inside. Then, cut into cubes.

3. Put the heart into a non-reactive container (i.e., plastic, glass) and add the garlic, oregano, and cumin.

4. Add the ají panca. Don’t be stingy with it! This is where a lot of the flavor comes from.

5. Add the beer and the vinegar and mix well. You may need to add more vinegar to ensure that there is enough fluid for every part of the meat to be covered.

6. Press the meat down into the liquid and close your container. If you’re using a zip-top bag like I am, you’ll want to squeeze out as much air as possible from the bag.

7. Leave to marinate in your refrigerator overnight. You can even let this marinate for a few days, if you want a stronger flavor and more tender meat.

8. A few hours before cooking, soak your skewers in water (if they are made of wood/bamboo; metal skewers need no soaking).

9. Turn on your barbecue (or your broiler, which is what I’m using here) and start skewering the cubes of meat, leaving at least a finger’s-breadth of space between the pieces of meat.

10. Lay the skewers to cook, with a bit of space between each of them. If you have a heat-safe brush and an open grill, you can make up a basting sauce of ají panca, salt, and olive oil, which you can apply to the meat as it cooks.

11. Cook until browned and slightly charred on the outside, but still tender to the touch. If the pieces of meat decrease substantially in size, you should pull them off the heat. Until you’re used to gauging this, you can pull a piece off one of the skewers and cut it in half; the center should be a little bit pink.

12. Serve and eat immediately.

I just made ceviche this afternoon (although the pictures date from an earlier version back in Chicago), and so I was inspired to put together this recipe while the fish marinates. This ceviche was made with corvina, but it can be adapted to nearly any sort of seafood by changing the marinating time and the contents of the marinade.

Summary

Recipe Archetype

Essentially, ceviche (also written cebiche and sebiche) is a marinated fish dish. What is distinctive about it is how the recipe blurs the lines between raw and cooked food. Raw fish (or other seafood) is cut into chunks or slices and covered with a marinade of citrus juice, along with other spices and aromatics. The acid in the marinade denatures the proteins in the fish and causes the same changes in texture and color that one would see with cooking over heat.

Recipe Overview

At its most basic, all you need for ceviche is: fish, acidic citrus juice, onions, and hot peppers. The version described here is the “classic” Peruvian version found along the coast (especially around Lima). This recipe features local Peruvian ingredients (e.g., ají mirasol) as well as the legacy of Chinese immigration to Peru over more than 150 years (i.e., the inclusion of ginger, called kión by Peruvians, which is a loanword from Cantonese). This recipe also features a blend of lime juice and bitter orange juice; in North America and Europe, bitter oranges only rarely appear in Latin American and Asian food stores (see the Tips section below for suggestions on how to substitute it with other citrus fruits).

By the way, you can also check out an earlier version of this recipe posted to my first blog, Luis in Paris.

Tips

• The precise marinating time for the ceviche depends on the consistency of the fish and how you cut it up.
  • If the fish is delicate (like sole or tilapia), it may only require a half-hour or so to cook, while heartier seafood (like tuna, salmon, or sea bass) need two or three hours. If you’re making something very tough like shark or octopus, you’ll need to marinate them overnight.
  • If you cut the fish into small cubes or slices, the ceviche may be ready in a matter of minutes. If you cut the fish into 1.5–2cm pieces (0.5 inches), you need to marinate for at least an hour, sometimes more. If you cut them into two-inch cubes, you’ll need two or three hours. If you cut them into very thin slices and then serve them just after the marinade has been added (i.e., nearly raw), you have tiraditos, a Peruvian-Japanese, sashimi-like relative of ceviche.
  • NOTE: You’ll notice that, in the pictures and instructions below, I cut the corvina into very large chunks and then only marinated it for an hour. This is because I like my ceviche to be a little raw in the middle. If you want your ceviche fully “cooked,” be sure to cut the fish into smaller pieces or to marinate it for a longer period.
• Ají mirasol (peruvian yellow hot pepper) can usually be found in most Latin American food shops, either frozen or canned. You can also find it molido (i.e., ground into paste). Ají rocoto is a little bit harder to find, but it is sometimes sold in Mexican shops with under the name peron or locoto; you can recognize it by it’s round shape, thick flesh, and black seeds. If you can’t find these hot peppers, you can replace the ají mirasol with medium-spicy peppers (e.g., jalapeños) and the ají rocoto with rather spicy ones (e.g., thai chilis, habaneros).
• Bitter orange (naranja agria) is really hard to find. Look for it in Latin American or Asian shops. Some shops may keep the oranges frozen in the back (since demand for them is rather low and they are very perishable), so it’s worth asking the staff. If you can’t find bitter orange, try to find sour or unripe oranges and then just increase the proportion of lime juice in the marinade.
• If you have trouble finding a “typical” ceviche fish, such as corvina or sole, select a white-fleshed fish with relatively tender flesh (e.g., Northern Pike, cod, orange roughy). Swordfish is also excellent, but requires longer marinating.

Ingredients & Equipment

• a large non-metal bowl
• a storage container for marinating (either a cover for the bowl or a gallon-size, zip-top freezer bag).
• 10-15 limes (for approximately 1kg/2lbs of fish; i.e., 1-2 filets if you’re using corvina)
• 1 lemon (more, if you’re short on limes)
• 2 bitter oranges (see Tips above)
• 2 red onions, medium—or 1 large one—french-cut (see photos below in instructions)
• 2  whole ají mirasol peppers for the marinade, chopped finely (or a heaping tablespoon of ají amarillo molido / paste)
• 1 whole ají rocoto for serving, julienned (sliced lengthwise)
• 1 rib of celery, chopped finely
• 1 tbsp of ginger, crushed, grated or finely diced
• 2-3 cloves of garlic, finely diced
• A handful of cilantro, chopped finely

Serve with:

• corn on the cob (boiled, but served cold)
• cold, sliced sweet potato
• black olives
• a hard-boiled egg

Instructions

1. Wash the fish in cold water and pat dry with paper towels. Put aside while you prepare the marinade.

2. Dice the ají mirasol and the garlic finely; grate the ginger. Add to bowl. NOTE: In this photo, I took a shortcut and put all three into a hand-blender attachment to dice quickly.

3. Squeeze all of the citrus fruits and add to bowl. Mix.

4. French-cut the onion. Cut off the top and bottom of the onion and peel. Then, cut the onion in half lengthwise. Cut the onion lengthwise radially around the center (see images below).




5. Cut the fish into cubes or slices. Try to cut across the grain of the fish’s muscle groupings, which will make the pieces more tender after marinating.




6. Mix well, cover, and store somewhere cool for at least an hour.
7. Just before serving, mix in coriander and slices of ají rocoto. Serve.

Having made a sweet-spicy salsa for my first recipe, I thought I’d follow up with a creamy-savory-spicy salsa (i.e., Spanish for “sauce”). Ocopa is a traditional Andean recipe, associated with the Southern-Peruvian mountain city of Arequipa. The flavor base is a combination of roasted ají mirasol (Peruvian yellow peppers, also known as ají amarillo) and huacatay, which is an Andean black mint that the inhabitants of that region use in a lot of their cooking. Huacatay has a unique and pungent aroma—somewhere between herbal mint and epazote—which is the key to this dish (see the Tips below on where to find it and how to substitute if you can’t find it). The textural base to this dish is a mixture of fresh cheese (queso fresco or a similar farmer’s cheese) and evaporated milk, thickened with crackers and nuts. It’s usually served as an appetizer or side dish, poured over slices of yellow potatoes. Interestingly, you can serve this in several hot-cold combinations, with the potatoes hot and the sauce cold, the potatoes cold and the sauce warm, both cold, or both hot (I generally go with the second option).

Summary

Recipe Archetype

This is one of a number of Peruvian cheese-based spicy sauces (papas a la huancaína is another one) that involve blending together cheese, milk, hot peppers, and various other aromatics into a thick sauce, which is then served over slices of boiled potatoes or yucca (also known as manioc or cassava).

Recipe Overview

Ocopa aims to be a bit thicker than your usual Peruvian cheese sauce, so the milk has been replaced with evaporated milk, and we also add some crackers and roasted peanuts when blending the sauce. In addition to hot peppers, our aromatic base includes huacatay—which is this dish’s signature ingredient—garlic, a roasted onion, and some fresh herbs. You can vary this dish by replacing the peanuts with other nuts (pecans, walnuts) or changing the fresh herbs.

Tips

• Look for huacatay at your local Peruvian food store / importer, sold as a jar of paste. If you don’t have one in your city (look! you might be surprised), try a Latino supermarket or a specialty grocery store. If you still can’t find it, you can try to substitute a mixture of fresh coriander and fresh herbal mint.
• If you can’t find Latino-style queso fresco, you can substitute farmer’s cheese, haloumi, or even feta. If you use feta, though, try to find a low-salt one.
• This is usually served over boiled Peruvian yellow potatoes, which resemble Yukon Gold varieties in North America.
• This can be served in a number of hot-cold combinations. I prefer serving the sauce cold and the potatoes hot; however, if you have a large meal to prepare, you can prepare both in advance and serve them cold together. Hint: avoid putting the potatoes in the refrigerator! If they get too cold, the starch in the boiled potatoes will gelatinize and form a rather unappetizing slick on the cut sides of the potatoes.
• If you can’t find whole ají peppers (frozen or canned is fine), you can substitute the paste made from the same peppers, which is often easier to find. If you can’t find the paste, you can use some medium-spicy peppers, like jalapeños.

Ingredients & Equipment

• a blender (preferably a stand mixer)
• 8-10 ají peppers, roasted
• 200 grams of queso fresco (fresh cheese)
• 1 medium onion, roasted
• 2-3 cloves of garlic
• 1-2 tablespoons of huacatay paste
• a few sprigs of coriander and other herbs (your choice, but oregano or mint are nice)
• 1 cup (250 ml) of evaporated milk (but only use 3/4 at first, then add more to adjust thickness)
• 3 tablespoons of toasted peanuts (unsalted, preferably)
• 3 graham crackers (many recipes call for soda crackers, but I prefer the slight sweetness of graham crackers)

Serve with:

• yellow potatoes (or Yukon Gold), at least two per person
• hard-boiled eggs
• lettuce (garnish)

Instructions

1. Put the ají peppers and the onion (peeled, cut into quarters) under the broiler (or into your oven set on the highest heat) until the peppers have blistered and the onions begin to blacken. I roasted them separately here, but you can roast the peppers and the onion at the same time.



2. Throw the peppers into a brown paper bag and allow them to self-stem for a few minutes. In the meanwhile, chop the onions roughly and place in the pan where you’re going to fry up everything.

3. Once the skin on the peppers feels a bit loose, skin them using the dull side of your knife. You can also do this with your fingers, but make sure to wash your hands afterwards (or wear gloves), you’re handling 10 hot peppers! Be sure to remove the seeds as well.



4. Put the peppers in a pot of cold water and add a teaspoon of sugar. Put over heat and wait for it to boil. As soon as bubbles break to the surface, dump out the water. You can repeat this process up to two more times (i.e., three times in total). This reduces the spicyness of the peppers, which allows you to get the flavor of many peppers without making the resulting sauce too hot. Boil once for people who like very spicy food, boil twice for people who can only eat moderately spicy food, and boil three times for people who can barely tolerate hot peppers. (Personally, I don’t think boiling twice is even worth it; after three boilings, you begin to lose the flavor of the peppers.)

5. In the meanwhile, peel your garlic and slice thinly.


6. Put the hot peppers, the garlic, the onions, the fresh herbs, and the huacatay together in about 1/4 cup (75 ml) of oil. Fry over medium heat until the garlic has mellowed out and the hot peppers have begun to fall apart (usually 5 minutes). Remove from heat.


7. While the pepper mixture cools a bit, place the remaining ingredients in a blender: the queso fresco/cheese (cut into cubes or crumbled), the evaporated milk (only 3/4 of it at first), the peanuts, and the graham crackers.

8. Add the fried pepper mixture (still warm) to the blender, add about a tablespoon of fresh olive oil, and blend until you have a semi-thick, smooth sauce. It will most likely be too thick, so you can thin it out by alternately adding splashes of olive oil and evaporated milk. If it becomes too runny, you can thicken it with more graham crackers and peanuts. (NOTE: the sauce will thicken a bit as it cools, so once you achieve the desired consistency in the blender, thin it out a little bit more.) Adjust flavor with salt if necessary.


9. Boil the potatoes and the eggs (separately).

10.  Line a serving dish with lettuce. Place the thickly-sliced potatoes on the dish and cover with the Ocopa, reserving some sauce for individual servings. Place hard-boiled eggs, cut in half, around the edges of the plate. Serve warm or cold.

There you have it! Note that the sauce does not keep for very long, so you should consume it all in 3 days (or freeze it).

Note a few conventions for my recipes:

• Recipe Archetype: This is the methods and materials of the recipe at the most abstract level, which helps you to substitute ingredients, modify the recipe, and improvise from it in the future.
• Recipe Overview: This shows how this recipe fills out its archetype with specific ingredients, and also provides some detail on the methods being used.
• Tips: Tips for the recipe that don’t have a clear place in the instructions. These tips are usually about shopping for the right kind of ingredients, finding rare ingredients, or particular pre-cooking preparations.

Summary

Recipe Archetype

All salsas are a combination of pickling and maceration. You take a fresh ingredient (usually starting with onions and tomatoes) and soak it in acidic liquid (usually citrus juice), which softens it, mellows its flavors, and preserves it from spoiling.

Recipe Overview

In this instance, we’re flaunting convention by dropping out the tomatoes and onions altogether and focusing only on the two title ingredients: mangos and jalapeños. I’m also insisting on lime juice instead of lemon juice; I know that it’s a pain to squeeze a bunch of limes, but their juice is more intensely flavorful and acidic, which is needed to cut the sweetness of the mangos.

Tips

• Look for Manila / Ataulfo mangos, which have non-fibrous flesh and a very sweet taste. If you can’t find them, any other ripe mango will do.
• Pick smallish mangos (a bit larger than your fist) that are very ripe or even overripe. The flesh of the fruit should give slightly when you press on it with your thumb, but bounce back; also, a good sign of ripeness is that the skin near the stem is beginning to wrinkle. If you see some very overripe mangos on reduced sale, buy them. You can cut out the brown parts and save the good parts, which will most likely be super-sweet…just buy a few extras to make up for brown parts you cut out.
• If you wear contacts (and even if you don’t, really), wear gloves when handling the hot peppers. Capsaicin, the chemical that makes hot peppers hot, is also what goes into “pepper spray,” and rubbing your eyes after handling peppers will make you feel like you’re in the middle of an anti-WTO street protest. You can buy disposable latex or nitrile gloves at nearly every grocery store and pharmacy, in the cleaning goods aisle.
• This recipe can be eaten after an hour or so of marination, but it’s even better if it marinates overnight.
• To make the maceration/pickling more effective, put the salsa in a large freezer bag. This allows you to remove most of the air from the container and thus ensure that all of the mixture is covered by liquid.

Ingredients & Equipment

• 8-10 smaller mangos (see tips), diced into small cubes
• 10 limes, juiced (but buy some extra limes, just in case)
• 3-5 jalapeños, diced (depending on how spicy you want it)
• some good-quality salt

Instructions

1. Peel and dice the mangos. Any method will work, but if you want to see how I do it (after years of experience), follow steps 2–6. Otherwise, skip right to step 6.

2. Take a mango and peel it using a peeling knife.

3. Hold the mango upright and slice off the fleshy “cheeks” from both sides of the seed. Mango seeds of this variety are usually flat and sit in the middle of the widest part of the fruit. Try to get as close to the seed as you can without cutting into the fibers surrounding the seed.

4. Shave the remaining flesh off of the seed. This can be a bit tricky at first, as you have to learn to “feel” the shape of the seed through knife-pressure and sound. Don’t worry about cutting through some of the seed-fibers, just try to get as much of the good stuff off of the seed. When you’re done, you can put the seed in your mouth and drag your teeth along it to salvage any remaining mango. Chef’s treat!

5. Dice the irregular, shaved bits roughly and set them aside. Put one of the “cheeks” cut-side-down on the cutting board. Cut it lengthwise. Give it a quarter-turn, and then cut it crosswise. It should look like the images below. Repeat for the other cheek.

6. Move all of mango pieces to your container (I’m using a freezer bag resting in a glass bowl). Sprinkle a pinch of salt on the mangos pieces. Repeat steps 2-6 for the remaining mangos, sprinkling a bit of salt on each new layer of mango pieces.

7. The salt needs some time to draw out the mangos’ juices, so set yourself to squeezing all of the limes. As you pour the lime juice in, the level of the liquid should come up to about 2cm below the top of the mangos.

8. De-seed and dice the jalapeños into small cubes. Again, I’m only showing you my dicing technique below, so skip ahead to step # if you aren’t interested in how I dice peppers.

9. Hold a jalapeño down against the cutting board, with the stem facing you. Make a cut on the side of the pepper, then turn your blade downwards to cut around the stem. With your blade parallel to the board, roll the jalapeño back as you continue to cut, as if you’re peeling a layer off of a cylinder. Throw away the seed pod.

10. You should now have a mostly-flat slab of jalapeño. Cut this lengthwise into thin strips. Then, gather these strips together and cut them crosswise into small cubes.

11. Throw the jalapeños on top of the mangos and mix. If you’re using a freezer bag like me, close the bag and toss it around, massaging the bag with your fingers to evenly distribute the jalapeño bits among the mango.

12. Place in the refrigerator for at least an hour, preferably several hours and ideally overnight. If you’re using a freezer bag, try to push as much of the air as possible out of the bag before closing. Also, be sure to put the bag on a plate or some other flat container, just in case there are any leaks.

13. Serve with tortilla chips or some other savory starch, such as potatoes or crackers.

Well, I hope you enjoyed my first recipe! Admittedly, I’ve posted a ton of recipes on my old blog, Luis in Paris, but this is the first fully photo-blogged recipe that I’ve done, and it’s also the first recipe for this new blog. Yay!

Also, check out my other blog, LMGMblog, where I have post of my essay/nightlife work. Oh, and also check out my semi-professional website, TheLuisGarcia.com, where you can find my CV, some writing samples, and links to pretty much all of my web presence (well, maybe not ALL of it).