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The Andes · Volume 17, Altitude, Chuño and the Picantería Table

Ocopa arequipeña

Arequipa, Peru

Ocopa arequipeña, potatoes in a huacatay peanut sauce: thick slices of pale yellow boiled potato fanned across a single lettuce leaf, coated in a matte mustard yellow sauce flecked with dark green herb.

Illustration

As tradition built it

Ocopa arequipeña

Name's own etymology contested

Ingredients

The sauce

  • 4 dried ají mirasol
  • 2 ají amarillo
  • as needed oil
  • 2 cloves garlic
  • 1 medium red onion
  • 1 heaped tbsp peanuts
  • 50g vanilla biscuits
  • 200g queso paria (fresh cheese)
  • 1 sprig huacatay
  • 120ml evaporated milk

To serve

Method

  1. Soak the mirasol in hot water until soft, then seed it. Seed the ají amarillo.
  2. Heat oil in a frying pan and brown the garlic, onion, both ajíes, peanuts, biscuits, cheese and huacatay together, about 5 minutes, stirring all the time. Add a little water halfway if it needs it.
  3. Take it off the heat and let it cool.
  4. Blend it, adding the milk gradually until the texture is right.
  5. Serve over native potatoes with olive, egg and strips of ají amarillo.

Notes

A widely told story that Inca chasquis carried a bag of the same name holding chillies and ground peanuts for energy on long routes has the shape of an invented tale rather than documented history and is not asserted here as fact.

The recipe is chef Rocío Oyanguren's, for El Comercio. Buenazo fries only the chillies, onion, garlic and huacatay and uses serrano cheese and water crackers, served on lettuce. Sergio Henostroza, for La República, uses queso fresco and soda crackers, stirs the huacatay in for seconds only, and names the batán, the grinding stone, as the traditional tool: it gives a coarser sauce.

What a modern chef changes

Batán base, blender-finished

Rung 03

Method

  1. Grind the sauce on the batán exactly as tradition specifies for as long as it takes to build the base.
  2. Finish it in the high-power blender only at the very end, for a texture that carries the batán's own coarser character forward rather than erasing it.
  3. Roast and grind the peanuts fresh in the spice grinder immediately before blending.
  4. Pass the finished sauce through the chinois for a smoother pour over the potato.
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