Rocoto para relleno - Rocotos for stuffing! For sale in 'El Super', Arequipa

Rocoto chilis are something of a favourite in the  kitchens of Arequipa in Peru.  These fat bulbous peppers look a little like sweet bell peppers but they are firey hot.

Rocotos Grande and Rocotos Enteros

Although Rocotos come in many colours, red ones do look great! In the photo above above you can see two types, the large Rocotos are used for a popular traditional dish called Rocoto Relleno (Stuffed Rocoto), and the smaller variety is just used as an ingredient. If you slice a small rocoto you can just rub it on your food, meat, vegetables and they will be spicy. You don’t have to eat the chili itself.

Here you can see the distinctive black seeds of the Rocoto

If you go to Peru and buy some rocotos, you can slice and dry them. The air in Arequipa is usually quite dry and warm, and if you leave them in the sun after a couple of days they will be dried out.  Cut them horizontally into rings as this allows the water to escape faster.

You could try taking some seeds home (which is illegal in some countries so check first!) but you are probably wasting your time because Rocoto chilis are very hard to grow in other climates. They need to grow in hot places like Arequipa where the climate is quite stable. If you can get some seeds to grow in places like England, they will grow slowly and can easily die in the winter.

]]> http://www.anaperuana.com/2010/06/27/rocoto-chili-peppers-in-arequipa-peru/feed/ 0 http://www.anaperuana.com/2010/06/27/do-people-eat-guinea-pigs-in-peru/ http://www.anaperuana.com/2010/06/27/do-people-eat-guinea-pigs-in-peru/#comments Sun, 27 Jun 2010 18:34:55 +0000 Ana http://www.anaperuana.com/?p=2116

Guinea Pigs, traditionally called Cuy in Peru, are a traditional food.

Yes, people do eat guinea pigs in Peru. For thousands of years people have eaten Cuy as they are called in the native language.

Cuy come from the Andes, the moutains that run along the west of South America. They have been domesticated since at least 5000BC.

]]> http://www.anaperuana.com/2010/06/27/do-people-eat-guinea-pigs-in-peru/feed/ 0 http://www.anaperuana.com/2010/06/27/cochineal-farming-in-peru/ http://www.anaperuana.com/2010/06/27/cochineal-farming-in-peru/#comments Sun, 27 Jun 2010 18:34:16 +0000 Ana http://www.anaperuana.com/?p=2144

Cochineal farming in Peru

On our latest visit to Peru we travelled to the Majes Valley, an hour or two drive from Arequipa city. On the way we had the chance to have a close look at some cochineal farming and learn about how they do it.If you don’t know already, cochineal is a dye that comes from a type of insect. It is not actually a beetle as many people think, it is a type of plant sucking insect. The dye is made from the adult females which are 5 mm (0.2 in) long.

It takes 155,000 dried female Cochineal beetles to make 1 kilo of Cochineal dye. In food you will see it listed as Carmine or E120.

It is used in many foods as a ‘natural’ food colouring and is also used in traditional textiles for dying fabric. Even the famous British army ‘Redcoats’ were coloured with cochineal, as were the robes of Cardinals after Pope Paul II took a liking to it in 1464!

Cochineal may have been used for more than 1500 years in Peru where it has always been prized for its strong red colour. It was traded by the Huari (a civilisation before the Incas) as far away as Mexico with the Toltec and Aztec civilisations where it was considered as valuable as gold.

Peru still produces 85-90% of the world’s cochineal although people are attempting to farm it in similar climates in Spain and Australia.

Cochineal is still very valuable and so some people concentrate on just farming the beetles and the cacti that they live on. So if you are travelling through Peru and you see a field full of Cacti you are most likely looking at Cochineal farming.

Cochineal farming in Peru - Infestation on a cactus

The insects are introduced to the cactus that they will feed on in small envelopes that are clipped to the catcus. This also offers the insects some shade from the strong desert sun, the cold desert night and somewhere to hide. Gradually the insects get larger and start to infest the cactus and breed – even though the female attaches herself permanently in one place.

In the photo above you can see the white waxy fuzz that they produce to protect themselves from other parasites and the sun. You can see someone has squashed a beetle and left a strong red dot on the left.

As they gradually cover the cactus the farmers will cover them  to shade them from the sun so they can keep on breeding and feeding.

Eventually they can even kill the cactus. When the cacti are covered in fat female insects, about 90 days later, they are cut down and the insects are scraped off. They are killed by various methods, including putting them in hot water, steaming them, baking in a special oven or just leaving them out in the sun.

In the same areas you will find shops of traders who buy Cochineal – ‘fresh or dry’. The insects have to be dried out in the sun so they do not decompose, and then they are ready for export.

Papea Peru - Potatoes for Patriots!

In Peru the Ministery of Agriculture has launched a campaign to encourage people to eat more potatoes. This is both a nutritious choice and a patriotic act! With the massive increase in the cost of imported wheat and other cereals in the last year people in Peru found that the price of bread went up about 40%. In poorer parts of Peru this is a real problem because there is the risk of children not getting enough nutrition if the food is too expensive. The Peruvian response was creative as usual and the shops were soon selling ‘Papapan’, literally Potato Bread.

When I was last in Peru I tried some of this bread and it was nice, it is quite soft and tastes good, it is not pure potato but is a mix of wheat flour and about 30% mashed potato and tastes like French bread but has more iron. It would be nice to buy here in the UK.

Scientists believe that potatoes were first cultivated in the Andes about 8,000 years ago and there are now over 4,000 varieties (a few more than you will find in a british supermarket!) which allow potatoes of one kind or another to be grown in the very varied environments, high up in the mountains, in the valleys in dry or wet environments.

As well as proving a valuable source of nutrition for Peruvians and other Andean this incredible variety of potatoes could help feed people all around the world in very different climates where other crops would have problems.

The ‘Papea Peru’ campaign not only encourages people to eat potatoes but reminds them that it is good for their pockets and their country, as more demand for potatoes means more money for communities that produce them. ‘Papea’ is a slang word meaning ‘eat’ like English people say ‘scoff’ that actually comes from the word Papa, meaning potato. So it has a double meaning, both ‘Eat Peruvian’ and ‘Peruvian Potatoes’ – it doesn’t translate so easily. In the television commercials people from different walks of life say ‘Este Pechito Come Papa’, this is also slang, literally translating as ‘This chest eats potato’ which is what you would say while patting your chest to show you mean yourself, like if you were saying ‘I was the one who thought of that!’ so it means they are proudly saying  ’I eat potato’!

In this video you will see people who eat potato – including in our modern society a ‘Gringo’ immigrant with his wife and baby!

You can see they have Pastel de Papa (a savoury potato cake), mashed potato, and a Peruvian favourite called Papa Rellena (a ball of potato stuffed with meat).

There is a lot of word play going on here, but the translation is something like. “Potatoes are nutritious and eating well  is good. Put potatoes on your Plate – Papea Peru!”

Traditional Mazamorra Morada Recipe

Ingredients

Purple Corn
Pineaple skin
Apple
Cinamon powder and sticks
Corn starch or sweet potato starch
prunes
dried apricots
Sugar

Boil the purple corn in water for about 15 minutes with the pineaple skin and some cinamon sticks, sieve, then pour the liquid in a pan, add dried fruits, apple in cubes and the starch and cook for a few more minutes stirring with a wooden spoon. Leave to cool down and serve with cinamon powder on top.

Mazamorra morada is traditionally eaten with rice pudding in Easter – or any time of the year:)

Essentially the ingredients are purple corn, apple, pineapple and cinnamon.

Chicha Morada also sold ready to drink in bottles In supermarkets there are packets of powder you can mix with water to make Chicha Morada like the famous Negrita brand but these usually use artificial colours and flavours. If you want to make Chicha Morada the traditional way this is the recipe:

Purple corn
Cinnamon
Pineaple skin
Apple
Sugar
Lemon juice

Boil the purple corn with the pineaple skin or any fruit that you like that is gonna give the chicha a strong flavour for about 15 minutes.Sieve the chicha. Leave it to cool down, when the chicha is cold add sugar or sweetener and lemon juice, you could add apple in little cubes as well.

In fact Chicha Morada is often still available in cinemas where you can have it instead of coca-cola, 7-up, etc.

Some Adverts for Chicha:

Tuna, a type of cactus, growing in fields in Arequipa Province, Peru

For centuries Cochineal has been prized for its colour for dying fabric and now is commonly used in food products as a ‘natural’ food colouring. You can find it in ingredients lists, called carmine, or E120. Here are some photos from the production…

The white patches are colonies of cochineal insects

The insects are scraped off the cactus and boiled to kill them. Then they are dried….

Cochineal traders line the roads, who buy and sell 'fresh and dry' cochineal

There is a nice by-product of this industry – the Tuna fruit. These ra the fruit of the cactus and are sold in the shops but only after the spikes have been removed. It has soft, juicy red flesh and is popular as a juice. It has a delicious flavour, which you might think of as like watermelon but stronger. So if someone offers you some ‘Tuna Juice’ don’t worry its not fish, its a lovely drink

Irrigations outside Arequipa are popular places to find tuna fields, there are  a lot of cochineal traders and I imagine that the prize that they is not bad.

Inca Kola is very distinctive, as it tastes quite unlike the big cola brands, it is more like bubble gum flavour using a native herb called ‘Hierba Luisa’, but what you will notice before you even taste it is the colour; Inca Kola is bright yellow, like the legendary gold of the Incas.

It was originally created in 1935 by the Lindley family, immigrants from England, who had a successful bottling operation in Lima.

Inca Kola quickly became popular and Coca-Cola tried for many years to compete with it, even changed its recipe slightly in Peru to try and make the flavour more similar but could not succeed. Inca Kola was the most popular cola in the market and still is so Coca Cola knew they could never win and needed a new strategy…

Inca Kola was eventually partly bought by Coca Cola in 2005 for hundreds of millions of dollars. Now the Inca Kola company help market and distibute Coca Cola with total share of 60% of the market. For patriotic Peruvians this was bad news but Peruvian entrepreneurs are quick to spot an opportunity and many new cola brands have now emerged for the thirsty patriot.

Kola Real is made by a Peruvian company and is now the third most popular cola in Peru. They have also launched a golden cola called ‘Oro’. In 2002 a new drink arrived that was very proud to be Peruvian, called ‘Peru Cola’ which is like a traditional dark cola. Because Inca Kola is unsual in being yellow in colour, the same company also launched Isaac Kola, a gold cola to compete with Inca Kola.

Kola Real is available in many flavours such as strawberry, orange, pineapple, lime-lemon and cola flavour.

There are other colas that you will find in Peru that you never see in the UK. For a tourist fromn the UK maybe the strangest of these is Kola Inglesa (English Cola) and Kola Escocesa (Scottish Cola) which you cannot buy anywhere in the UK!

Kola Escocesa is very tipical from Arequipa and I haven’t seen it anywhere outside there,  it’s made using natural mineral water from Yura outside Arequipa, it has a very nice taste and you can find a no added sugar version as well. It doesn’t have caffein or phosphoric acid (used in many fizzy drinks specially cola with negative effects in bone calcium and kidney health) , it’s a fizzy drink but it feels kind of “natural” and it goes very well with traditional spicy food from Arequipa.

www.incakola.com.pe 
www.kolainglesa.com.pe 
www.kolaescocesa.com 
www.perucola.com.pe 
www.ajegroup.com (Kola Real)

Cusquena is the most famous Peruvian beer.

I was very surprised last year to find Cusquena in my local Asda supermaket. This is the most famous beer in Peru and gets its name from the city of Cusco, which used to be the captial of the Inca Empire. All tourists that want to visit Machu Picchu travel through Cusco where they will definitely see this beer, but you can buy Cusquena all over Peru.

It is considered a very high quality beer because it uses pure barley, where other beers use barley and corn.

Arequipena - the beer from my home city welcomes you on the road to Arequipa

Franca a Peruvian owned beer (this one is in Mancora!)

After being abroad for a while in a visit to Peru I saw that there are many more brands, when I left Peru Brahma (the famous brazilian beer) just started to be popular and after a couple of years being abroad when I came back I saw another new brands like Barena or Franca.

In Peru there isn’t the variety of british and imported beers that you can find in the UK, but definitely the range of peruvian beers is wider now.

Artika ice cream parlour in Arequipa, Peru

In most of the larger cities in Peru the weather is mild all year long, so eating an ice cream is always good. The ice cream tradition in Peru probably comes from Italian inmigrants but now everyone enjoys them.

D'Onofrio's ice cream parlour in Miraflores, Lima, Peru

The first big ice cream company in Peru, called D’Onofrio, was founded by Italian immigrants and was developed into a big compan. They are still called D’Onofrio but now the brand belongs to a transnational corporatation. They sell ice iream in little trolleys, and on bicycles and they also have ice cream parlours called ‘heladerias’, or ‘gelaterias’ in Italian that just sell ice iream in many flavours and presentations. Ice cream flavours in Peru are very exotic, one of the most popular is lucuma flavour, a fruit originally from Peru that has a flavour like a mix of toffee, maple syrup and even sweet potato. My mother has a lucuma tree in her garden so we used to make our own sometimes.

You can always find an ice cream man in Arequipa

But apart from D’Onofrio there are many more brands of ice cream and many very posh gelaterias that they are really like restaurants where eating an ice cream is a lovely experience because they are so sophisticated and incredibly tasty.

People go to a heladeria or a gelateria with a friend and order an Ice Cream and have a long chat and enjoy every spoonfull of it.

D'Onofrio have some very creative ice creams for kids

There are very interesting ice creams for kids in the shapes of  boats and clowns, ice cream with sweets, fruit, biscuits, etc. There is no limit to what these people can do with Ice Cream!