Peruvian Picantephiles pt. II

Hopefully your mouth's not still burning from yesterday's helping of Aji sauce, because that was just the appetizer. Today brings us an even spicier Peruvian delight. Frankly, I can't help but feel inspired by a national fascination that runs so deep. Roughly 8,500 years deep, that is, as it's believed that chiles have been cultivated in Peru since 6,500 BCE. The writer "El Inca" Garcilaso de la Vega, born in in 1539 to an Inca princess and a Spanish Conquistador, and a major contributor to our understanding of Inca culture, often mentioned aji (Peruvian for chile) in his writings. "The people of my homeland are so enamored of ají," he wrote, "that they won't eat so much as a few raw vegetables without it." You needn't be a native, however, to notice the fixation. Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander Freiherr von Humboldt wrote in his Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain that "The fruit (of the chile) is as indispensable to the native Peruvians as salt to the whites." The very soul of Peruvian cuisine, it's been said. Even today McDonald's fries are served with a yellow aji cream sauce.

One particular object of affection is the rocoto pepper, the second most iconic Peruvian pepper after the Aji Amarillo. Though upwards of a hundred varieties exist, the typical rocoto is very similar in appearance to red or yellow bell peppers, but with distinct black seeds and Scoville rating on par with the habanero. In some South American markets, they are actually sold alongside bell peppers, which I imagine must make for some very spicy surprises. So spicy, in fact, that they are sometimes referred to as "llevanta muertos," hot enough to raise the dead, or "gringo huanuchi," hot enough to kill a gringo.

The pepper's trademark dish is Rocoto Relleno, or stuffed rocoto, a traditional entree from the Andean city of Arequipa. Rocotos are, sadly, rather difficult to find in the US. And while rocoto.com does provides ample info for growing you own, if you decide to prepare some Bell Pepper Relleno, we promise not to tell. There are indeed plenty of fine recipes to be found online, though here at Firestone we have a certain fondness for chefs able to encapsulate their culinary craft in a brief online video (you'll find out more about that soon).

But to be fair, while Peru's cuisine is inextricably linked to the aji, it really is so much more. In fact, the Fourth International Summit of Gastronomy, held in Madrid in 2006, declared Peru's capital city of Lima to be the "Gastonomical Capital of the Americas" (Gastronomy is an interesting interdisciplinary take on the study of food that takes into account all of the surrounding culture, including the fine arts, hard science, and sociology). If you're interested in checking out some Peruvian cuisine for yourself, peruvianrestaurants.org maintains a thorough list of restaurants in American cities. Still though, I don't suppose anything could match the thrill of having it prepared for you in Peru, by a culinary expert, perhaps even while hiking the Inca trail, to Machu Pichu. If only...

How to make Rocoto Relleno