Hola! Today is the second day of Fiestas Patrias (national holidays) in Peru! Yesterday and today celebrate the country's independence. I decided to make a very popular dish in Peru: papa a la Huancaina. This consists of boiled and sliced potatoes covered in a spicy cheese sauce. Usually it's served on a bed of lettuce, but I completely forgot that part, but luckily I served it with a different kind of salad, so it kind of worked!
A biggest part of this dish is the sauce. The yellow color comes from a paste made with aji amarillo, which is not super easy to find here, so I used habanero peppers instead. Habaneros are actually a lot spicier (100,000-350,000 on the Scoville scale vs. just 30,000-50,000) but I needed spicy peppers that would give me the yellow color I was after. The other two green-ish peppers in the above picture are Hungarian wax peppers, which I ended up using in the salad instead because it was difficult to remove their skins and they just weren't yellow enough. Plus, they weren't very spicy; they mostly taste like bell peppers with a tiny bit of spice to them (I have a pretty high tolerance for spicy foods though, and I tried it only after taking a bite of raw habanero, so it may be spicy to some.)
Even though I love spicy things, it's not fun getting that capsaicin on your skin, or worse, in your eyes! Even with the gloves on, I ended up having some burning fingers for a little bit.
To remove some of that heat, I boiled the peppers--I also added a yellow bell pepper for more color with less spice. I took the bell pepper and wax pepper out after the first boil, but the habanero I boiled three separate times, replacing the water each time. Chris and I like to poke fun of people who don't like spicy food by saying "this water is too spicy!" but apparently when you boil spicy peppers, not only does the water get spicy, but the air gets spicy too. This was exacerbated by the size of our kitchen. It was like a spicy sauna in there.
I was a little afraid of the peppers being too hot, but luckily the other main component of the sauce is quesco fresco. Usually it's blended with evaporated milk, but my stomach can't handle that much dairy so I used almond milk instead. That probably caused my sauce to be thinner than it should have.
One surprising ingredient in the sauce is saltine crackers! They help to thicken the sauce a little bit and can give texture if you prefer it a little...chunkier. I made sure to blend mine as smooth as possible.
I ended up using all the habaneros that I boiled, and it ended up not very spicy at all! I kind of wish I had added a few more in there, but the sauce had a good flavor anyway.
The sauce was poured over some boiled and sliced yellow potatoes, which were then topped with black olives and hard boiled eggs.
According to Wikipedia, lima beans got their name from when they were exported from Peru to the rest of the Americas and Europe. The boxes had "Lima, Peru" labelled as their origin. Since lima beans and Lima, Peru are pronounced differently, I've gone my whole life up until now not knowing there was an actual link between the two. I've thought about it a few times, but assumed it was a coincidence, and never had enough curiosity to look it up. So to honor the capital city, I made an "ensalada de pallares." Pallares are what lima beans are called in Peru. This salad was basically a mix of lima beans and pico de gallo, so I literally just used some leftover pico de gallo that I happened to have made earlier in the day. I also added some chopped wax peppers since I didn't want to waste the one I had chopped up and boiled.
I think the freshness and acidity of the lima bean salad really balanced the heaviness of the creamy sauce and potatoes. The bed of lettuce on the bottom was not even missed (probably because I forgot about it until I started writing this up.) I have a ton of the sauce left over, so now I get to think of different ways to use it up before it goes bad! Wish me luck!
Recipes Used: Papa a la Huancaina // Ensalada de Pallares
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