Peru — A foodie’s paradise
After the bland Chilean food, Peru is the perfect place for any foodie. The country rightly boasts of its cuisine as a very important part of national identity. It’s pretty remarkable how much pride Peruvians take in their food. Given my new found love for cooking, I am also more interested than ever in learning recipes and also some history of food. Enjoyed visiting a nice museum of gastronomy in the heart of Lima which talks about the evolution of modern Peruvian cuisine since Inca and pre-Inca times. The Spanish colonization molded things a lot and especially in Peru, it’s all about fusion. It seems pretty different in India where our typical food still feels largely unaffected by any British influence.
One of the great things in Peru is the concept of mercados (markets) throughout the country. Not only are they an easy access to fresh stuff (fruits/veggies/meats), they also usually have small and cheap restaurants serving a fixed menu (a starter, a segundo, which is a main course and a cool drink) and some tiendas (stores) to get some munchies. In Lima, our couchsurfing host, Juan Carlos, took us to one of these markets for a lunch and we enjoyed some arroz verde (green rice) and papa a la huancaina (potatoes with a creamy gravy). In all of Peru, we always looked for such markets — the best way to experience authentic local food.
We spent our first few days exploring the different neighborhoods of Lima but the street food was the most attractive bit. An interesting drink they have is ponche con malta — beaten eggs with beer. It’s sweet with algarrobina which is a local Peruvian sweetener. One of the common cool drink is chicha morada — made from fermented purple corn.
There is a LOT of chifa (Chinese food) in Peru. I was expecting some Chinatown-like settlements in the big cities but not a Chinese restaurant at every corner and in the smallest of pueblos (villages). Chinese influence is everywhere in South America! Arroz chaufa (fried rice with soy sauce) has been a common part of our meals in the past few weeks.
My favorite snacks here are cancha (roasted corn), chifle (fried banana chips) and habas (fried beans); all of them super addictive!
But my favorite thing has been ceviche. It’s fresh raw fish and other seafood in a spicy lemon juice. It’s super popular along the coast (actually in other Latin American countries too) and I can’t get enough of it. They also add a few munchies to make it a bit crunchy. Leche de tigre (translates as tiger’s milk) is the juice from a similar preparation.
In the Amazons, the food is pretty different. People heavily use banana, both raw and ripe. One cool street-side thing is a banana roasted till golden and then cut in the middle to stuff it with ground peanuts and grated cheese. Super yummy! Couple of other typical things in the forests are tacacho and juane. Tacacho is made from fried plantain which is then crushed and shaped into a ball. It feels like a type of Indian halwa but not sweet. Juane is steamed rice and chicken which is packed neatly in a banana leaf. A little too bland than other Peruvian things.
My best experience in Amazons though was when we caught fresh piranha from a lake where we were camping. Our guide made it with a simple citrus salad and it was a real treat in the middle of the jungle.
Peru is also a great fruit paradise. It turns out that all the fruits I liked in Chile are there in Peru and slightly better. Hope my Chilean friends have stopped reading this post already! :D I am religiously in love with avocado. I think I have been eating it everyday for last few months now. It’s much cheaper in Peru and a perfect thing to carry along while travelling. My second love in fruits is chirimoya (called something like custard apple in English) which is surprisingly similar in taste to India’s sitaphal but different in the outward appearance. There’s lucuma which is my favorite ice-cream flavor here. Pepino dulce is literally sweet cucumber and quite common. A unique one was tuna (cactus fruit), which is a bit similar to watermelon and quite sweet. The Amazon area has some unique fruits like camu camu (which is super sour) and guanabana but I didn’t eat any of them directly. Chilled fruit juices are much more common given how hot it gets in the jungle.
And yeah, we finally also tasted the much hyped about Peruvian pisco (strongly debated to be better than the Chilean pisco). Tried couple of cocktails, Pisco sour and Chilcano, which were pretty good. But the more interesting drink for me was chicha blanca. Chicha is essentially fermented corn and the drink can be alcoholic or non-alcoholic. It’s something more easily found in campo (countryside) where they keep it in huge buckets.
These are just some glimpses of an elaborate cuisine and there are so many more things I would like to try. Besides seafood, I am eating other meats only occasionally, plus it gets too unhealthy eating street food all the time. We do balance it by cooking ourselves in hostel kitchens sometimes. Looking forward to the flavors of Ecuador now!
