Papa a la Huancaína

Boiled potatoes under a yellow sauce thickened with soda crackers, which is what stops it being a thin cheese dressing.

Egg. Not vegetarian — contains feta whose rennet the source does not name.

Ingredients

For the sauce

• 4 tablespoons ají amarillo paste, as on its own page
• 250 g queso fresco or mild feta
• 8 soda crackers
• 150 ml evaporated milk
• 1 clove garlic
• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
• salt

To serve

• 1 kg waxy yellow potatoes
• 3 eggs, boiled 9 minutes
• black olives
• lettuce leaves

Method

1. THE SAUCE IS THICKENED WITH SODA CRACKERS. Eight of them, blended in with the cheese and the aji, and they are what give it the body to sit on a potato instead of running off it. Without them you have a thin yellow cheese dressing that pools on the plate -- which is how this dish usually disappoints, and the fix is four pence worth of biscuit. They are also why no flour or cornflour is needed and why nothing is cooked.
2. NOTHING IS COOKED AT ALL. The sauce is blended raw and cold, and that is the dish: no roux, no reduction, no heat. Warmed, the cheese splits and goes grainy.
3. THE CRACKERS GO IN A FEW AT A TIME AND IT IS WATCHED. Too many and it turns to paste in seconds and cannot be loosened without thinning the flavour. Blend, look, add two more.
4. THE POTATOES ARE BOILED WHOLE IN THEIR SKINS AND PEELED WARM. Boiled peeled and cut, they take up water and the sauce slides off a wet surface. Whole and then peeled, they stay dense and the sauce clings.
5. AND THEY ARE SERVED WARM OR AT ROOM TEMPERATURE, NOT HOT AND NOT FRIDGE-COLD. Hot potatoes split the sauce on contact; cold ones are hard and taste of nothing.
6. THE CHEESE IS A MILD FRESH ONE and the page says so plainly: queso fresco, or feta rinsed to take the salt down. A mature or strong cheese takes over a sauce whose other flavour is a mild chilli.
7. Potatoes boiled WHOLE in their skins in salted water 20 to 25 minutes until a skewer slides in. Drained and left until they can be handled.
8. Peeled while warm and cut into thick slices. Covered and kept at room temperature.
9. Eggs boiled 9 minutes, cooled and quartered.
10. The ají amarillo paste made as on its own page, and blended with the cheese, garlic, evaporated milk and oil.
11. The crackers added THREE OR FOUR AT A TIME, blending between each addition, until the sauce drops thickly off a spoon and holds its shape for a second.
12. Tasted and salted -- the cheese may have done it already.
13. Lettuce leaves laid on a platter, the potato slices arranged over them.
14. The sauce poured over to cover the potatoes completely.
15. The egg quarters and olives arranged on top, and served within the hour.

Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.

Filed under Peru · All recipes