One of the very first Peruvian sauces I learned to make was huancaina, a bread thickened sauce of fresh cheese, walnuts, yellow chilies, and milk. It’s generally served chilled, over potatoes, as a simple cold appetizer. I learned it on the way to making an ají de gallina, the same base sauce, heated, with the addition of onions, garlic, and mild red chili powder for color. There, it’s served over poached and shredded chicken, along with potatoes and rice. It has variations in traditional Peruvian cooking – there’s an ají de langostinos, much the same, but with whole poached prawns, there’s ocopa, the chilled sauce, but colored green by the addition of the herb huacatay. And more.

In fact, in my first Casa SaltShaker cookbook, Eat Salt, I devote a whole (albeit short) chapter to the sauce and its variations, and we’ve presented versions that involved empanadas, pastas, crepes, gnocchi, lasagna, and risottos.

 

We’ve used cauliflower, we’ve used artichokes, we’ve used asparagus. We’ve used it as the dipping sauce for hot wings.

 

 

And we’re not unique in this. Here in BA, off the top of my head, I know that Tanta makes ají de gallina into croquettes; Osaka uses huancaina as a sauce underneath duck confit gyoza, and numerous Nikkei style sushi outlets use it to dab onto nigiri.

But oh, I think I may have gone a touch off the rails this time. Call it huancaina inspired… something that embodies the spirit, if not remotely the letter, of the recipe.

Yes, that is a dessert. I don’t recall where the inspiration came from, I think, vaguely, I was watching some cooking competition and someone was trying to work chilies into a dessert with cheese, and I started thinking, chilies… cheese… huancaina. Or maybe it was something else. Either way, it’s been percolating, and gradually getting experimented with.

So let’s take the base dish, papas a la huancaina, and break it down. First, there are potatoes, normally boiled, then sliced, and served somewhere between refrigerator cold, room temperature, or slightly warmed. That became a sweet potato cake. Various experiments, including some a bit dense, led me finally to a light, spiced cake flavored with our local batatas, white sweet potatoes, cinnamon and ginger. The cake is served warm, sliced into rounds.

The sauce… at its most classic, one boils up Peruvian yellow chilies, then, depending on how spicy you want it, either seeding them or not, and pureeing them with fresh cheese – something like Port Salut, milk, walnuts (or sometimes peanuts), and bread to thicken. Here, I torched the chilies like I might do for bell peppers, and then peeled off the charred skin, and removed the seeds and veins – I wanted that roasted chili flavor, but without the heat. I pureed them with mascarpone, milk, and walnuts. I didn’t want the heaviness that bread would give the sauce, so I thickened the mixture with caramelized white chocolate. And, rather than enough salt to make a savory sauce, I used just a couple of grinds of sea salt to bring out the flavors.

The garnishes – classically, hard boiled egg cut into wedges, chopped or sliced black olives, occasionally diced tomato, and/or some sort of chopped herbs. Here, I went with dried cranberries, toasted pecans, raspberries (frozen at this time of year, but fresh when available), and shavings of dark chocolate.

And, that’s the dish. Tarta de Batata a la Huancaina Dulce (Sweet Potato Cake in Sweet Chili Sauce).