Travel Food Porn: Peru (3 of 3)

Following my brief stint in Peru, I headed north to Cusco for a few days to experience Incan ruins, cultural festivals and parades galore, llamas around every corner, and a different type of Peruvian cuisine.

Of course I saw the illustrious Machu Picchu...truly a magical place. I did not end up hiking the larger mountain behind the ruins shown on the right (Huyana Pichu) but I sure ate like I had!

The cuisine in this area errs on the side of hearty and also included an animal that I find adorable and obsessed over everywhere I saw them: the alpaca. There was no way I was going to eat one of these adorable beings. I took enough selfies and other llama/alpaca pictures that I couldn't bear the thought of eating one of their siblings.

I arrived in Cusco armed with some recommendations not only of foods to try, but of places to eat. I had met a new friend in Lima who provided some great recommendations. I only managed to get to one of those places, but it was definitely worth the trip to have one of the specialty dishes of that region: Aji de Gallina.

I had tried this dish a few months before my trip, while on a date with a Peruvian who took me to a place in Adams Morgan that he said would be the closest I'd find to authentic Peruvian cuisine in DC. Besides all those chicken places, but those are a whole other ballgame.

The restaurant in Cusco where I ate Aji de Gallina was a bit more sophisticated than the place I ate in Adams Morgan (no shocker there), and the presentation of the food was a direct reflection. However, the flavor profile and consistency was spot on.

Calle del Medio, had a great view of the Plaza and served a variety of pisco drinks. But I was most impressed with their version of this dish. Aji de Gallina is chicken with potatoes and rice. As if that wasn't enough starch, there is bread in the sauce. Rich and beautifully presented, it was the best Peruvian-style dish I had while in Cusco. A very hearty stew, it fit well with the brisk, winter air I experience in Cusco in June.

In addition to recs from a new friend, I also had a coworker who had recently hiked the Inca trail and had passed through Cusco just a few weeks earlier. Ironically enough, she recommended a great burger place (the irony being that she's a vegetarian).

The place was called Papacho's, which is a Gaston Acurio concept. One of the more celebrated Peruvian chefs, he had a few restaurants in Lima that I could not get into, but I was happy to check out this burger place. I know, I know...why was electing to get a burger while in Peru? Even I, the eternal foodie traveler sometimes craves something a little like home. However, knowing that this was a restaurant owned by a top chef, it wouldn't just be any burger place. And I was right.

The meat burgers they served at this restaurant were veal burgers and beyond tender. I elected to a burger with blue cheese, fried onion, bacon, and...here's the kicker...elderberry ketchup. This was served along with sweet potato fries. As you can see, this was a beast of a burger. I only ate half of this monster, namely because a dessert on the menu caught my eye and I very much needed to leave room for this dessert. Not to mention the fact that this was the meal I ate after having hiked around Machu Picchu starting at 5 a.m. that day so I was exhausted and this, including the pisco sour I drank, was enough to knock me completely on my ass.

But I digress...I need to talk about this dessert. I love caramel. It may be one of my favorite sweet things out there. I like it in ice cream and mixed in brownies. I loved the plastic wrapped hard caramels that my Grandma always kept around her house. So when I saw that my new favorite South American cookie, the alfajore, was included in an ice cream sundae topped in caramel, I had to bite.  So much caramel and dairy. I was already full but I accepted the challenge. I'm not sure where this sweet tooth I developed during my trip came from, but I definitely found myself leaving room for South American desserts on the regular.

Speaking of sweettooths, which I have never claimed to have, I have claimed a salt tooth. I can't get enough salty food (much to the detriment of my blood pressure). So I'll end my Food Porn: Peru edition posts on a high note. I visited salt pans while in Salinas, Peru and it was by far one of the more beautiful things I've seen while traveling. And I say that not just because I love salt...and I got to bring some of it home with me. As you can see on the right, they are definitely a sight!

All this blogging about my travels sure has made me hungry. I guess it's time to get back in the kitchen! ;)

Travel Food Porn: Peru (Part 2 of 3)

Earlier this week, I wrote about two of the best meals I had while in Lima. I was only in the city for three days, but having great food was definitely one of my major goals in visiting Lima. Hell, that's usually the case for anywhere I travel. So I wanted to make every meal count. This blog serves as a cautionary tale on going by TripAdvisor reviews, but no worries...it has a happy ending.

I had wanted to check out Central, one of the top restaurants in Lima but when inquiring for a reservation, I was informed they were already booked through the end of the month. This comes as no surprise given the prestige of the chef, but I was hopeful that I'd be able to successfully eat there at some point since I was there mid-week. When my friend Dan and I headed out for food, it was a bit early to check out Central so we pulled up TripAdvisor and found fairly solid reviews for a restaurant not far from the hotel. So we went. For some reason, we elected to only order a ceviche and an octopus dish, hoping that we could pop in to Central later. Am I ever glad we didn't elect to eat a large meal at this place. This horrific display of octopus bathed in olive sauce was so unappetizing, I couldn't even bring myself to have a bite. The look on my friend Dan's face after sampling it proved my instincts were right, but not so were the writers on TripAdvisor. I hate to put ugly food on here, but really, it needs to be seen. Food not only needs to taste good, it needs to look remotely appetizing.

So after that debacle, we headed over to Central where we were able to enjoy some cocktails at the bar, chat with some locals (well Dan did, I just pretended to understand with my limited Spanish skills), and I even gained some restaurant recs for my trip to Cusco (which came in handy!). After a solid hour or two at the bar, we were able to get a seat for dinner and the meal far made up for the horror that was our experience earlier that evening.

The food at Central was rich and delightful. We started off with fresh breads, including one that contained coca (just able everything down there does). We followed that up with sweetbreads. I know what sweetbreads are and I willingly ate them here. However it always makes me think of a story (the person who said this shall remain nameless) of a friend who when reading sweetbreads on a menu thought that it meant something like a donut. I can see how someone could make that mistake, but it's pretty funny nonetheless.

I followed up with a suckling pig with potatoes (surprise surprise) and a caramel based sauce (shown above). I don't recall what Dan ordered but I do recall that the facial expressions following this meal were far improved from our last experience.

We finished our meal with a lovely dessert that had a fruit that Dan was a big fan of from his childhood. The dessert was light and fluffy and beautifully presented. The texture of the pinkish substance that resembled ice cream reminded me of the chalky "Astronaut Ice Cream" I tried in elementary school.


So if you find yourself heading to Lima, I can offer this advice. 1) Take the recommendations on TripAdvisor with a grain of salt. 2) Visit Central. And if you can't get a reservation, try your luck and drink at the bar for a bit. You might not remember all the intimate details of the meal, but the mixologist there was an artist.

Travel Food Porn: Peru (Part 1 of 3)

Part of the delay in me finally writing about the food in Peru is that I ate so damn much of it. I think I was still going through some sort of potato-less shock when I got back to the States and couldn't quite comprehend the thought of revisiting all the starchy wonderfulness that I encountered during the second half of my trip. So I'm exercising some portion control and writing this in three parts.

I was only in Lima for three nights, but I was advised by many that I would fall in love with the food scene in this city. That the main reason to visit Lima was to eat. Having now been there, I would agree with this sentiment.

The first part of my Lima write-up will cover my favorite two meals in the city, in addition to the chocolate making class I took. These three experiences are quite disparate from each other, but all stories worth telling.

Let's start with the cheapest meal I had in Lima and how something so wonderfully simple can be so good. On my way to my chocolate-making class, after a failed attempt at doing tandem paragliding off the coastline shown above, I realized that I wanted to have a good meal prior to consuming a lot of chocolate. Because it's vacation. And that's how I roll.

I was actually quite hungry considering I hadn't eaten that morning for fear of losing it while jumping off a cliff. So since that was not in the cards, I settled for a heavy lunch. I found a little hole in the wall on my way to the class and ordered the papas with huancaina sauce for my appetizer followed by the Peruvian classic, lomo saltado, shown at the right.

My 8-year-old self, who would have survived on potatoes and starches alone if I was allowed, was thrilled beyond belief that people eat like this on the regular. A starch appetizer, followed by meat paired with potatoes and rice. This is the Peruvian take on stir fry and something I will definitely try to replicate this winter. It seems pretty easy and it will allow me to improve on my steak cooking abilities (something that I don't always excel at.) I blame the lack of a good grill.

Following this heavy lunch, I continued on to my chocolate making class at the Museo de Choco. I received this recommendation from a friend who had taken the same class during his recent trip to Peru. Knowing that I like to do these types of activities when traveling, I appreciated the recommendation.

While it was interesting to learn more about the chocolate making process, I didn't feel this was as hands-on as I typically seek out in a cooking class. We did ground some cocoa beans and make hot chocolate, but the true chocolate making was more of an observational process of the big machines doing their thing to mix all the ingredients. Then we were provided with chocolate that was ready to be placed in molds. Don't get me wrong, it was good chocolate, but perhaps I should have taken something a bit more hands-on.

Now on to my other favorite meal in Lima. I read about Rafael in my Lonely Planet Guide and had heard great things about this little spot that if you blinked, you'd miss, on a quiet side street in Miraflores. I had tried to get reservations at some of the other hotspots (including Central, which I'll cover in Part 2 of this blog series) but had limited success.

I was able to get a cozy spot for one in this restaurant, which boasted a well stocked bar and great ambiance. This great "mood lighting" made it a bit hard to take proper pictures of the meal, but I did copy down the descriptions. I opted to have two of their appetizers and a dessert, so that I could try as much food as my little stomach could handle that day.

A fellow foodie that I met during a city tour earlier that day had recommended that I get the tuna tataki as one of my dishes. The dish, shown above, was a yellow fin tuna tataki with yuzu, kiuri, avocado, and salmon caviar. The fish was so fresh and the flavors just melded together in your mouth. I chose to eat this as slowly as possible, thinking that my next dish would pale in comparison. Wrong. It was just as good. Seafood really is wonderful in Lima. My second dish was a shrimp tempura with akishiso sauce, cucumber, mango, avocado and cashew nut salad. Unfortunately the lighting wasn't on my side to capture how pretty the dish was, but trust me, it was just as good as the tataki.

I closed my meal with the crispy churros with smoky Nutella sauce, decadent truffle-Nutella tart, and raspberry sorbet, shown at the right. Let's just say I am not a dessert person but I was in heaven with just about every dessert I had in South America. None were overly sweet, but complex in their own way. A wonderful way to end a great meal.

If you find yourself in Lima, I highly recommend checking out Rafael. It's a great date spot, or a place for one single foodie to eat her little heart out.