IMAGES: CAMILA NOVOA; AWL IMAGES
PERU
Mil restaurant’s famous dish, huatia, named after the underground stove in which it’s cooked Right: A traditional home in Lima, which was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1988 and is also known as the ‘City of the Kings’
Huatía MIL, MORAY It’s hard to imagine a more appropriate location for the restaurant Mil. It sits at over 11,800ft above sea level in the Andes, overlooking the circular terraces at Moray — a renowned archaeological site that’s believed to have once been used for testing crop varieties in different microclimates. Similarly, Mil is as much a research vehicle for owner Virgilio Martínez’s NGO, Mater Iniciativa, as it is a restaurant. It’s located among the communities of Mullak’as-Misminay and Kacllaraccay, which share their harvests with the restaurant and open their homes and farms for full-day immersion programmes, where, if they’re lucky, visitors will encounter a huatía — the name of both a dish and the underground stove in which it’s cooked — during a potato harvest. “Traditionally, huatía is made in the farmlands.
A small oven is built using stones and soil clods — inside it, small logs and dried stalks of herbs are lit on fire,” explains chef Luis Valderrama. “Once it’s hot, tubers such as potatoes, ocas, ollucos and mashuas are introduced before the complete construction is smashed down with all the tubers inside, where they’ll cook for a few hours. When they’re ready to eat, they’re eaten dipped in uchucuta sauce.” At Mil, the traditional huatía is reinterpreted,
with small ovens made from chaco clay — an edible clay used to neutralise toxins in bitter potatoes
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— as well as salt from the nearby mines at Maras and Andean herbs like muña. The uchucuta sauce, traditionally made by grinding chillies, herbs and aromatics with a stone, is made in a food processor. Still, the flavour achieved is very close to that of the traditional dish. “When we do the huatía in Mil, the potatoes have
to move from the chacra, or farmlands, so we’re taking them out of their original place. We don’t make a huatía, as this would involve working with the people in the open field,” explains Martínez. “Because the meaning of huatía encompasses a lot, it’s not just one bite of potato. That’s why we say our dish is an interpretation. What we seek, in our kitchen environment, is to recreate the moment as if we were in that place where huatía actually happens.”
milcentro.pe
Muchos tubérculos KJOLLE, LIMA Since she launched Kjolle in 2018, there’s one dish that chef Pía León has kept on the menu. Muchos tubérculos, or ‘many tubers’, began as a small tart, with a base of kañiwa, a pseudocereal from the High Andes. This was filled with a potato cream and crowned with pink and yellow olluco slices beautifully rolled up, and garnished with huacatay, an aromatic herb that grows in the same fields. The dish’s vibrant colours, array of textures and bold flavours really demonstrated what could be achieved cooking with Peru’s native tubers.
At her restaurant in Lima’s bohemian Barranco
neighbourhood, León has made it her business to showcase the culinary, cultural and nutritional value of Andean tubers. Many have been cross-bred by farmers over centuries to produce new flavours and textures, to have a higher concentration of pigmentation and to thrive at different altitudes. Yet there were rarely used for anything other than their traditional preparations. “In Peru, we normally eat olluco in two ways
only — in stews or soup,” says León. “We wanted to explore other ways to prepare and present it, gathering many different Andean ingredients in one dish, enhancing and connecting with the products of the land.” Kjolle is located on the floor above its sister
restaurant, Central. While the latter has a guiding philosophy, León likes to mix and match ingredients from ecosystems around Peru on her nine-course tasting menus. And, as the restaurant has climbed the rankings of the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list, muchos tubérculos has evolved. These days, the colourful tart remains, but as a side dish to a larger plate of tubers like oca, mashua, olluco and yuca arranged in a circle around a serving of sacha papa, a potato-like Amazonian fruit. It’s sweet, crunchy, creamy and savoury at the same time. “The recipe is simple, yet culturally powerful,”
says León. “Here you can feel Peru in one bite — its flavours, colours and history.”
kjolle.com/en/
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