1. Cooked at least twice

    Once the way it's made here, with the ingredients a Peruvian kitchen actually has. Then again testing the substitutions we recommend to readers cooking abroad, because a substitute we haven't tried is a guess, not advice.

  2. Photographed in that same kitchen

    Every photo on this site starts on our table: the dish that came out of the pot that day, photographed in this kitchen. No stock images, no borrowed pictures of somebody else's plate. Afterwards we retouch the photos with AI editing tools — light, color, framing — so what you see is an edited version of our own photo, not a raw camera shot.

  3. Honest about substitutes

    When an ingredient is hard to find outside Peru we say so, rank the realistic alternatives, and say plainly when there isn't a good one. Huacatay has no true replacement; mint and basil are a polite impression of it, and we write that instead of pretending otherwise.

  4. Written from the altitude where it's cooked

    Water boils at about 89 °C here, so things take longer and we say when that matters to your pot. It also means we're writing about highland food from the highlands, and about coastal or Amazonian dishes as visitors — and we mark the difference rather than blur it.

  5. Careful with words we can't back up

    Peru has 48 indigenous languages and its food carries them. We use Quechua, Spanish slang and the Cantonese that came with the chifa kitchens — but only where the dish genuinely has that root. Where an origin is disputed, like the name of causa, we say it's disputed and give the competing versions instead of choosing the prettier story. Every term we use is collected in our glossary.

  6. No health claims

    We'll tell you that quinoa carries all nine essential amino acids because that is a fact about the grain. We will never tell you a dish cures anything. Recipes with raw egg carry a warning, and anything with alcohol carries a note about legal drinking age.

  7. Corrected, not quietly edited

    When a reader tells us something is wrong, we check it and fix it. Every recipe page carries the date it was published and the date it was last updated. If you've heard a dish described differently where you're from, write to us — regional variation is the point, not a problem.

We'd rather publish one recipe a week that we've actually cooked than five we haven't. That's the whole method.

The person doing all of this is Junior Quintana, who learned to cook from his mother, Lina, in a kitchen where chicha morada simmered every Sunday. Andean Kitchen exists because too many "authentic Peruvian recipes" online call for ingredients no Peruvian kitchen has ever held, or skip the steps that make a dish what it is. Our food has earned the world's attention; it also deserves to be explained accurately, in English, from inside the country where it's made.