Starters · Amazon
Ensalada de chonta: the Amazon's palm heart salad
Ensalada de chonta: sliced palm heart tossed with tomato, onion and lime — the Amazon's crisp, cooling answer to a salad, built around an ingredient that only comes from one tree.
Cover Recipe · Stir-fry
Lomo saltado, the way it's actually made in Peru.
Most recipes outside Peru get the fire wrong, the soy sauce wrong, and the potatoes very wrong. Here is the version you'd be served in a Peruvian home — wok smoke, vinegar splash, fries folded in at the last second.
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What this site is
Andean Kitchen is written from a kitchen in Junín, in the central Peruvian Andes, at around 3,200 meters. Every recipe here has been cooked in that kitchen and photographed on that table. That is not a marketing line — it is the reason the recipes say things other sites do not, like how long a potato really takes to boil at this altitude, or which supermarket cheese behaves like queso fresco and which one turns to rubber.
Most Peruvian recipes in English have been copied from other recipes in English. They repeat the same errors for years: ceviche marinated for an hour when it takes ten minutes, lomo saltado cooked in a cold pan, ají amarillo swapped for a bell pepper as though the swap were free. We write from the other direction — from what is actually cooked here — and when a dish genuinely will not work without a Peruvian ingredient, the recipe says so instead of pretending.
How to use it
If you are cooking Peruvian food for the first time, start with lomo saltado or papa a la huancaína: both are quick, both are forgiving, and between them they teach you the two things this cuisine runs on — high heat, and ají amarillo. From there the recipe index sorts everything by course and by region.
The glossary explains every Peruvian word used on the site — the slang, the Quechua, the Cantonese that came in with the chifa kitchens — because a recipe that says aderezo or graneado without explaining it is only useful to people who already knew. And how we cook and test sets out what happens before a recipe goes up: what gets cooked, how many times, and what we do when a substitution does not honestly work.
New recipes go up every Tuesday and Friday. Nothing here is generated, spun or rewritten from somebody else's post — if you find a mistake, write to us and it gets fixed with a note saying what changed.
Latest from the kitchen
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Pantry · Amazon
Yuca: the root behind half of Peru's comfort food
What yuca actually is, how to peel and cook it safely, and why it shows up from the coast to the jungle — from a kitchen that treats it as a real staple, not a novelty.
Starters · Highlands
Pan francés and the Peruvian neighborhood bakery
Pan francés isn't French at all — it's Peru's everyday bread roll, bought fresh every morning. The bakery culture behind it, and how to bake it at home.
Starters · Highlands
Pan de anís: the soft, fragrant bread of Andean bakeries
Pan de anís: a soft, faintly sweet bread scented with anise seed — a staple of Andean bakeries, often shaped into rounds or braids for a Sunday breakfast table.
Pantry · Amazon
Culantro: the Amazon's sharper cousin of cilantro
What culantro actually is, why the same word means ordinary cilantro on the Peruvian coast, and what to use instead when you cannot find it.
Drinks · Highlands
Cremoladas: Peru's shaved-ice fruit drink
Cremoladas: fresh fruit blended with ice into a thick slush eaten with a spoon. The Peruvian street-cart answer to a hot afternoon.
The Andean pantry
Explore ingredients →Chiles
Ají amarillo
The backbone of Peruvian cooking: fruity heat that defines huancaína, causa and a hundred sauces.
Grains
Quinoa & kiwicha
Grown in the highlands for 5,000 years. How to rinse, toast and cook them so they never taste bitter.
Tubers
Native potatoes
Peru grows more than 3,000 varieties. Which ones to seek out, and honest substitutes abroad.
Corn
Maíz morado
The purple corn behind chicha morada and mazamorra — color, aroma and how to brew it right.
Cook by region
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La Costa
Ceviche, tiradito, arroz con mariscos — lime, fish and the Pacific cold current doing most of the work.
La Sierra
Our home turf: quinoa soups, pachamanca, native potatoes and everything that grows above 3,000 meters.
La Selva
Juane, tacacho con cecina, cocona and plantain — the Amazon side of Peru most recipe sites never reach.
Chifa & Nikkei
Where Cantonese and Japanese kitchens met the Peruvian pantry: lomo saltado, arroz chaufa, tiradito nikkei.
"We write from Junín, in the central Peruvian Andes, at 3,200 meters above sea level. Every recipe here is cooked, tasted and argued over before it's published."
New recipes, twice a week.
We publish every Tuesday and Friday. Bookmark the recipe index or write to us with the Peruvian dish you want explained next.
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