Peruvian · Main
Cau Cau
- Intermediate
- 40 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, aromatics blooming from the first bite, lifted green at the very end.
Ingredients
- 800 g honeycomb tripe
- 2 limes, halved
- 20 g coarse salt, for scrubbing
- 60 ml vegetable oil
- 250 g red onion, diced fine
- 20 g garlic, chopped
- 80 g ají amarillo paste
- 4 g palillo or ground turmeric
- 700 g yellow potatoes, in 2 cm dice
- 600 ml of the tripe cooking liquid
- 120 g peas
- 15 g hierbabuena (fresh spearmint), chopped, or 15 g huacatay leaves for the regional version
- 8 g fine salt
The skills inside
Blanching & shockingKeeping the cooking liquidKnife cuts: dice, julienne, bias
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Scrub the tripe with the coarse salt and the cut limes, rinse it, then blanch it 5 minutes in boiling water and pour that water down the sink. 5 min
- Cook the tripe in fresh water as for Dulet, about 2 hours, then cut it into 2 cm squares and keep the liquid. 120 min
- Fry the onion and garlic in the oil until they have lost all their water and start to catch, then stir in the ají amarillo and palillo and fry until the oil at the edge runs orange.
- Add the tripe, potatoes and 600 ml of the reserved liquid and simmer uncovered until the potatoes are soft and their starch has thickened the sauce, about 25 minutes. 25 min
- Stir in the peas and the hierbabuena off the heat, because its oils cook away within a minute.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Keeping the cooking liquid 60 recipes
- It was actually kept: the liquid went into a container rather than down the drain, and the volume saved is enough to be worth using.
- It is clean: strained of solids and grit, and not clouded with the debris of whatever broke up in it.
- It tastes of what it cooked and tastes concentrated rather than washed out, and it is not so salty or so bitter that the only honest use is the bin.
- It was cooled quickly and stored cold, not left standing warm on the stove to be dealt with later.
- Used, it does the job the dish gives it (carrying flavour into a sauce, loosening the dish, or setting when chilled) rather than merely adding water back.
Where it goes wrong The pot was left to cool slowly on the stove and only strained the next day, so it soured overnight: what should have been the best ingredient in the dish goes in the bin, and the recipe gets water instead.
Blanching & shocking 76 recipes
- A large volume at a hard rolling boil, and enough of it that adding the food barely interrupts it; a pot that goes quiet has started stewing rather than blanching.
- Timed rather than watched, and short. This is an interruption in the cooking of something, not the cooking of it.
- The ice bath was made and standing beside the pot BEFORE anything went into the water, not started once the timer went off.
- It went straight into the ice water, fully submerged, and stayed until cold at the centre: a piece still warm inside is still cooking, and the arrest has not happened yet.
- Drained and dried afterwards rather than left sitting in water, so it does not carry that water into whatever it meets next.
Where it goes wrong The ice bath was not ready, so the food sat draining in a colander while its own residual heat carried on cooking it. By the time it cooled it was a stage past where it was pulled, and exact arrest is the entire reason for blanching rather than simply boiling.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Champagne: when lost, bubbles
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais, lightly chilled
- From the Taps
- Pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with citrus
The universal donors: acid, bubbles, and low tannin rescue nearly any plate: the sommelier’s honest safety net.
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