Peruvian · Drink
Chicha Morada
- Easy
- 20 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with acid holding everything up to the light, warm spice humming through the middle.
Ingredients
- 500 g maíz morado, whole purple corn cobs
- 3 litres water
- peel and core of 1 pineapple
- 2 quinces or green apples, quartered
- 2 cinnamon sticks
- 6 whole cloves
- 150 g sugar
- 120 ml lime juice
- 1 green apple, in fine dice, to serve
Equipment
Fine sieve
The skills inside
Straining & passing through a sieveKnife cuts: dice, julienne, bias
The words inside
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
- Snap the cobs in half and put them in the pot with the water, pineapple peel, quince, cinnamon and cloves.
- Bring to the boil and hold at a lazy simmer for 45 minutes, until the liquid is an opaque ink purple and the cobs have gone pale and spent. 45 min
- Strain through a fine sieve without pressing the solids, then cool completely; pressing pushes starch through and the drink turns cloudy and thin tasting.
- Stir the sugar into the cold liquid until it dissolves, then the lime: the colour should jump from slate to ruby as it goes in.
- Serve over ice with the diced apple stirred through.
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.
Straining & passing through a sieve 148 recipes
- Nothing solid got through: a finger drawn through what came out finds no fibre, seed, skin, curd, or grit.
- Where the dish wants body it was worked through rather than left to drip, and the solids left in the mesh are spent and dry rather than still holding liquid worth having.
- It is judged on the tongue rather than by eye: smooth, with no residual grain left behind after the mouthful has gone.
- The mesh was fine enough for the job and held its shape, and nothing bypassed it by going over the rim.
- The yield is close to what went in less the spent solids: not half of it abandoned in the sieve because it stopped running and nobody pushed.
Where it goes wrong It was pushed through a mesh too coarse for it, or the sieve was overloaded and slopped at the rim, so the fibres it was meant to remove are in the finished sauce and it reads grainy on the tongue.
Knife cuts: dice, julienne, bias 150 recipes
- Take any three pieces from anywhere in the pile: they match closely enough in every dimension that you would have to measure them to argue otherwise.
- The cut faces are flat and clean rather than ragged or crushed; leaves and herbs are cut through, not bruised, and the board carries no dark smear where they were.
- The stated size is the actual size, held against a rule or a known reference rather than called about right.
- Everything in the pile is the shape that was asked for: no wedges, no half pieces, and no offcuts swept in to avoid waste.
- They cook evenly, which is the entire point: at the end of cooking nothing is still raw and nothing has collapsed.
Where it goes wrong The knife was dull, or the vegetable was never squared off first, so the pieces vary: the small ones are mush by the time the large ones are cooked, and the dish has two textures where it wanted one.
At the Table
- The Pour
- It is the pour
- Also Right
- Serve alongside something salty and fried
- From the Taps
- -
- Zero-Proof
- Already zero-proof unless you made it otherwise
This is the glass, not the plate: judge it on temperature, dilution, and balance, and let the food do the answering.
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