Peruvian · Dessert
Picarones
- Advanced
- 45 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with warm spice humming through the middle, a silken, spoon-slow texture.
Ingredients
- 500 g squash (zapallo macre or crown prince), peeled and cubed
- 300 g sweet potato, peeled and cubed
- 5 g aniseed
- 2 cinnamon sticks
- 500 g strong white flour
- 7 g dried yeast
- 8 g fine salt
- 250 g chancaca or panela, chopped
- 250 ml water
- 1 strip orange peel
- 3 cloves
- 1500 ml neutral oil, for frying
The skills inside
Reducing a sauceDeep fryingStraining & passing through a sieveMashing & puréeing
Allergen screen
Found: gluten
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
- Tie the aniseed and one cinnamon stick in a square of muslin and boil them with the squash and sweet potato until collapsing. Lift the bag out, drain while keeping 200 ml of the cooking water, mash to a purée with no lumps left, and leave it to cool to blood heat, about 35C (95F).
- Stir the salt through the flour. Beat the yeast into the cooled purée, then work in the flour to a thick sticky batter-dough, loosening it with the reserved water until it falls from a spoon in a heavy ribbon, then cover and leave 90 minutes, until domed and full of bubbles. 90 min
- Simmer the chancaca, water, orange peel, remaining cinnamon and cloves until it coats a spoon, then strain and keep warm.
- Heat the oil to 180C (350F). With a wet hand take a lump of dough, punch a hole through it with your thumb, spin it open in the air and lower it away from you into the oil.
- Fry 2 minutes to 3 minutes a side until deep gold and hollow sounding on the spoon, drain, and pour the warm syrup over. 2 min
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.
Reducing a sauce 95 recipes
- A steady simmer with the surface moving, never a rolling boil that throws it up the sides and scorches what is left on the base.
- Judged by behaviour rather than the clock: it coats the back of a spoon and holds a clean line when a finger is drawn through it.
- The drop in volume is visible against the side of the pan: there is a line to see, not a guess about whether anything has happened.
- Seasoned at the end and not the beginning, because salt concentrates at exactly the rate everything else does.
- Nothing is catching underneath: a spoon drawn across the base comes up clean, with no browned film building where the heat is fiercest.
Where it goes wrong It was seasoned at the start and then reduced by half. The salt concentrated along with everything else, so the sauce reaches perfect body and is too salty to serve. And the only remedy is to dilute it and reduce it all over again.
Deep frying 96 recipes
- The oil was at temperature before anything went in, measured rather than guessed, and the vessel is no more than two-thirds full.
- Everything went in dry. Surfaces are patted down and any coating is not dripping, because water hitting hot oil erupts and is the one accident this technique actually has.
- The oil recovers between batches. It is back at temperature before the next load goes in rather than falling further with each one.
- A steady vigorous bubbling that slows as it finishes: the bubbles are the food’s own water leaving, so a piece that has gone quiet has stopped drying out and is done.
- Seasoned or finished in the first seconds out of the oil, while the surface is still hot and will hold what lands on it. Anything applied to a cooled crust sits on top and falls off.
Where it goes wrong Too much went in at once and the oil temperature collapsed. The crust forms slowly while the food sits in warm fat absorbing it rather than shedding steam, and it comes out heavy and greasy instead of crisp, which no amount of draining afterwards will fix.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Sauternes
- Also Right
- Demi-sec Champagne
- From the Taps
- Belgian tripel
- Zero-Proof
- Jasmine tea
The sweetness rule is absolute: the pour must be sweeter than the plate, and acid keeps it from cloying.
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