Ají amarillo

Boiled potato does nothing at all, which is why the yellow sauce has to do everything.

Poached, pulled, folded back into a sauce thickened with nut and stale bread.

The paste is fruity and flat. Lime gives it the edge the whole coast is built on.

Cut fine, salted, tossed through the paste raw. Sulphur and apricot, no pan involved.

Firm white flesh takes the chilli oil without the heat cooking its way through.

Fried down together into a base paste. Almost nothing Peruvian starts without both.

Seared hard in a wok with soy and onion — the Cantonese pan Lima made its own.

Ground nut gives the sauce body and a tannin that pins the fruit note in place.

Fat Andean kernels blunt the burn and hand the sweetness straight back.

Sugar-sweet shellfish under apricot heat, served raw on the half shell and nothing else.

The older thickener, from before the wheat arrived. Roast, grind, loosen with stock.

Fat mutes capsaicin and leaves the stone-fruit half of the chilli standing alone.

Two tropical acids, one sour and one hot. The pulp turns the paste into a dressing.

Maple-ish Andean fruit against Andean heat. A pudding nobody has put on a menu yet.