What is Huancaina Sauce?
Huancaina sauce is a traditional Peruvian condiment with a creamy and slightly spicy flavour. Originating from the region of Huancayo, it is made from a base of yellow ají amarillo peppers, cheese, evaporated milk, and crackers or bread. These ingredients are blended until smooth, creating a rich and velvety sauce. Huancaina sauce is typically served over boiled potatoes and garnished with olives and hard-boiled eggs. It can also be used as a vegetable dip or drizzled over grilled meats.
What does Huancaina Sauce Taste Like?
Umami is one of five main tastes. It is savory with a depth of flavor. Umami is a taste in many foods, including meat, seafood, beans, and nuts. It is both naturally occurring and created through the specific use of ingredients to create a satisfying taste. Umami is characteristic of proteins and savory dishes.
Spicy is a flavor that brings heat and fire to food by creating a burning sensation in the mouth or sinuses. Spicy flavors come from hot peppers, horseradish, and wasabi. Spicy adds a kick and sometimes complexity to a dish and releases endorphins, creating a mildly addictive quality.
Ingredients
Queso fresco is a fresh cheese made from cows milk and is aged for less than a week. It has a mild, smooth, and salty taste and crumbles easily, making it great for tacos, sopes, and other Medixan dishes. The cheese comes in a round block. It originated and Spain and become popular in Mexico.
The onion is a bulb vegetable, meaning its bulb and not its leaves are eaten. Onions come in many varieties, including white, yellow and red. Shallots are small and mild onions. Vidalias are sweet, while red onions are strong and sharp. The onion is usually round and has a thin dry skin around its juicy layers. This skin depends in the color of the onion, as does the flesh. The flesh, or body of the onion is made of multiple round layers, that get smaller towards the center. The flavor of onions are sharp and sweet when raw, with an astringent taste. When cooked, these flavors mellow and the sweetness emerges. Onion are a very common flavoring and ingredient for many savory dishes.
Evaporated milk is a condensed milk product, though different from sweetened condensed milk. The milk is cooked down until more than half of the water content evaporates. Because it has been heated the milk is safe for storing and can last a while on store shelves. The result is a creamy milk product, with a gentle milky flavor. Evaporated milk is often used in baking.
Crackers are a firm, dry and crunchy snack. They are made from a dry unyeasted dough, pressed into thin disks, oblongs and other shapes and baked until crunchy. The common cracker is plain, salty and sometimes buttery in flavor. They are eaten plain, with soups, spreads, meats, jam and cheese.
Vegetable oil is obtained by extracting oil from seeds. Types of vegetable oil include canola, sunflower, corn, and safflower. Light and with a neutral taste, vegetable oils are used to fry foods, or can be used to lightly coat meats and vegetables before roasting. Vegetable oils are also used as ingredients in salad dressings and sauces.
Aji amarillo paste is a spicy pepper paste made from hot yellow chilies and salt and is very popular in Peruvian cuisines. Amarillo is the Spanish word for yellow, hence the name which literally translates to yellow pepper. The peppers are blended into a thin paste with a golden yellow color that may border on orange. The flavor is hot and spicy with a hint of sweetness. A little bit goes a very long way to flavor grains, vegetables and proteins.
Garlic is used in cuisines around the world and is extremely popular for its depth of flavor. The garlic bulb forms underneath the soil and is harvested once it reaches maturity. The bulb typically has thin, dry, white and flaky skin, surrounding the individual cloves. Often there are 10-12 cloves to a bulb/head of garlic. The cloves are cream colored with a strong smell and flavor that is spicy and sharp. Garlic takes on a nutty flavor in addition, when cooked. It is used in countless dishes, sauces, breads and more.
Salt and pepper is a seasoning mix composed of these two ingredients. Black pepper has a cool and mildly spicy flavor. Salt brings out the flavor in food. This combination is a mix of grey/black and white granules. It is used on many savory dishes to boost the flavor.
