Picarones (Squash and Sweet-Potato Doughnuts)

Name: Picarones (Squash and Sweet-Potato Doughnuts)
Total time: 2 h 30 min
Yield: 6
Cuisine: Peruvian
Ingredients: 500 g Butternut or kabocha squash, peeled and cubed; 300 g Sweet potato, peeled and cubed; 1 tsp Aniseed; 1 Cinnamon stick; 450 g Plain flour; 2 tsp Instant yeast; 1 tbsp Sugar; 1 tsp Salt; 1.5 L Neutral oil, for deep-frying; 400 g Chancaca or dark muscovado sugar; 1 Orange, zest and juice; 3 Cloves; 400 ml Water, for the syrup

Squash and sweet potato boiled, mashed and raised with yeast into a slack, sticky batter, pulled into rings by hand straight over the oil, fried until lacquered and drowned in chancaca syrup scented with orange and cinnamon. The street dessert that follows anticuchos, sold from the same cart in the same evening.

Fonte

Ricetta di Peruvian criollo kitchens · 🏺 Tradizionale · Lima's home cooking — Spanish technique, Andean potatoes and chillies, and whatever the port brought in, cooked together for four hundred years.

Lima · the doughnut after the anticuchos — An ownerless traditional dessert, so no cook is credited. The cited article confirms picarones as a Peruvian dessert that originated in Lima during the viceroyalty, somewhat similar to buñuelos brought by Spanish conquistadors, with squash and sweet potato as its principal ingredients, served in a doughnut form covered with a syrup made from chancaca, and traditionally served when people prepare anticuchos. The yeast batter, the hand-shaping method, timings and quantities are this book's own.

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Guarda come si prepara · 3 video

kiwilimón recipes Sabroso elGourmet

⏱ 150 min🍽 6 porzioni🔥 340 kcal🇵🇪 Perù

VegetarianoVeganoSenza latticiniSenza frutta a guscio

Passaggi

Boil the squash and sweet potato with the aniseed and cinnamon stick until very soft, 20 minutes. Drain, keeping 250 ml of the cooking water. Discard the cinnamon, mash smooth and cool to lukewarm.
Mix the mash with the flour, yeast, sugar, salt and enough of the reserved water to make a very slack, sticky batter — looser than bread dough, closer to a thick porridge. Beat it hard by hand 5 minutes.
Cover and leave in a warm place 1½ hours until doubled and full of bubbles.
Syrup: simmer the chancaca, water, orange zest and juice, cloves and the rest of the cinnamon 25 minutes until it coats a spoon. Strain and keep warm.
Heat the oil to 180 °C. Wet one hand, take a handful of batter, squeeze a ball out between thumb and forefinger, poke a hole through it with your other thumb and stretch it into a ring straight into the oil. Fry 2 minutes a side until deep amber.
💡 Wet hands, and shape over the pan. This batter will not survive being rolled on a bench or cut with a cutter — the ring is pulled in the air and dropped.
Drain briefly, stack two or three per plate and pour the warm syrup over generously. Eat hot.

💡 Consigli

The rings are never perfect circles and are not supposed to be — a picarón with a wobble and a tail is the sign of a hand, not a mould.
The batter can rest in the fridge overnight after rising and fries better cold — it holds the ring longer.