Inchicapi

The Peruvian Amazon's hen soup thickened with ground peanuts and maize flour, with yuca, and finished with a handful of sacha culantro

Origin: Iquitos & the Peruvian Amazon

From the journey of Peanut.

The name is Quechua and it is a recipe in itself. Inchi is the peanut, the word that also gives sacha inchi, the wild peanut of the forest, and api is a thick soup or porridge, as in the purple maize api of the highlands. Inchicapi is peanut soup: a farmyard hen simmered for its broth, thickened with raw peanuts ground to a paste and a little maize flour, with pieces of yuca cooked in it. The herb is sacha culantro. Sacha means wild or of the forest, and the name exists because of a confusion the rest of Peru created. On the coast and in the Andes, culantro means coriander, the Old World herb brought by the Spanish; so when the long saw-edged native leaf of the Amazon needed a name in Spanish, it became the wild culantro, to tell it from the cultivated one. It is stronger, holds its smell through the long simmering, and is the herb that tells a loretano the soup is from home. Inchicapi is Sunday and fiesta food around Iquitos and along the rivers, served with rice and plátano and a dish of ají charapita, the tiny round Amazonian chilli, on the side.

Ingredients

Broth

  • 1.5 kg boiling hen or chicken, jointed
  • 3 l water
  • 2 tsp salt

Soup

  • 200 g raw shelled peanuts, skins rubbed off
  • 2 tbsp vegetable oil
  • 1 red onion, finely chopped
  • 4 garlic cloves, crushed
  • 1 tsp ground cumin
  • 0.5 tsp ground turmeric (palillo)
  • 60 g fine maize flour
  • 500 g yuca (cassava), peeled and cut into chunks

To Finish

  • 20 g sacha culantro (culantro) leaves, chopped
  • 1 ají charapita or other hot chilli, to serve

Method

  1. Simmer the hen in the salted water for about an hour, skimming, until tender. Lift out the pieces and keep the broth.
  2. Toast the peanuts lightly in a dry pan, then grind them with a ladle of the broth to a smooth paste.
  3. Heat the oil and fry the onion, garlic, cumin, and turmeric for 5 minutes until soft.
  4. Add the fried aromatics and the peanut paste to the broth and bring back to a simmer, then whisk the maize flour with a little cold water and stir it in.
  5. Add the yuca and simmer for 20 to 25 minutes, until tender and the soup has thickened to the consistency of thin cream.
  6. Return the chicken pieces to heat through, stir in the sacha culantro, and serve with rice, boiled plantain, and ají charapita on the side.

Notes

Sacha culantro is culantro, sold as culantro, recao, or ngò gai outside Peru. Coriander is no substitute here; the soup is named for its herb as much as its peanuts in the minds of those who make it. Some cooks add a few leaves of sacha culantro to the broth at the beginning as well as at the end.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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Ingredient originTrade or transit route
Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control
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