Lomo Saltado

Peru's wok-seared beef with red onion, tomato and ají amarillo, splashed with soy and vinegar and served over chips and rice at once

Origin: Lima & the Peruvian Coast

From the journey of Soy.

Lomo saltado is the emblem of chifa, the Chinese-Peruvian cooking that grew out of the arrival of roughly a hundred thousand Chinese indentured labourers, mostly Cantonese, between 1849 and 1874. When their contracts ended a great many settled in Lima and opened eating houses, and what emerged was neither Chinese nor Peruvian but a genuine third thing: Cantonese technique and seasonings applied to Peruvian ingredients. Everything about the dish is that collision. The method is a wok stir-fry over ferocious heat, the seasoning is sillao, soy sauce, which is what the word chifa itself derives from in one etymology; but the aromatics are red onion cut in thick wedges, tomato in wedges, and ají amarillo, and the whole thing is served over both chips and white rice, which is a double starch no Chinese kitchen would countenance and no Peruvian one questions. The chips are inside the dish rather than beside it. They are fried separately, tossed into the pan at the very last moment, and served immediately, so that some stay crisp and some take up the sauce. Leaving them to sit is the one way to ruin it, and Peruvian cooks plate lomo saltado the instant the pan comes off the heat. The soy sauce is not a garnish or a modern addition but the seasoning the dish is built on, and it demonstrates something the atlas is fond of: an East Asian ferment arriving on the Pacific coast of South America by way of a labour system, and becoming, within a couple of generations, part of the national cooking of the country it arrived in.

Ingredients

Beef

  • 600 g beef sirloin or rump, in thick strips
  • 2 tsp salt
  • 1 tsp coarsely ground black pepper
  • 1 tsp ground cumin

Chips

  • 800 g floury potatoes, cut into chips
  • 1 litre neutral oil, for frying

Stir-fry

  • 2 red onions, cut into thick wedges
  • 3 tomatoes, cut into thick wedges and deseeded
  • 2 ají amarillo, deseeded and sliced, or 2 tbsp ají amarillo paste
  • 6 garlic cloves, finely chopped
  • 3 tbsp neutral oil, for the pan

Sauce

  • 4 tbsp soy sauce
  • 3 tbsp red wine vinegar
  • 2 tbsp oyster sauce

To finish

  • 1 large handful coriander, chopped

To serve

  • 400 g white rice, cooked, to serve

Method

  1. Season the beef strips with the salt, pepper, and cumin and leave them at room temperature for twenty minutes.
  2. Dry the beef thoroughly on paper before it goes into the pan. Wet beef steams and greys instead of searing, and the sear is the dish.
  3. Fry the chips in the oil at 150°C for six minutes until cooked but pale, drain them, then fry again at 190°C for three minutes until crisp. Salt and keep hot.
  4. Get a wok or a heavy frying pan as hot as it will go with the 3 tbsp of oil.
  5. Sear the beef in two batches for ninety seconds each, without moving it for the first minute, then tip it onto a plate.
  6. Work in batches. A crowded pan drops in temperature and the whole thing stews.
  7. Add the onion wedges to the pan and sear them hard for a minute, so they blacken at the edges but stay crunchy in the middle.
  8. Add the garlic and the ají amarillo for thirty seconds, then the tomato wedges for a further minute.
  9. The vegetables want a minute or two at most. Onion that has gone soft and tomato that has collapsed both mean the pan was not hot enough.
  10. Return the beef with its juices, pour in the soy, vinegar, and oyster sauce, and let it hiss and reduce for thirty seconds.
  11. Tip in the hot chips, toss twice, and take the pan off the heat immediately.
  12. Scatter the coriander over and serve at once, with white rice on the side of the same plate.

Notes

Everything must be prepared before the pan is lit, since the cooking takes under five minutes from start to finish. The pan cannot be too hot and must not be crowded. Dry the beef. The onion and tomato are cut in wedges, not slices, and should stay in pieces with some bite. The chips go in last and the plate goes out at once; lomo saltado does not wait and does not reheat. Ají amarillo paste from a Latin American grocer is a fair substitute for the fresh chilli.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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