Llajwa - Weekend Herb Blogging
Buenos Aires - Salsa Llajwa is sometimes known as the Bolivian National Hot Sauce. I first encountered it at a restaurant in Palermo, and it was so delicious that I’d asked the manager of the restaurant what was in it. He described it as containing the Peruvian herb huacatay and the Bolivian herb quirquiña, blended with rocoto peppers and oven dried tomatoes. I’ve spent a bit of time looking for recipes, figuring one of these days, like yesterday (see last post), I’d make it out to Liniers and possibly be able to find the key ingredients. Although he didn’t mention it, every recipe I saw included either onion or garlic, so I added in a shallot. Recipes varied wildly, using various herbs, generally on the aromatic side, but from coriander to mint to parsley, and the peppers varied as well - from just rocoto to rocoto and much hotter pepper combos, to others.
Huacatay is referred to by some as Amazon Black Mint, and it has a pungent aroma, sort of a like spearmint; and others insist that it is a variety of the Mexican herb epazote - it doesn’t look at all like the epazote I used to get in New York at the Mexican markets, which had longer, arrowhead shaped jagged leaves, and it has a much more intense flavor. Other names for this are Chiquilla, Chinchilla, and Zuico. I’ve seen both the scientific name Tagetes minuta, and also Pazote chenopodium ambrosioides, which between them come back to a variety of different English names, including muster John Henry, Stinking Roger, Mexican Marigold, Hedionda Grass, Sagrada Grass, and Tall Khaki Weed. Searching for various photos online, some of these look the similar, some don’t. Such is the world of plant names, however I’m leaning more towards the non-epazote camp and something in the mint-ish world. [Edit: further research says that the non-epazote/tagetes minuta camp is the correct one.] It is a common ingredient in Peruvian cooking especially, and is the key herb in both ají de huacatay (not surprising), a spicy hot sauce from the Arequipa area, and in the sauce for ocopa, one of my favorite potato dishes.
Quirquiña, or Bolivian coriander, (also called quilquiña or killi), is a vibrant green herb found throughout Bolivia. It has an aroma and flavor that is similar to coriander, but with a touch of bitterness (Wikipedia describes it as a cross between coriander, arugula, and rue). Scientific name Porophyllum ruderale, which puts it in the Aster family, as an annual herb. In different parts of the globe it is known as Pápalo, Papaloquilitl, Tapakuelo, Yiwa ndusú, Yiwa pápalo and many others. Obviously, it looks nothing like coriander, and even the flavor is different enough that it’s clearly not related, merely possessing similar aromatics.
I’d remembered the sauce as having a brownish color to it, which, given the bright green of the various ingredients, seemed unlikely, though the tomato red might have managed. I also remembered a very smoky flavor, and attribute that to the oven drying process that the restaurant manager had mentioned. Although all the recipes I’ve found call for this to be an uncooked, fresh herbal sauce, I decided on a compromise to try to get the effect that I wanted. So, I cooked the shallot and some sun-dried tomatoes (they’re what I had) in oil until they were all lightly golden, then poured the hot oil mixture over the fresh herbs and rocoto pepper and immediately blended them. This took a lot of the edge off of the shallots, the herbs, and the hot peppers, and gave me the smoky flavor I was looking for. If you don’t have access to these herbs, I’m not sure what to suggest - but given the references, the closest substitutes might be to give a shot with coriander cilantro and spearmint, it might just work - after all, both match well with hot peppers in salsas!
Salsa Llajwa
1 cup of good olive oil
1 cup of sun-dried tomatoes
1 coarsely chopped shallotHeat these three ingredients together until the oil just starts to bubble, then reduce the heat to minimum and cook slowly, stirring regularly, until the shallots are lightly browned and the tomatoes have reconstituted and taken on a touch of toastiness.
1 packed cup of huacatay leaves
1 packed cup of quirquiña leaves
2 seeded rocoto peppers
1 tablespoon of coarse saltPut these ingredients into your blender or food processor. When the oil mixture is ready, pour it directly onto the herbs and blend immediately.
If you need to add a touch more oil to smooth this out to a consistency you like, feel free, but you don’t want this runny. Makes about a cup and a half of sauce, which will keep well in the refrigerator and can also be frozen - like you won’t finish it off within 2-3 days!
This sauce can be used on a variety of things where you want a nice, herbal and spicy sauce. I’m especially fond of it on crustacea - shrimp approach perfection tossed with or dipped into this. It also works well on fish, chicken, and even veal.
March 2nd, 2006 at 11:04 pm
Dan,
I am second to no one in my adoration of delicious hot sauce and I’d love to make this recipe. But my local supermarket is fresh out of quirquiña and huacatay leaves and may not get more for a little while. Like five years. Are there any substitutes possible?
March 2nd, 2006 at 11:26 pm
What a great post for Weekend Herb Blogging. I’ve never heard of either of these herbs before.
March 3rd, 2006 at 7:47 am
Now Ken, you’ve got to start reading thoroughly. The last paragraph before the recipe I suggested substitutes, really just for people who live in god-forsaken places like Massachusetts, where markets don’t carry fresh quirquña and huacatay? It’s heresy I tell you, heresy!
March 3rd, 2006 at 4:27 pm
That looks good, I’ll have to try it. IF I can find the herbs. I have like 100 packets of dried locoto “en polvo” that someone gave me from Bolivia. Hardly has any taste. Like a milder version of cayenne. Good for soups, sauces, and marinades though. Llajwa recipe on the back says grate 2 or more tomatoes. Add locoto powder to taste. Season with salt, minced onion, and quilquiña. Just need to get my hands on quilquiña. Maybe I can score some seeds and grow it myself.
March 3rd, 2006 at 4:56 pm
Asadoarg, aren’t you in Argentina? If so, it shouldn’t be hard to find either herb, there are enough pockets of Andean communities around. And if not, depending on where you are, there might be a source of Peruvian or Bolivian products somewhere near to you? Maybe if there’s a restaurant of either type near to you you could ask them. Also, powdered rocoto/locoto is no substitute for the fresh peppers!
Beyond that, if you just want to try the sauce (though, of course, not as good as my version…), or any of lots of other Peruvian products (for example, they have pureed rocoto and pureed huacatay, ready to use - though I didn’t see quirquiña), you can check out: Peru Cooking: Pricelist
March 3rd, 2006 at 6:20 pm
I’m down in Rio Grande, btw. Amazingly, there are some Bolivans here and “supposedly”, from what someone told me, there is a little store in Ushuaia that has Bolivian/Northwest Argentina products.
Definitely agree on the fresh peppers. I live by them. Same person who gave me the powder gave me some fresh ones, well not really fresh. A bit blemished and when I cut them open the seeds were all black. Was hoping for the seeds to be alright so I could at least grow them but no such luck. Thankfully a supermarket here sells a bunch of jalapeños and cilantro so I can make due with a pseudo-llajwa, cough Mexican-type salsa. Speaking of cilantro, when I lived in Buenos Aires, it was quite a challenge to find. Jumbo would sell like a few sprouts in a container for $3 pesos. Here the supermarket sells them by the bunch for almost half the price. Probably due to the amount of Chileans here and their love for pebre.
March 3rd, 2006 at 6:35 pm
The seeds in rocotos should be black, so that’s normal. If they’ve been refrigerated, that’s probably why they didn’t grow, who knows?
These days, cilantro is readily available here.
March 4th, 2006 at 1:28 am
Cool post. Never hear of any of these herbs before. Very enlightening.
Paz
March 9th, 2006 at 8:59 am
[…] All of which leads us to last night. Friends Tuomas and Alfredo are in town visiting from Finland. I had made a couple of more sauces from the herbs I talked about last weekend, the huacatay and quirquiña, plus still have plenty of salsa llajwa left over. So we invited them over for dinner, and I decided to start in with just a simple two course meal (plus a bought dessert, horror of horrors - no really, it’s hard to justify baking when there’s a patisserie on the corner that makes amazing tarts for 10-12 pesos apiece). So, I started thinking and hit the markets. I’d mentioned that the salsa works beautifully with shrimp, but frozen shrimp at 140 pesos per kilo (just over $21 a pound) were just not going to fit the bill. In fact, no one seemed to have any non-frozen crustacea yesterday, so I finally picked up some small scallops, which were only reasonably priced by comparison at 80 pesos per kilo ($12 a pound), so I picked up a quarter kilo, or just over half a pound. I tossed these with a bit of the salsa llajwa, and put them in a baking dish with some sun-dried tomatoes that had been soaked for a bit in water to plump up, and some sliced tomatillos. The whole thing then went in the oven, covered with foil, until the tomatillos were cooked through and the tomatoes and scallops had stewed together for a bit. […]
April 16th, 2006 at 9:24 am
[…] 1 rocoto pepper 1 hot chile pepper 1 cup of huacatay leaves olive oil salt […]
July 31st, 2006 at 4:50 pm
[…] Round two was a double serving of potatoes. Two classic dishes, which I’ve mentioned many times before, are Papas a la Huancaina and Ocopa. They both start from the same base mixture - a large handful of saltine crackers soaked in milk, some type of fresh, creamy cheese (Henry likes Port Salut, though I understand that something more like ricotta or farmer’s cheese is far more traditional). After the crackers are nice and mushy, they get turned into one of the two sauces, or, in our case last night, both. The Huancaina is the simpler of the two, a mere blending of the base mixture with ají panca amarilla. These peppers aren’t available fresh here, so we buy them dried and then reconstitute them in a little boiling water. We started by blending in just the flesh, along with a little powdered ají amarilla as well, mostly for color (the dried peppers turn a fairly dull yellow-orange, whereas the fresh, and the powder, are a vivid yellow), and then added salt and some of the seeds and veins from the boiled peppers to get a little bit of spiciness into it. The Ocopa requires several ingredients - a small amount of the same peppers, nuts (we used toasted pecans, though apparently peanuts are the most traditional, with walnuts being a close second - pecans are apparently “special”), cilantro, and a whole lot of huacatay, or Amazon Black Mint. Traditional toppings are hard-boiled eggs and black olives. […]
August 10th, 2006 at 3:35 pm
[…] A few weeks ago one of our local food writers reviewed a new Japanese restaurant located just off the main strip in Barrio Chino. One of the assertions made was “Para empezar debo decir que probé las gyosas mejores de mi vida, sin exagerar.”, or, “To start I have to say that I tried the best gyozas in my life, without exaggeration.” At a later juncture, she also asserts that some of the sushi tried is, in essence, invented on site and not available anywhere else (an example given is salmon with mango and avocado, available from almost any sushi bar here I can think of). On the other hand, this same columnist recently wrote up one of our favorite Peruvian restaurants, Zadvarie, claiming that it is the only place in town offering ocopa arequipeña because they have the only source of huacatay herb in town through a store in Barrio Chino. We eat the dish regularly at other restaurants (and it’s better at some and not as good at others), and as regular readers here know, I buy huacatay in the markets in Liniers by the bagful for mere pesos. […]
March 12th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
[…] color and a nice glow when egg washed and baked. We served these up with some freshly made Salsa Llajwa - with some modifications - I used fresh tomatoes which had been peeled and seeded, so just the […]