The Aji Amarillo is, in my honest opinion, the most underrated chili in the Southern Hemisphere. Peruvian cooks have known about it for centuries — it’s the flavour base of huancaina sauce, of ceviche, of about half the things you’d order at a good cevicheria. But ask the average Australian shopper where to find one and you’ll get a blank stare. They’re not at Coles. They’re rarely at the markets unless you know which stall to ask.

I grow about a dozen Aji Amarillo plants every year specifically so I can make paste in May and June, when the pods ripen properly in Sydney’s tail-end-of-autumn light. This week I made a six-month batch. Here’s how I do it.

What you’re actually making

Aji Amarillo paste is not chili paste in the sambal sense. It’s not a fermented product. It’s not aggressively hot — these pods sit around 30,000 to 50,000 on the Scoville scale, similar to a cayenne, but with a completely different flavour profile. The pod itself is a bright marigold-orange when ripe, around 12cm long, slightly wrinkled, with a fruity flavour the locals describe as having notes of mango and passionfruit. That description is accurate, by the way. I rolled my eyes the first time I read it and then I tasted my first ripe pod and went “ah, alright then.”

The paste is essentially: fresh pods, deveined and peeled, blanched, blended with a neutral oil. That’s it. No vinegar, no preservatives, no garlic. Garlic goes in when you cook with it, not when you make the paste, because the paste is a base ingredient, not a sauce. There’s a long thread about this on South American cooking traditions if you want the cultural background.

The peeling question

This is where most home cooks give up. Aji Amarillo skins are tough and slightly bitter, and traditional Peruvian cooks always remove them. The textbook method involves three rounds of blanching: bring water to the boil, dunk pods for 30 seconds, plunge into ice water, repeat twice more. By the third round the skins slip off if you pinch them.

It works. It’s also a pain. I’ve cut it down to two blanches and the paste still tastes good, especially if I’m planning to cook with it rather than serving it raw in a sauce like huancaina where the bitterness would come through more.

My method:

1. Harvest when pods are fully golden-orange, slightly soft to the touch. Underripe Amarillos are green-yellow and harsh.
2. Slit lengthwise, remove seeds and the white pith. The pith holds most of the bitterness and a fair bit of the heat. Some Peruvian cooks leave a little pith for heat; I take it all out and add cayenne separately if I need more punch.
3. Blanch. Boil water in a large pot. Drop in the pods for 30 seconds. Lift them out with a slotted spoon into a bowl of ice water. Repeat. After the second round, pinch a skin — it should come off easily.
4. Peel. This takes a while. Put a podcast on. Each pod takes maybe 30 seconds.
5. Blend. Combine peeled flesh with a neutral oil — I use a light olive oil or sometimes rice bran oil — at roughly 4:1 flesh to oil. Blend until smooth. Some cooks add a splash of water if the paste seizes up.
6. Store. I freeze in ice cube trays, then transfer the cubes to a labelled bag. Each cube is roughly a tablespoon, which is the dose for most recipes.

What to actually do with it

This is the fun part. A spoonful goes into:

Huancaina sauce — blend Aji Amarillo paste with queso fresco (or a mild feta), evaporated milk, a few saltines, and salt. Pour over boiled potatoes. The classic Peruvian appetiser, and it’s miraculous on a cold Sydney winter night.

Ceviche tigre’s milk — the marinade where lime juice “cooks” the fish. Aji Amarillo paste, lime, salt, a touch of garlic, blended with a piece of the fish itself. Strain, pour over diced raw fish, sliced red onion, coriander. Ten minutes later you have ceviche.

Lomo saltado — Peru’s stir-fried beef dish. Half a teaspoon of Aji Amarillo paste in with the soy sauce and vinegar adds the floral note that distinguishes it from a generic stir-fry.

Roast chicken marinade — paste, oil, salt, cumin, garlic. Slather a chicken inside and out, leave for 24 hours, roast. Whole-roast result is the colour of marigolds and tastes nothing like a normal roast chook.

Substitutions when you can’t find fresh

If you’re reading this in regional Australia and you can’t grow your own, dried Aji Amarillo (sometimes labelled “ají mirasol”) is available from specialty importers — there’s a few on the Sydney Markets list of registered traders. Soak the dried pods in warm water for an hour, then proceed from step 3. The flavour is more raisin-like and less fruity than fresh, but it’s a fair stand-in.

Habanero is not a substitute. It’s far hotter, and the flavour goes citrus-floral in a different direction. Cayenne is also not a substitute — wrong colour, wrong flavour. If you absolutely have to fake it, a yellow Hungarian wax pepper roasted and blended with a pinch of turmeric for colour gets you about 60% of the way there.

A final thought

The reason I make this every year, and the reason I keep planting these particular seeds, is that the paste tastes like nothing else in the kitchen. It’s distinctly South American, distinctly bright, and one cube turns a regular weeknight dinner into something specific. Worth the peeling.

Marco