Chef Fernando Arias introduces a plate of fruit with boisterous enthusiasm. I’ve signed up for his four-hour Full Immersion class at Cusco’s Marcelo Batata Cooking School, hoping to learn a few tips and look under the hood of Peru’s culinary success. The fruit platter consists of mango, starfruit, gooseberry, custard apple, passion fruit, and papaya, all locally grown and in season. Peru has 84 of the world’s 103 ecosystems, representing a diversity of tropical jungle, Pacific desert, Andean highlands and dry forests. Indigenous Quechua and Aymara people learned to take advantage of these wild swings in climate, elevation, and soil. They crossbred and cultivated native vegetables and fruits that we now take for granted, such as potatoes, tomatoes, avocados, guavas, gooseberries, and sweet potatoes.

Inca farmers later built on generations of knowledge to construct striking terraces with underground irrigation, harnessing microclimates to grow a wide variety of grains, legumes, starches, and fruit. Through centuries of selective breeding, they domesticated thousands of varieties of potato — a plant with poisonous, natural toxins – along with hundreds of varieties of corn. Both continue to be harvested in shapes, textures and colours unfamiliar to Canadian veggie stands.

Fernando explains how papaya is used to soften and marinate meat, and how every Peruvian family has a recipe for aji amarillo. We get to work on our ceviche, dicing and slicing fresh trout along with red peppers, toasted corn, cilantro, sweet potato, and chilli. Peru has the second-largest Japanese diaspora in South America after Brazil, and it was Japanese immigrants who first introduced the idea of marinating fish and vegetables in spoon-scooped lime juice for just five to seven minutes. Evaporated milk is added to the marinade for extra creaminess, resulting in mouth-watering ‘Tiger Milk’ which Peruvians drink on its own as a restorative elixir. 

Chef Fernando now gets into pisco, explaining how the spirit is produced and how to sniff it, taste it, and prepare Peru’s signature cocktail, the pisco sour. 

“I really like my job,” says Fernando, shaking up a pisco sour and adding three vital drops of aromatic bitters.

Then it’s back into the kitchen to fry up the lomo saltado. He adds some pisco to the pan for good measure, resulting in a dramatic flame. As with the best cooking classes, I leave the kitchen more knowledgeable, well-fed, and inspired to tackle a few new dishes on my own. I ask Chef Fernando why Peruvian cuisine is having such a moment. Is it the diversity of fresh ingredients? The history? Perhaps the creative fusion of cultures? 

“No,” he says. “It’s because we love our food, and food made with love is the best food you can have.”