Picarones: Sweet Potato Doughnuts
Picarones — street-sold rings of sweet potato and squash dough, fried and served with chancaca (raw cane sugar) syrup flavoured with fig and orange — are the Peruvian transformation of the Spanish buñuelo (fried dough) using indigenous Andean ingredients. The sweet potato's natural sugars and the squash's moisture produce a dough that fries to an extraordinary lightness despite its density at room temperature.
- **Sweet potato and squash:** Cooked together and mashed smooth — the combination of sweet potato's sweetness and squash's moisture produces the specific dough character. - **The dough:** Mashed sweet potato/squash + flour + active dry yeast + anise seeds. The yeast produces CO₂ that aerates the fried picarones. [VERIFY] Acurio's specific dough recipe. - **The shaping:** Wet hands form a ring shape — wet to prevent sticking to the dough's slightly tacky surface. - **Chancaca syrup:** Raw brown sugar (chancaca, similar to piloncillo) dissolved with cinnamon, cloves, orange peel, and fig — simmered to a thin syrup consistency.
Peru