Peruvian Ingredients That Belong in a Cacao Cup
The cacao in your cup comes from the eastern highlands of Peru. So does lucuma, and maca, and sacha inchi, and camu camu, and algarrobo. There is a whole shelf of Andean and Amazonian ingredients that grow in the same country as Chuncho cacao, and most of them pair with it far better than anything imported.
This is a guide to five of them — what they actually taste like, in what quantity, and which are worth your money.
Lucuma
Pouteria lucuma is a subtropical fruit grown through the Peruvian valleys, with dry, dense, deep-yellow flesh. Fresh, it is barely juicy at all — closer in texture to a cooked sweet potato than to a mango. Almost all of it that leaves Peru leaves as powder, dried and milled.
The flavour is the reason it belongs in a cacao cup: maple, butterscotch, a little sweet potato, and a distinct caramel note. It is genuinely caramel-like without any caramelisation having occurred, and it is subtle rather than loud.
Part of that caramel impression comes from maltol, an aromatic compound also produced when sugars are browned. Maltol has a useful property beyond its own smell — it increases perceived sweetness, so a spoonful of lucuma makes a cup taste sweeter than the sugar in it would suggest.
Use 5 to 8 g per cup, which is roughly a heaped teaspoon. It is mild, so under-dosing does nothing; this is one where you can be generous. In Peru it is the default ice cream flavour, in the way vanilla is elsewhere.
Maca
Lepidium meyenii is a root vegetable in the brassica family — a relative of turnip and mustard — grown high on the Andean plateau, generally above 4,000 metres. That altitude is not marketing; it genuinely will not grow well low down.
It is the one on this list most likely to disappoint you if nobody warns you first, because it does not taste sweet or pleasant. It is earthy, nutty, and distinctly cruciferous, with a butterscotch edge underneath. In too large a quantity in a cacao drink it reads as raw vegetable.
Two things to know. First, gelatinised maca — heat-treated to break down the starch — is milder, easier to digest, and dissolves better than raw powder. It is worth the difference in price. Second, maca comes in yellow, red, and black. Yellow is the most common and the mildest; black is the earthiest.
Start at 3 g per cup. Lucuma covers maca's rough edges better than anything else here, which is why the two turn up together so often.
Camu camu
Myrciaria dubia is an Amazonian riverside fruit, and it is startlingly sour — it is among the most vitamin-C-dense fruits known, and you can taste that immediately.
Which makes it a poor choice for a cacao cup as a flavour, and an excellent one as a tool. Acidity in a very small amount lifts a heavy drink and makes the fruit notes in the cacao more legible. A quarter teaspoon, no more, at the end.
Overdo it and the cup turns sharp and the cacao goes harsh — the same problem acidic fruit causes in any cacao preparation. Treat it like lemon juice rather than like a powder you scoop.
Sacha inchi
Plukenetia volubilis, sometimes called the Inca peanut, is a star-shaped seed pod from the Amazon basin. The roasted seeds taste like a cross between a peanut and a pumpkin seed, and the oil is notably high in alpha-linolenic acid.
In a drink it is best as texture rather than flavour. Ground into a paste it emulsifies well and adds body, in the way a nut butter would. It also brings a green, grassy note that not everyone likes — taste it alone before committing it to a cup.
The oil goes rancid faster than most because of its unsaturated profile. Buy small, keep it cold, and smell it before use.
Algarrobo
The least known of these outside Peru and the one most worth trying. Algarrobo is a syrup made from the pods of the Peruvian carob tree, Prosopis pallida, boiled down into a dark, thick molasses.
It tastes of molasses, dates, and a little malt, with a mineral bitterness underneath that keeps it from being cloying. As a sweetener for cacao it is considerably more interesting than sugar and rather less assertive than blackstrap molasses.
Use a teaspoon. It is dark and it will deepen the colour of the drink noticeably.
Building a tasting cup
The point of a tasting cup, as distinct from a comparison flight, is to sit with one drink and understand what each element contributes. Build it in stages and taste at every stage.
- Start with 14 g of ceremonial cacao in 240 ml of water at 75°C. Whisk smooth. Taste it. This is your baseline and you should be able to describe it before adding anything.
- Add a pinch of salt. Taste again. The bitterness should recede and fruit should come forward.
- Add 6 g of lucuma. Taste. Caramel and body, and the cup will read sweeter without being sweeter.
- Add 3 g of gelatinised maca. Taste. Earth and depth underneath.
- Finish with a teaspoon of algarrobo if you want it sweeter, or a very small pinch of camu camu if it feels heavy and needs lifting.
Doing it in this order, tasting each time, teaches you more in one cup than a finished recipe teaches you in ten. You will also find out which of these you actually like, which is not predictable from descriptions.
Where to buy, and what to check
These are all sold widely now, and quality varies enormously.
For lucuma and maca, check that the ingredients list is the single ingredient. Blends cut with rice flour or maltodextrin are common and the powder should be one thing. For maca, look for gelatinised unless you specifically want raw. For camu camu, the powder should be pale pink to beige — a very white powder suggests it has been cut. For algarrobo, the ingredients should read as carob pod extract and nothing else.
Freshness matters more than with dried spices, because these are milled fruit and root rather than aromatic seed. Buy in quantities you will finish in a few months.
The baseline for all of this is a cacao worth building on. Our pure ground Chuncho cacao comes from the same highlands as most of these ingredients, and the background on why that region produces what it does is in our piece on Peruvian ceremonial cacao.
