Huacatay (Peruvian black mint) ✦

Huacatay (tagète des Andes)

What it is

Huacatay is a marigold, not a mint, and its essential oil is distilled commercially as tagetes oil for perfumery — the plant that flavours ocopa turns up in fine fragrance. Outside the Andes it has a reputation of another kind entirely: naturalised across Africa and Australia as a roadside weed called stinking roger, where nobody eats it at all.

In the kitchen

Start at a teaspoon of paste per 250 ml of sauce and correct with more chilli and nuts, never with water — thinned down, huacatay turns soapy rather than milder. Stir it into an ocopa at the end, off the heat, so the tarry top notes survive.

Goes with

Peanut Ají amarillo Potato Egg Olive Garlic Corn

Same species

Lemon tagetes

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