Ulluco ✦

Ulluque

What it is

Andean cooks know it as olluco or melloco, and it has one property no European tuber shares: the flesh is mucilaginous rather than starchy, so it stays crunchy through cooking and never goes floury. The skins come yellow, rose and magenta, and all of them fade toward yellow in the pan.

In the kitchen

Do not peel and do not boil long: scrub it, slice it into matchsticks and give it three or four minutes at most, or the mucilage turns slippery rather than crisp. You are buying texture, not starch — it will never thicken a stew.

Goes with

Chili pepper Potato Onion Cilantro / Coriander Lime Garlic Ají amarillo

Also used with

Mashua

In season alongside

Blue foot mushroom Celeriac Escarole Lotus root Miner's lettuce Nagaimo (Chinese yam)

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