Aji de Gallina de Rocoto

We recently posted a recipe for Aji de Gallina, a wonderful Peruvian chicken recipe which makes use of the aji amarillo pepper. In that post, however, we also said that the dish is wonderfully suited to showcasing different pepper flavors by simply using a different pepper in place of the aji amarillo. So just a few days ago, we tried it with a pepper we had not used in this dish before - the rocoto pepper.

You may remember that we first made use the rocoto pepper, which is also South American, in a Secret Ingredient Improv post, in which I used it to make a mango salsa. It's quite a hot pepper, actually, significantly hotter than the aji amarillo (which already doesn't mess around), so this version of aji de gallina was a bit overzealous. We used less of the rocoto here than we did of aji amarillo in our usual recipe, but it was still very spicy, and in the future, I would use less still. To maintain the color, however, one could add a touch of tomato paste or paprika (not too much, or either may dominate the flavor). Annatto would also work.

Despite it's excessive heat, I think the rocoto is a tasty pepper. It's sweet, and has a slight, pleasant bitterness like a citrus zest, but you'll really only notice that for a few seconds before the heat kicks in. Then it's hot, very hot. I think my initial use of this pepper in a mango salsa was a more appropriate dish for the rocoto, for though it's tasty, it's too hot to be the star of a dish.