A Journey Into Latin American Cuisine via My Backyard Garden


Aji Dulce and Aji Amarillo peppers in Wissahickon Park in Philadelphia

 

In my fall garden this year, I’ve had a bumper crop of aji dulce and aji amarillo peppers–at least a couple hundred of them, from just a couple of plants. They spent the summer branching out 4 to 5 feet in every direction while showing no interest in fruiting. I had penciled them in as total failures, but they were just late bloomers. By September, the outstretched branches were laden with little green peppers. By October they had begun to reveal their fully ripe colors: glistening orange and red for the aji dulces, and for the aji amarillos, luminescent yellow.

I hadn’t bothered to look up what kind of peppers I had on my hands until then. The seedlings were leftovers from my community garden’s City Harvest plot, and I ended up with them simply because I happened to have an empty space in my garden bed.

It turned out that the two pepper plants had quite an interesting story to tell, which didn’t surprise me, given the City Harvest connection. Aji amarillo peppers are a keystone ingredient in the cuisine of Peru and aji dulces are integral to the cuisine of parts of the Caribbean region including Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba.

As the harvest from my plants rolled in through October into November, they drew me into an exploration of the intriguing and distinctive cuisines of those regions. I’ve put my unexpected harvest of Latin American peppers to good use in, among other things, sofrito and pique from Puerto Rico, and a cheesy, Peruvian pepper sauce. (See link to recipe pages below.)

Mine was just the sort of culinary discovery that the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s City Harvest program aims to spark, judging from my interview several years ago with Sharat Somashekara, a City Harvest food crop specialist at the time, who was involved in selecting the varieties to include among the 200,000 or so seedlings propagated each year. They are distributed to over one hundred community gardens scattered around the city, including mine in the Roxborough neighborhood of Philadelphia. PHS gives us seedlings to plant in several plots we’ve set aside for the program, along with other supplies and support, and we hand-deliver a weekly harvest to a local food bank. One of the fringe benefits is that seedlings left over are free for gardeners to plant in their own plots.

pique

Each distribution always includes dozens of different varieties, ranging from the conventional to the exotic. Thus, among the tomato seedlings delivered in May, there will be dependable but unexciting Early Girls and Better Boys along with the likes of Hillybilly potato leaf and sunshine bumblebee tomatoes.

Somashekara explained the thinking behind the selections. “We are trying to get people things that they are accustomed to eating, but we are also pushing the boundaries a little bit,” he told me. “People who like spinach, well, we will try to turn them on to Swiss chard. If they like collards, we will try to turn them on to bok choy or stuff like that. … We are trying to give people what they like, but we are also trying to expose people to new things.”

It’s an approach that works, Somashekara insisted, citing kale as a case in point. City Harvest began including it in seed distributions before it became all the rage. “We have seen that the demand for transplants of kale relative to say broccoli or collards has gone up tremendously over the years. Kale is almost ubiquitous now.”

Aji Amarillo (left) and Aji Dulce

It has been a good bet for me for the past several years to snap up the stragglers left behind after our City Harvest plots have been planted and other gardeners have taken their pick of the rest. I’ve been delighted and surprised by the last ones to go—the oddball varieties that have been passed over by everyone else.

Among the peppers, last year I ended up with a leftover fish pepper plant, which produced a prolific harvest in the fall, and introduced me to the Philadelphia local Truelove Seed company and its African diaspora collection, which includes heirloom varieties passed down through many generations of African American gardeners. The aji dulce and aji amarillo peppers I’ve grown this year have been equally revelatory.

Check out how I’ve put my bumper crop of the peppers to use:

AJI DULCE RECIPES

AJI AMARILLO RECIPES