Chuño

Chuño is a freeze-dried potato product traditionally made in the Andean highlands of Peru and Bolivia. Its main value lies in preserving potatoes for years without refrigeration.

History

Andean communities dried tubers to preserve them long before the Spanish arrived. The oldest evidence of its use is a Peruvian grinding stone that still held traces of ground chuño, and remains have also turned up at sites of the Tiwanaku culture, which flourished around Lake Titicaca. Colonial sources record it in the seventeenth century; the chronicler Bernabé Cobo lists it among the foods of Andean travellers, which suggests the practice continued for a long time.

Production depends on the weather. Small potatoes are spread on flat ground covered with straw and left through alternating night frosts and daytime sun for about three days. They are then trampled to remove the remaining water and skins, and the cycle continues for roughly twenty days. The process cuts the weight by at least 80 percent, which made transport and storage much easier. It takes place in June and July, when hard frosts are most reliable.

The basic process yields two varieties. Black chuño is sun-dried after trampling and turns dark through oxidation. White chuño, or tunta, is washed in river or lake water before drying, which gives it a paler colour and a milder flavour.

Culture

Chuño is a staple of Highland Indigenous food and appears in the cooking of Peru, Bolivia, northern Argentina, northern Chile and southern Ecuador. It is soaked in water for several hours before cooking, and its flour is an essential ingredient in dishes such as chairo, a traditional Bolivian soup, and chuño pasi. On the Peruvian coast it is used to make mazamorras, and in Argentina potato starch is used for dessert similar to flan.

Production is communal and still practised in rural villages, where whole families take part in trampling the potatoes. It also appears in popular culture: in Bolivia the word is used colloquially for a dog's snout, and the satirical character Chuñoman became popular on social media in 2020.