Anticuchos (Grilled Beef Heart Skewers)

Variations

• With steak instead: if heart is a step too far, marinate skirt or flank the same way. Peru sells that as anticucho de carne and the method is identical — the fat just gives you a slightly wider window.
• Chicken hearts: much smaller, almost nothing to trim, packed tightly onto the skewer, one minute a side. The same cut as hatsu in yakitori.
• Chilean and Bolivian versions: Chilean anticuchos mix beef, pork and sausage on one skewer, and Bolivian anticucho paceño comes with potato and a peanut sauce. Only the Peruvian one is heart exclusively.
• No ají panca: mix 2 tablespoons of chilli powder, 1 of paprika and 1 of vinegar into a paste. Ají panca is more smoky-fruity than hot, so a fine chilli powder gets closer than coarse flakes (chilli and heat, gochugaru).
• A corn husk brush: Lima's stalls baste with a brush made of tied corn husks. Nothing sheds into the food and it gets thrown away afterwards.
• How it differs from yakitori, souvlaki and kebab: those are all lean muscle meat; this is sold as offal but is actually muscle. So the grilling is the most similar thing on the site while the handling is completely different — the trimming takes ten times as long as the cooking.
• Against asado and nyama choma: all three are live-fire cooking, but those take large cuts slowly and this takes small pieces very fast. The presence or absence of fat is what makes that difference.
• What it is served with: the same table as ceviche or lomo saltado. Anticuchos are an evening thing in Peru, eaten standing at the cart.

Tips

• The trimming is half the dish. Five minutes of grilling, thirty minutes of knife work. The tough outer membrane, the white sinew inside, the valves and the fat all have to come out. None of that softens with heat, so anything you leave stays unchewable however well you cook it. A kilo becoming 700g is right.
• Heart does not taste like liver. This is the misconception that stops people cooking it. Liver and kidney are metabolic organs and carry that smell; heart is a muscle that spent its life contracting, so it is fine-grained and tastes like very concentrated beef.
• No fat means fast. A steak has intramuscular fat that melts and buys you a margin; heart has none. Two minutes a side, four or five total, and stop. A little past done does not come back (cooking meat and resting).
• The fire has to be fierce. With so little time on the grill, all the heat needed to colour the surface has to arrive within it. Over a moderate fire the inside is cooked through before any colour appears (grilling, browning).
• Four hours of vinegar, minimum. The acid loosens the texture and damps the metallic note. Overnight is the ceiling though — beyond a day the surface goes pale and cooked (what marinades do, vinegar).
• Keep basting. Oil stirred into the leftover marinade, brushed on at every turn, stops the surface drying and layers the flavour. There is no sugar in it, so it will not burn.
• Leave gaps on the skewer. Packed tight, the touching faces never cook, and grilling longer to fix that just dries the outside.
• Do not leave out the cumin. In Peruvian cooking cumin is not optional. With the oregano it sets the direction of this marinade; without it you have meat soaked in vinegar (cumin).
• Soak the skewers 30 minutes. Dry bamboo over a fierce fire burns through at the handle first.
• Slice leftovers thin. Re-grilling toughens them, so cold heart is better shaved into fried rice or a sandwich (reviving leftovers).