Name: Anticuchos (Grilled Beef Heart Skewers)
Prep time: 40 min
Cook time: 25 min
Total time: 1 h 5 min
Yield: 4 servings
Cuisine: Peruvian
Ingredients: 1 kg beef heart; 4 tbsp ají panca paste; 100 ml red wine vinegar; 6 cloves garlic; 1 tbsp ground cumin; 1 tbsp dried oregano; 2 tsp salt; 1 tsp black pepper; 3 tbsp oil; 2 corn on the cob; 4 potatoes; 2 tbsp ají amarillo paste; 3 tbsp mayonnaise; 1 tbsp lime juice; 12 bamboo skewers

Ingredients

4servings

Meat and marinade (serves 4)
beef heart · about 700g once trimmed1 kg
ají panca paste · substitutes in the tips4 tbsp
red wine vinegar100 ml
garlic · finely chopped6 cloves
ground cumin1 tbsp
dried oregano1 tbsp
salt2 tsp
black pepper1 tsp
oil · for basting on the grill3 tbsp
To serve
corn on the cob · Peruvian choclo; sweetcorn substitutes2
potatoes · medium, boiled in their skins4
Ají sauce
ají amarillo paste2 tbsp
mayonnaise3 tbsp
lime juice1 tbsp
Equipment
bamboo skewers · soaked 30 minutes12

Steps

Trim the heart. Lift the tough outer membrane away with the tip of a knife, then cut out every bit of the white sinew, the valves and the attached fat. Ending up with about 700g from a kilo is correct. Skimp here and you are left with pieces that no amount of grilling will make chewable. Cut across the grain into 3-4cm pieces.
Mix the ají panca, vinegar, garlic, cumin, oregano, salt and pepper and work it into the meat by hand. Cover and refrigerate 2 hours; in Peru it often sits overnight. The vinegar is there for flavour: it damps down the metallic note heart can carry. It does not tenderise. The tenderness comes from the trimming in step 1 and the short cook.
⏲ 120 min
Boil the corn and potatoes in salted water for 20 minutes. Cook the potatoes in their skins and peel them once the steam has gone. Do this just before grilling: the meat takes so little time that there is no room to prepare anything afterwards.
⏲ 20 min
Thread 3-4 pieces onto each soaked skewer. Do not pack them tight — gaps let heat circulate so the sides cook too. Stir the 3 tablespoons of oil into the leftover marinade and set it aside for basting.
Get the charcoal or grill very hot — you should not be able to hold a palm 20cm above it for two seconds. Over a moderate fire the surface dries out while the inside creeps up to temperature, and it turns tough.
Grill 2 minutes a side, brushing with the reserved marinade oil each time you turn them. Four to five minutes total is the whole cook. Past that it is leather — there is almost no fat in heart to protect it, so the window is far narrower than for a beef steak.
⏲ 2 min
Rest them 5 minutes, then serve with the boiled corn and potatoes and a bowl of ají amarillo paste stirred into mayonnaise with lime. This is eaten off the skewer, with your hands.
⏲ 5 min

Variations

Chicken hearts: much smaller, almost nothing to trim, packed tightly onto the skewer, one minute a side. The same cut as hatsu in yakitori.
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.
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.

More detail and the reasons why (5)

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.
Chilean and Bolivian versions: Chilean anticuchos mix beef, pork and sausage on one skewer, and Bolivian anticucho paceño is beef heart too, served with potato and a peanut sauce. In Peru heart is the default.
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).
How it differs from yakitori, souvlaki and kebab: those are mostly lean muscle meat; this is sold as offal but is actually muscle. So the grilling is the closest of the four 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.

Tips

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.
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).

More detail and the reasons why (6)

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).
The vinegar is for flavour. Acid does not tenderise; it damps the metallic note. The longer it sits, the more the surface turns white and chalky, so if you marinate overnight in the traditional way, pat the surface dry before grilling (what marinades do, vinegar).
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).

The basics behind this dish

Cooking basics →

More of the same kind

Main course →

More from this country

Peruvian →