My wife J works in international wildlife conservation, which requires frequent travel to Latin America. One of her favorite pastimes is to visit a local market to discover new and interesting ingredients, which she brings home for experiments in the kitchen (disclaimer to U.S. Customs: no forbidden products were imported in the making of this blog). Hopefully, she’ll describe her exotic fruit-filled and glazed doughnuts in a future post. But I’m going to talk about cocktails, naturally. After a recent trip to Peru, J returned with a variety of unusual ingredients and asked me to create a menu of Latin-inspired drinks for our next cocktail party. Challenge accepted!

The first item that caught my eye was maíz morado (purple corn). The dried corn kernels are used to make chicha morada, a traditional Peruvian drink that dates back to the Incan empire. The modern version of this non-alcoholic beverage is made by boiling the corn with pineapple, flavoring with cinnamon and cloves, sweetening with sugar, and finishing with lemon or lime juice. Served chilled over ice, it’s a refreshing thirst quencher with a deep-purple, almost blood-red color.

The next package was a mystery: dried camu camu powder, which looked like ground cinnamon. The smell reminded me of green tea, with a hint of wood and orange zest. So I dipped in my pinkie and tasted it. Sour, bitterly sour! A quick internet search revealed why. Camu camu is a cherry-like fruit that grows on small trees in the Amazon rainforest. Its claim to fame? An extremely high concentration of vitamin C, aka ascorbic acid. A single teaspoon of the powder contains as much vitamin C as two dozen oranges. Small wonder it was so sour.

I decided to skip some of the other ingredients for now and focus on the drink menu (although if you have suggestions for dried pitahaya or lúcuma, let me know). I thought chicha morada would make a nice foundation for a punch. Mixed with vodka and lightened with seltzer, it was an intriguing combination of corn, citrus, and spice flavors – it might sound weird, but it tasted delicious. Next was camu camu. Its extreme sourness called for a syrup, which I paired with maracuyá (passionfruit) and pisco - two more South American ingredients. Of all the versions of pisco sour that I’ve had (and there have been many!), this one was my favorite. Camu camu accentuated the tartness of passionfruit as well as the wood and spice notes of the bitters, but was perfectly balanced by the sweetness of syrup and pisco, all complemented by the creamy foam of egg white. Mmmm!

These two cocktails are very Peru/Amazon-focused, and I wanted a more pan-Latin drink list. So I broadened my horizons and looked to central America and the Carribean. As a lighter beverage option, I combined Nicaraguan rum and Mexican horchata (a rice, milk, and cinnamon beverage) in a riff on the Puerto Rican piña colada. Like its inspiration, it had the velvety richness of coconut cream, but a completely different flavor of almonds and cinnamon. To balance this trifecta of unusual drinks with something familiar, the fourth choice was an azure-colored margarita variation with a ruby-red heart of grenadine (pictured at top).

With the drink menu complete, all that’s left to do is to invent some names for the cocktails, invite the neighbors, and set out some bar snacks, like canchas (corn nuts) and chifles (plantain chips). Let the fiesta begin!

h.