Revealed: the ancient Andean secrets behind Peru’s vibrant potato varieties

A single white ball rests on a wooden plate, looking like a quail egg and feeling almost as hard as a marble when poked with a fork. “Can you guess what it is,” asks our server, Josefina Escobar, at Hacienda Sarapampa, a family-owned estate in Peru’s Sacred Valley, the spiritual, agricultural and economic heartland of the Inca Empire (1438-1532). The estate’s farm-to-table restaurant stands in a 100-acre corn plantation close to the Urubamba river, surrounded by golden fields, mature trees and roaming baby alpacas. I am stumped. Choclo, the giant corn loved locally and one of Peru’s prized exports, is grown on the estate, so to suggest that this oval oddity is a supersized corn kernel would be too easy. “Is it a nut or a bean,” I ask. “Good try, but no,” she replies, with a smile. “A potato?” ventures my husband. He is correct; perhaps it’s only fitting that an Irishman has a nose for potatoes, considering its place as a staple in his homeland. This specimen is a moraya, we’re told, a freeze-dried potato from the Andes. In its raw state, it is naturally bitter and inedible due to a high glycoalkaloid content. Also known as tunta or chuño blanco, the moraya is produced using an 8,000-year-old Andean preservation technique that transforms it into a safe, shelf-stable foodstuff. Escobar explains that first, the potatoes are left to freeze in the high-altitude night air before being thawed, soaked in running water and sun-dried – a tedious process that removes the bitterness and toxic compounds while preserving the pebble-like potato for years. Born of necessity, the moraya has become a symbol of Andean resilience and culinary ingenuity, well loved by chefs for its unique texture, subtle earthy flavour and the history it brings to contemporary dishes. I tentatively bite into my moraya and find it denser and starchier than any potato I’ve ever tried. This, I believe, is my first taste of authentic Peruvian potatoes, as yet unaware that every potato I’ve ever eaten has its roots in Peru. From pillowy gnocchi to crispy triple-cooked chips and comforting, butter-laden mashed potatoes, all the potato dishes we enjoy trace their lineage back to the Peruvian Andes. Before the potato conquered the world, it was domesticated in the high-altitude Andean plateaux, between 7,000 and 10,000 years ago. For the Inca, the potato was not mere sustenance but the foundation of civilisation. When the Spanish invaded Peru in 1531, in search of gold, they discovered the innovations of the Inca Empire, including terraced farms, stone citadels and treasure in the form of giant corn and potatoes. In the 16th century, the Spanish took the potato to Europe. Imagine seeing a potato for the first time – holding the hard, strangely shaped vegetable, feeling its matte, dimpled skin and not knowing the wonders it contains. Born in the extreme conditions of the Andes, it is a resilient crop able to thrive at various elevations and, over four centuries, it has become the world’s third-most important food crop, after rice and wheat. Endlessly adaptable in the kitchen, the versatile vegetable has shaped cuisines. While it is embraced across borders, the potato’s soul remains in Peru. To this day, farmers cultivate a mind-boggling array of tubers, so much so that the country remains the undisputed centre of potato biodiversity, with more than 4,000 native varieties found nowhere else on Earth. Living in Ireland, I thought I knew enough about potatoes. I’ve come to learn which types are suited for roasting or mashing, and why baby potatoes are the go-to when I have only 15 minutes to whip up a meal. I’ve had potatoes in more ways in Ireland than anywhere else and have developed a higher standard for crisps, deeming local brand Keogh’s the best. However, I realise how limited my exposure has been when I meet Manuel Choqque Bravo, a fourth-generation farmer and agricultural engineer who is widely called “the potato whisperer”. Lightfoot Travel helped organise a visit to his family home, close to Chinchero, one of the highest towns in the region, at 3,762 metres above sea level. On a plateau ringed by mountains, with a great view of snow-capped Mount Chicón, the town of cobblestone streets is a key stop on the Sacred Valley circuit thanks to an archaeological site featuring Inca terraces and a 17th century church that stands on the foundations of Incan royal Túpac Yupanqui’s palace, built to signify the dominance of Catholicism over Incan traditions. Chinchero’s traditional weaving heritage is also a draw; tourists can visit cooperatives in which artisans spin and weave alpaca and sheep’s wool using backstrap looms. Dressed in a North Face jacket and black trousers, Bravo shakes my hand and welcomes me in with a wide smile. My husband and I are led to a cosy garden in which a modest tent stands over a white table, where we are asked to sit. More than a dozen small potatoes are lined up on another table. They all look like ordinary spuds, until Bravo takes his knife and slices each one open to reveal a burst of electric colour. The first ones feature faint pink lines against the yellow flesh akin to tie-dye marks or a jellyfish’s hydrostatic skeleton. As he progresses, the colours grow deeper, leaning towards fuchsia. The last ones he slices are completely purple on the inside. Bravo explains that the pigment is a marker of polyphenols, naturally occurring compounds celebrated for their antioxidant and anti-inflammatory qualities. Bravo has painstakingly cross-pollinated native varieties to develop 380 hybrids, including what he calls “super potatoes”. These jewel-toned tubers have remarkably high concentrations of iron and zinc, and some contain up to 10 times more antioxidants than blueberries and five times more vitamin C than citrus fruits. His work in preserving native varieties and developing new types isn’t only about safeguarding heritage, but also challenging how we think about these incredible crops. Learning how nutritious they are makes me think I should stop seeing potatoes as plain carbohydrates that we should eat very little of and instead consume them like quinoa, the other Peruvian superfood. A bowl of potato crisps – a kaleidoscope of colour and flavour – lands on the table alongside a selection of local cheese and charcuterie. Then comes a lavender-hued potato bread dressed with olive oil. Finally, a plate arrives bearing six varieties of potato roasted simply with fragrant herbs. They are served with a fresh salad and succulent roast chicken, and accompanied by home-made uchucuta, the smoky, addictive Andean chilli sauce. “All potatoes are tubers, but not all tubers are potatoes,” Bravo says, as he pours us a glass of Oxalis, the world’s first wine made from Andean tubers. It’s produced from fermented oca (uqa in Quechua, the lingua franca of the Inca Empire), a vibrant relative of the potato. The drink is the result of years of experimentation by Bravo’s family; they now produce red, white, rosé and orange expressions. Bravo is in the midst of building a tasting room and restaurant in his garden, a project expected to open at the end of 2026. However, this isn’t the only place you can taste his creations. Many of Peru’s culinary heavyweights use Bravo’s potatoes in their dishes and offer Oxalis on their menus. Despite the acclaim, Bravo’s focus remains rooted in the soil. He says that he wants to continue breeding hardier varieties that can adapt to climate change. “[Bravo] is preserving generations of knowledge about Andean farming and the communities that have cultivated them for centuries,” says Oliver Lever, Lightfoot Travel’s head of Americas and Antarctica, who has worked with the potato whisperer for more than a decade. “For many travellers, visiting Manuel provides the context behind everything they go on to eat during the rest of their journey. That connection between the land, the producer and the plate is something you cannot experience from a restaurant table alone.” A few hours with Bravo opens my eyes to the universe of the Peruvian potato and I begin noticing how it is incorporated in every restaurant I eat at thereafter. Killa Wasi, the fine-casual restaurant at the Sol y Luna hotel in the Sacred Valley, sources produce from nearby farms, the potatoes and tubers presented in seasonal cheese soup as well as main dishes such as root-vegetable millefeuille. Likewise at Oqre, a restaurant within the Monasterio, a Belmond Hotel, in nearby Cusco, where native potatoes are glazed beneath tangy ceviche and folded with local ají and seasonal artichokes, as well as served alongside crisp suckling pig. One of the most artistic homages to Peruvian potatoes is found at Kjolle, the Lima restaurant currently ranked ninth on the World’s 50 Best Restaurants list. Chef Pia León’s signature dish is Muchos Tubérculos (“Many Tubers”), which features paper-thin slices of olluco, an Andean tuber, that look like a rainbow. The assembly is held together by a rich, creamy paste, served over a tart constructed from cañihua (a grain similar to quinoa). It is delicate in appearance and approach, León having highlighted the colours and textures the vegetables inherently possess. Served with the tart is a second plate showcasing eight tubers, each prepared using a different technique and brought together with an airy sachapapa foam. It is a beautiful expression of León’s philosophy: that Peru’s heritage ingredients deserve to be appreciated with the same reverence as caviar, uni and truffle. Unsurprisingly, the most evocative tribute to the potato unfolds in the Andes, at Mil Centro, a one-of-a-kind restaurant created by chef Virgilio Martínez. At 3,568 metres above sea level, the restaurant overlooks the circular terraces of Moray, home to the agricultural experimentation of the Incas more than 500 years ago. Mil Centro is not just a restaurant; it also serves as the interdisciplinary research centre Mater Iniciativa, which is dedicated to studying the ecosystems, ingredients and communities of the Andes. The tasting menu here is arranged by altitude, with each course distilling a different Andean environment through native tubers, wild herbs and local grains, revealing flavours that feel both ancient and entirely new. The most soulful course is Central Andes, which showcases the potato varieties papa qecoranne, papa yema de huevo, papa sangre de toro and papa puka boli, alongside mashua, oca and olluco. These are cooked in a huatia – an earthen oven built from soil after the harvest, using edible chaco clay and Maras salt – and the dish is served with a selection of fiery uchucuta sauces. In June, Martínez and his team launched Qollqa Route – a five-hour immersion that begins with a visit to a local family for a glimpse of life in the Andes, including a demonstration of sankhu, a preparation of toasted grains ground by hand and mixed with herb-infused water into a paste. The experience concludes with an eight-course tasting menu at Mil Centro. “We want to propose something totally different from what you can find in a restaurant,” says Martínez. “That is why we have worked a lot on communication, so that the person visiting Mil understands that they will not receive a conservative fine-dining proposal at all. On the contrary, it is about the idea of eating in the field, in the land, and connecting with these high-altitude ecosystems. It is about feeling immersed in these landscapes, in the heights of the Andes, and being able to understand how things worked hundreds, if not thousands, of years ago. “It is an ancestral way of seeing tradition, together with innovation.” The writer’s tour of the Sacred Valley was hosted by Lightfoot Travel and her meal at Mil Centro was on the house