If you've only met peppers as "spicy," the ají amarillo will surprise you. It's bright orange when ripe, and once you wash the heat out, what's left is a delicious flavor — earthy and fruity, floral, almost like a bell pepper, with a little acidity. The heat lives mostly in the seeds and veins, so when those come out, that good flavor is what stays.
A nice thing to know: botanically, it's a fruit — a berry — that we happen to cook like a vegetable. It has been grown in Peru for thousands of years and is the backbone of dishes like papa a la huancaína, ají de gallina, and ceviche.
You'll hear this pepper be called ají amarillo, ají verde, and ají mirasol — but they're all the same pepper at different stages of its life. Verde (green) is a little misleading: it doesn't mean the literally green stage — verde is just the word for unripe. The plant grows the pepper green first, then it turns yellow-orange, and it's only considered truly ripe when it dries — right on the plant, until it looks like a dry chile. At that dried stage, it takes a new name: ají mirasol. (Honestly, I've never seen anyone use it at the literally-green stage — by the time it's worth eating, it's already golden.)
No need to devein or fuss. Simply wash and dry the peppers well, drop them whole into freezer bags, and freeze. Don't fully defrost them when you cook — most recipes, like huancaína, will have you soasar (roast/blister) the ají as part of the recipe anyway. Like any other vegetable you don't thaw first, you go straight into the cooking.
The paste method below is exactly how I learned it from Rossana — a sweet woman at the Mercado de Lince in Lima, Peru. She has since passed away. She sold her ají two ways, picante and sin picante, and wasted nothing.
Ají mirasol is simply ají amarillo that's been left on the plant to dry in the sun — the name means "mira al sol," "looks at the sun." Because it's already dried, you treat it a little differently:
Dried, it tastes deeper and more concentrated than the fresh pepper — earthy, less floral — which is why it's so good in long-cooked soups and stews.
During the years I taught cooking classes at Harmons Grocery Store, I shared this with so many homesick visitors — for papa a la huancaína, ají de gallina, picante de papas, and ceviche de pollo. YUM.
I'm not affiliated with anyone — but here's an Amazon link to ají amarillo plants so you can give it a try! They're growing them in Utah now, and with a little care they handle the weather here. I've seen them growing in Tarma, Peru, and that is cold — this pepper is hardier than it looks. And if you do grow one, come back and tell us in the comments how it went for you!
Pull open a drawer if you want to go deeper.
One of the two great legends of how Tawantinsuyu began tells of four brothers, the Ayar. Their names have always stayed with me: one carries the word uchu — ají — and another carries cachi, salt. Why would two of these founding names hold the very flavors that seasoned Inca life, salt and ají? I don't have the answer. I just find it beautiful that they're there.
Here's how I read it. Where his old punctuation makes it sound like he's describing one pepper with commas, I see three or four different peppers — and then he goes back and describes them one by one. The most common one is thicker-fleshed; another is long; and another has no point. That first thick one, pimiento grueso, he calls rócot uchu.
And here's the interesting part: he says it's eaten cooked, or verde — unripe — before it takes on its perfect color, which he calls colorado (red). So either he's talking about the so-called ají colorado or ají panca, or maybe he needed glasses and was looking at a dried ají amarillo — or a mirasol — perhaps a more artisanal one that dried darker instead of holding its orange hues. Four hundred years later, we can't be sure. Even the earliest writing was really describing the whole uchu family, not our amarillo alone.
Try reading his own words — the Castilian is old and a little choppy, which is half the charm: