Picarones

Using wet fingers, the cook pokes a hole in a piece of soft dough and drops the ring straight into the oil to fry. Picarones are a sweet made by working squash and similar ingredients into wheat flour, and they are eaten with chancaca syrup. In Peru, sweet potato is also used, and picarones are popular on the street corners and at the festivals of Lima. Chilean picarones also contain squash, but the dough is leavened differently and the syrup is soaked in differently.

The Buñuelo Technique and the Pairing of Sweet Potato and Squash

Picarones are thought to have come from a meeting between the frying techniques of the Spanish buñuelo family of sweets and the local camote and zapallo. Sweet potato and squash were already part of Indigenous diets, and wheat flour and sugar, which spread during the colonial period, were added to them. The result was a method particular to the region: a soft flour dough with vegetables worked into it is fermented, fried, and topped with sugarcane syrup.

The name buñuelo is a broad term for fried-dough sweets that differ from region to region. A Lima poem from the 1790s also describes picarones as buñuelos. The two are therefore thought to be closely related sweets whose names and formulas changed over time, rather than unrelated ones. There is also a story that picarones began as a cheap substitute, but it was Afro-descendant women who made them, sold them on the streets, and spread them as a local sweet.

A Fermented Dough Made with Vegetable Purée and Cooking Liquid

The Peruvian fermented dough uses the sweet potato called camote and the squash called zapallo. They are cooked until soft, mashed, and combined with wheat flour, yeast, anise, and other ingredients. Because the vegetables are worked into the dough itself rather than wrapped inside as diced pieces, a pale yellow-orange color shows even on the cut surface.

The cooking liquid is also used as moisture to bring the dough together. Since the moisture in the purée and the amount of water the flour absorbs vary, the dough is adjusted to a soft consistency that can be picked up by hand and formed into rings. Working the vegetables into the flour adds moisture and flavor to the dough.

Once the yeast is added, the dough is rested in a warm place so that it fills with air bubbles. In some methods, the yeast is activated in the cooking liquid before the purée and flour are added; in others, the flour and vegetables are mixed first and the dough is then fermented for a long time. Just before frying, the bubbly dough is shaped into rings by hand.

Not Cut with a Cutter but Shaped into Rings One at a Time Beside the Oil

The typical way to shape them is to take up the soft dough with wet hands, open a hole in the center with the fingers, and drop it into the oil. Some cooks moisten their fingers with salted water to keep the dough from sticking. Unlike doughnuts, which are made by rolling out a firm dough and cutting it with a cutter, picarones are formed into rings one at a time beside the oil.

The rings are fried until the surface is browned and fragrant, then lifted out with a stick or similar tool and drained of oil. Because each one is shaped by hand, the outline has small irregularities, with both thin and thick parts. The outside is crisp to the bite, and the inside is a soft dough that holds the vegetables and the bubbles formed during fermentation.

Anise in the Dough and Chancaca Syrup with Spices and Fruit

The “honey” poured over the top is not actually honey but chancaca, a non-centrifugal cane sugar, melted down by simmering. It is dissolved in water, strained, and flavored with a combination of aromatics such as cinnamon, cloves, anise, orange, and fig leaves. Some formulas also add fruit juice, or quince, apple, or pineapple.

Anise is mixed into the dough, while spices are simmered separately in the syrup. When the syrup is poured over the fried dough, both aromas can be enjoyed together. In cook Cecilia Tupac’s formula, the syrup combines orange juice, fig leaves, cinnamon, cloves, and anise. The sweet is completed by pairing the fried rings with the syrup.

Cooks who introduce picarones in Japan have also carried on this way of handling a soft dough. Takahiro Arai of the restaurant Arai Shoten in Tokyo cooks the vegetables in liquid in which spices have been simmered, and adds some of it to the dough as well. The dough is brought together to a sticky consistency, and the surface is not fried too hard, leaving a fluffy exterior and a chewy interior. For the syrup he uses kokuto (Japanese brown sugar), orange juice, and fig leaves, which add aroma and acidity separately from the dough.

Vendors Recorded in Paintings, and a Sweet of Lima’s Processions and Street Stalls

Women who make and sell picarones are called picaroneras. Their sweet-making appears in the work of the 19th-century painter Pancho Fierro, and later the voices of women selling the sweet were preserved in songs and poems. Picarones are also known as a sweet passed down by Afro-Peruvian cooks, and they have been served at events such as Lima’s religious procession of the Señor de los Milagros.

On street corners, they are also popular as a sweet to eat after anticuchos, a dish of grilled skewers. The area around Parque Kennedy in Miraflores is one of the places where picarones are sold alongside other Lima sweets. At street stalls, you can get them freshly made, fried and drizzled with syrup right in front of you.

Picarones of Lima and Santiago in 18th- and 19th-Century Records

Lima por dentro y fuera (Lima Inside and Out), written by Esteban Terralla y Landa under the pen name Simón Ayanque, was published in 1797. In a digitized copy of the 1798 edition, the section “Rest 15, Romance 16” contains wordplay that explains picarones as the fried sweets called buñuelos and teases that there are men even more roguish than they are. By the end of the 18th century, this name for the sweet was in use in Lima.

José Zapiola’s recollections also feature people selling picarones in the Plaza de Armas of Santiago, along with mote and huesillos. These are recollections of the city from 1810 to 1840, which he began writing in 1872. They do not go as far as describing the amounts of sweet potato or squash, but both Lima and Santiago are depicted as places where people received fried sweets and where vendors stood.

The Naming and the Move to Chile in the Story of Rosalía

In Justo Abel Rosales’s La Negra Rosalía o el Club de los Picarones (Rosalía the Black Woman, or the Picarones Club; 1896), Rosalía, who sells the sweets beside a bridge in Lima, tells a soldier that they are called picarones because while hot they are rascals that burn your mouth, and once lukewarm they become sweet and gentle. It is an origin story told within a conversation, linking the Spanish word pícaro, “rascal,” to the hot rings.

In the same book, she is born in the Aconcagua valley, comes from Chile to Lima at the age of 3 or 4, and refines her skills by helping another Black woman with her work. The story goes on to say that she married Pedro Olivos and, after planning in 1823 to return to Chile with the army, lived on Calle San Pablo in Santiago, and in 1827 or 1828 moved her shop to the corner of the old post office.

Rosales also included conversations with soldiers and with the independence leader San Martín, portraying a vendor who moved between the two lands. Apart from this story, which was retold at the end of the 19th century, Zapiola also recalled vendors in Santiago from an earlier period. It is not clear who first brought the sweet to Chile, but her story tells of the way of making it traveling with the army and the people.

Pasados: Thoroughly Soaked in Syrup in Chile

Some Chilean methods combine squash purée, wheat flour, and milk. Leavening is not limited to yeast; some methods use baking powder, and lemon or orange zest is added for aroma. Besides forming the rings with moistened hands, there is also a method that uses a dedicated mold called a picaronera.

For the chancaca sauce, some cooks add citrus peel and cloves and thicken it with a small amount of starch. In addition to serving them with hot syrup poured over and eaten right away, they are also made “pasados,” with the fried rings placed in the sauce and left for a while to soak it up thoroughly. The Peruvian rings containing sweet potato and the Chilean rings based mainly on squash each have their own characteristics in their ingredients and in how the syrup is soaked in.

A Method Passed from Mother to Daughter, and on to Grandchildren and Schoolchildren

Even today, picarones are a sweet whose handwork is learned from other people. Eufemia Antiallón Quispe, who makes them in San Luis in Cañete Province, says she began helping her mother, Evarista, at the age of 15 and was able to make them on her own by around the age of 20. A 2026 report by a public agency recorded her boiling sweet potato and squash, adding anise, and kneading the dough while paying close attention to its condition.

While she sells freshly fried picarones in the plaza in the afternoon, with syrup scented with fig leaves, she also teaches the method to her granddaughter and to children at local schools. The technique of poking a hole in the dough with a finger to form a ring, and the skill of judging the condition of the dough, are not only preserved in records of past vendors but are still taught from person to person today.

Glossary