Chicha Recipes

PERUVIAN CHICHA MORADA DRINK

Steps:

• Bring the water to a boil with the corn, cinnamon sticks, and cloves in a large pot. Reduce heat to medium-low; simmer 40 minutes. Remove from the heat and strain through a mesh strainer to remove the corn and spices. Stir the lemon juice and sugar into the chicha until the sugar has dissolved. Refrigerate until cold.
• Stir in the chopped pineapple and apple before serving over ice.

PERUVIAN CHICHA MORADA RECIPE

Steps:

• Gather the ingredients.
• Rinse the ears of purple corn under the faucet to remove any dust or foreign matter. Place the ears, plus any stray grains that may have fallen off, in a large pot together with the water, cinnamon, and cloves. Put the pot over high heat on the stove; once the water reaches the boiling point, reduce the heat to medium-low. Allow this to boil for about 50 minutes.
• Remove the pot from the heat and allow it to cool down until safe to handle. Strain the liquid through a fine strainer into a pitcher, setting aside (not discarding) the solids. Add the sugar to the liquid and stir until it is completely dissolved. Taste, adding more sugar if desired, though this beverage is most refreshing when it is not overly sweet.
• Chill the chicha for 3 hours in the fridge. At this point, you can make another batch of the beverage, if desired, by adding more water to the pot with the reserved solids and repeating the entire process. When you see that nearly all of the grains of corn have broken open slightly, you will know that the corn has given up all of its flavors; until then, it can be reused in this way.
• Right before serving, chop the apples or pears into small cubes and juice the limes . Add diced fruit and lime juice to the chicha in the pitcher and stir. Serve as is or over ice, with a straw and a long spoon (for eating the fruit), if desired. Store any leftover chicha morada in the refrigerator.

CHICHA PERUANA

Steps:

• Procedure: Mash for 90 minutes at 160°F.
• We did two 1.5 gallon batches, each spiced differently (one with curacao/coriander, the other with allspice/cinammon). We would rather have used a higher proportion of jora, but on brewday we discovered that our ability to determine the weight of things is seriously imparied.
• Instead of the 4.5lbs we thought we had, we found we had only 3lbs of jora.
• Rather than readjust (the OG would have been more appropriate at ~1.045 in any case), we added more sugar, a course of action that was inspired by homebrewed Weizen as much as anything else. The result is a very tasty beverage, pretty big all the way around on corn, and yet the flavor is quite subtle. Be warned that chicha is at its peak 2 to 4 days after pitching while it still retains some sweetness and body.
• Once the chicha ferments out, you are left with a fairly bland beverage that reminds me of iced tea more than anything else. If I'd been thinking (chicha lends itself to gulping), I would have kegged the stuff on the third day after pitching and stuck it in the fridge. While we took the trouble to grow our own (blue) corn, I see no reason why one could not start with good ol' yellow corn from the grocery store (domestic 20-row?) In fact, I plan on doing this if only to see what kind of chicha it makes.
• Specifics: OG: 1.055 FG: 1.012 Types of Chicha So far, there appear to me to be several main ways in which chicha de jora is made. These range in difficulty from trivial to a process almost indentical to what barley-beer homebrewers are familiar with.
• Facil (easy) - Corn is mixed with water and sugar and allowed to sit for several days until the corn begins to germinate. The sugar ferments and the corn, lending nothing fermentable, adds flavor.
• Abbreviated - The jora is mashed but the mash is ultimately brought to a boil, allowed to settle, and the clear liquid, or upi, now finished chicha, is drawn off.
• Traditional - Similiar to the Abbreviated method, but the jora is mashed and the mash is allowed to settle. The upi is drawn off the mash into a separate vessel for boiling.
• Modern - The ground jora is mashed and lautered through some sort of filtering device such as a manifold or false bottom.
• This process is helped by the inclusion of some crushed malted barley (Barley Assisted). The first is apparently how much chicha is made in people's kitchens.
• Bill Ridgely describes most of the others in his articles.
• Also note that the methods that include mashing use a batch sparge. That is, the sweet liquor (upi) is merely drained from the mash and there are no continuous additions of sparge water to the surface of the mash.
• Certainly sparging can be performed if desired, but it is neither traditional nor necessary (corn kernels have no husk and therefore do not form a filterbed). Chicha is traditionally allowed to spontaneously ferment. For the last type (Modern), George Duarte suggests that ground, unmalted corn could be mixed with a small amount of crushed 2-row malted barley and boiled for 20 minutes or so to gelatinize the starch in the corn.
• This gooey mass would then be added to more water and barley malt and mashed as per 'normal' homebrew procedures.
• This could probably be sparged as usual.