Peruvian-Style Ceviche (With Leche De Tigre) Recipe

With tender pieces of citrus-cured fish, spicy jalapeño, pungent onion, and mellow sweet potato, all awash in a sauce flavored with a lovely array of complementary aromatics like garlic, ginger, celery, and habanero, this ceviche is one that you definitely want to have in your repertoire. Ceviche is simple to prepare and it makes an elegant appetizer or light lunch. Served with crispy, salty corn chips (and maybe a cold beer), you don't need anything else.

Considering that ceviche is the national dish of Peru, it may seem redundant to call this recipe "Peruvian-style," but there is a good reason for the distinction. While ceviche originated on the west coast of South America, it has since traveled to many other cultures and cuisines, with each developing its own style for the dish. This recipe is quite different from the original ceviche (which was likely made with just fish and lots of chiles), but it does feature some of the unique characteristics of modern Peruvian ceviche, such as sweet potatoes and a collection of aromatic ingredients that display the multicultural influence present in so many iconic Peruvian foods.

For the leche de tigre in this recipe you will need water, lime juice, olive oil, celery, white onion, ginger, garlic, habanero, cilantro stems, and a little bit of scrap leftover from chopping the ceviche fish. The ceviche is made with firm, lean whitefish (such as snapper, sea bass, grouper, or halibut, among others), sweet potatoes, red onion, and jalapeños. You may also wish to have some cilantro leaves for garnishing and corn chips for serving.

Add all of the leche de tigre ingredients to a blender (or bowl, if you are using an immersion blender).

Puree the leche de tigre until smooth.

Using a fine mesh sieve set over another bowl, strain the solids from the leche de tigre.

Add the cubed fish, jalapeño, red onion, and sweet potato to the leche de tigre and cure in the refrigerator for one hour.

Once the fish is firm and white, it is ready to eat. Serve chilled, garnished with cilantro leaves and accompanied by corn chips, if desired.

While the phrase "leche de tigre" (which translates to "tiger's milk") is often used to refer to the spicy, sour, salty, umami juices left over from a dish of ceviche, it can also refer to the curing liquid itself. In this recipe, we prepare the leche de tigre first, using lime juice, water, salt, plenty of flavorful aromatics and chiles, and the scraps leftover after chopping the fish. The solids are strained out, leaving only a spicy, milky-looking liquid perfect for curing and flavoring fish. But, as it turns out, that is not the only use for leche de tigre.

Beyond curing fish, leche de tigre is also viewed as an aphrodisiac, and is often taken as a straight shot or used in cocktails, be it a leche de tigre martini, a bloody tigre (a play on a bloody mary), or mixed with Peru's signature spirit, pisco (which you'll recognize from the pisco sour cocktail). As it turns out, leche de tigre is also a popular breakfast drink in Peru, thought to help cure a hangover. (Add it to the list of bizarre-sounding breakfasts from around the world.)

With a dish like ceviche, which originated thousands of years ago, there are bound to be many iterations and variations. With this recipe, we brought in some aspects of modern Peruvian-style ceviche, but there are many avenues that you can take to make this dish your own, be it leaning into other traditional Peruvian ceviche ingredients or borrowing from other cultures that have made ceviche their own.

If you want to explore other Peruvian flavors, aji is a good place to start. For the sake of ease, we chose habanero peppers to flavor the leche de tigre in this recipe, but aji is the traditional chile of Peruvian cuisine. While these peppers are not easy to find in much of the world, aji amarillo paste has a long shelf life and can be picked up at a specialty grocery or online (like this Inca's Food Aji Amarillo Paste on Amazon). Another Peruvian touch would be to add corn. Corn is often included in Peruvian ceviche in one of two forms: You can either use regular corn on the cob or opt for cancha, crunchy toasted corn kernels similar to the popular snack corn nuts.

As far as pulling ideas from other cultures' takes on ceviche, you'll see everything from salmon ceviche recipes to Mexican shrimp ceviche, each with their own collections of complementary ingredients, and all of them can be delicious. You'll just have to read up and experiment.