THE ULTIMATE GUIDE ON TRADITIONAL STUFFED VENEZUELAN AREPAS – PART 2
So in Part 2 of The Ultimate Guide on Traditional Stuffed Venezuelan Arepas I want to show you how to make Arepa Perico Recipe. And you are mostly likely wondering what the hell is Perico right???
Well Perico is simply Venezuelan Scrambled Eggs, yeap, that’s right, and you’re probably also wondering where is the connection between the word PERICO and Scrambled Eggs, right?
If you don’t know PERICO in English means PARROT, you know, like the green bird that talks… yeap, you might be thinking that we in Venezuela are pretty weird, which might be the case…
But despite the weirdness of the name, this arepa is pretty traditional and found in any arepera throughout the country. In fact it is the easiest and quickest arepa filling of all because it uses just 5 ingredients and is made in literally 15 minutes, plus is vegetarian.
The key secret of this arepa is the cheese. Of course the PERICO is essential, but I think the cheese also plays an important part on how good the flavours are.
Traditionally this arepa is made with a Venezuelan cheese called “Queso Blanco Duro”, which is a white semi fresh hard cheese excellent for grating or cutting in pieces, and widely used in Venezuelan cooking.
(Picture by www.notilogia.com)
WHAT IS THE BEST CHEESE FOR AREPA PERICO RECIPE
Of course, being abroad it would be impossible to find Queso Blanco Duro, so in substitute I use either Feta or Wensleydale cheeses because they are tangy and semi fresh, slightly similar to the Venezuelan cheese.
For the Feta I try to use a slightly less salty and less mature cheese, only because I don’t like mature cheeses and because in Venezuela like in all Latin-american countries we don’t have a culture of mature cheeses so paring our food with mature cheeses wouldn’t go very well.
In fact I would say that our Queso Blanco Duro is the most mature cheese we use, and in Europe I think it would be classified as a fresh cheese.
VEGAN AREPA PERICO RECIPE
If you’re vegan you might be saying, well what the hell I can’t eat this PERICO filling! Well, you’re wrong!!
Doing a research I found a new vegan egg substitute that you can actually do scrambled eggs with, yes, and in their video it looked pretty good.
This product is called VEGANEGG from Follow Your Heart. Is an american product new to the UK and watching their video the scrambled egg looks pretty real.
I found two on-line shops that supplies the product, is not cheap (in my opinion), but if you’re vegan this product looks really good, here are the links:
VIVASHOP priced at £6.99 + delivery and Real Foods Online priced at £7.19 + delivery.
Of course, you will need to add a vegan cheese so the dish is 100% vegan.
WATCH HOW TO MAKE AREPA PERICO RECIPE
WATCH HOW TO VENEZUELAN SCRAMBLED EGGS or PERICO
For the full recipe go to Venezuelan Scrambled Eggs Recipe
Next week in Part 3 I will be showing you how to make another delicious arepa filling. I won’t say what it is because I wanted to be a surprise, so you have to keep in tune with the next videos and blog, but for now happy cooking!
Thank you for watching and reading!
