Destination
Santiago
The story
Mote con huesillo is Chile's iconic summer drink-slash-dessert: cooked wheat berries (mote) and rehydrated dried peaches (huesillos) suspended in a sweet cinnamon-scented syrup, served in a tall glass with a straw and a small spoon. Sold on every street corner in Santiago during the hot months, from carts with big glass jars kept chilled with ice packs. Not a drink you sip, not a dessert you eat, but somewhere in between: refreshingly cold, subtly sweet, weirdly satisfying.
Method
Rinse the dried peaches. Place in a large saucepan with the cold water and leave to soak at least 4 hours or overnight in the fridge. This is essential: dried peaches take a long time to soften.
Add the sugar, cinnamon stick, cloves and peel to the same pan with the peaches and their soaking water. Bring to a simmer over medium heat and cook 45 to 60 minutes, until the peaches are plump, soft and the syrup is aromatic. Off the heat, remove the cinnamon, cloves and peel.
Transfer to a jug and refrigerate at least 4 hours until completely cold. The colder the better.
While the syrup chills, cook the pearl barley: rinse well, place in a saucepan with plenty of cold water, add the oil and salt. Simmer 30 to 40 minutes until tender but with a slight bite (like cooked risotto rice). Drain and rinse under cold water to stop the cooking and remove excess starch.
Refrigerate the cooked, drained mote until cold.
In each tall glass, place a generous heaped spoonful of cooked mote at the bottom (2 or 3 tablespoons). Add one or two whole huesillos on top. Fill the glass with the cold syrup.
Serve with a straw for the syrup and a long spoon to reach the mote and peaches at the bottom. Both utensils are required: this is not negotiable in Chile.
Tips
- The overnight soak is not optional. Dried peaches take hours to soften properly. Skipping the soak gives you either a stringy, tough peach or a soaked-out flavourless one.
- Pearl barley is the easy substitute for mote. Real Chilean mote (specifically pelado, dehulled wheat berries) is what's used in Chile but hard to find outside. Pearl barley cooks the same way and has an almost identical bite.
- Rinse the mote hard. Barley releases a lot of starch as it cooks; a proper cold-water rinse after draining stops it from turning gluey in the syrup.
- The syrup should be barely sweet. Chilean mote con huesillo isn't a sugary drink; it's more like a very lightly sweetened peach-cinnamon water. Start with the 200g sugar and adjust down if it's too much for you.
- Serve genuinely cold. Room-temperature mote con huesillo is a disappointment. Chill both syrup and mote thoroughly, and add ice to the glass if the day is hot.
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