“You could say that picarones are like a sweet potato-and-squash doughnut, but that doesn’t pay enough respect,” says Hender Gonzales. “Doughnuts are, what, Dutch? This is something we Peruvians came up with ourselves.” Gonzales’s version, which they doled out during their pop-up at Ursula in Brooklyn, is made of a sweet potato–based dough that’s fried until crispy and soaked in spiced syrup. The syrup is sweetened with
chancaca (also known as
piloncillo and panela), which is a type of unrefined whole cane sugar that you can find in most Latinx grocery stores, in the Latinx section of supermarkets, and online.