The art of Sri Lankan cuisine

Last year, we decided to spend a couple of weeks exploring Sri Lanka. Probably one of the most up and coming place to visit (I know of at least four different friends who have been in the last year), we were extremely excited about spending some time discovering an entirely new culture and, almost more importantly, cuisine.

I'll post another blog about some of our great adventures in Sri Lanka - we had an awesome time exploring this beautiful island. This blog is about the cooking course that we did while staying down in Galle, and a little bit about breakfast.

Starting with the latter....we had our first traditional Sri Lankan breakfast in the ancient city of Anuradhapura. There is nothing better to start off a hot day of sightseeing than a plate of fresh fruit, encompassing banana, melon and passionfruit, followed by an array of curries and supporting sides. Not for the faint hearted, the spicy chicken (on the bone) jaffna curry with the fragrance of pandan leaves, supported by the coconut sambal that I flicked liberally on top, was my favourite. The string hoppers, essentially rice noodles that have been cooked in a little patty shape, are delicious for sopping up the curry sauce, which intermingles nicely with the yellow potato curry that makes my mouth tingle with anticipation, even now.

The real shame was that the tourist culture has really begun to take hold in Sri Lanka, and many tourists are not appreciative of a breakfast curry. So in the places we visited after Anuradhapura, the Sri Lankan breakfast was hard to find, with many of our hotels serving bread and fried eggs (cold and undercooked) for brekkers. We were furious! Thankfully, the hotel we stayed at in Galle had the option of either Western or Sri Lankan breakfast and, since we spent a week there, we were able to take full advantage of this delightful aspect of the culture (check out those pictures *dribble*).

                                      Breakfast looked like this most mornings

Afternoon tea at the Grand
 Hotel in Nuwara Eliya

One of the things we really wanted to do on our visit to Sri Lanka was to go on a cooking class. Food is such an important element of a country's culture, and this was no exception. Sri Lanka has a fascinating history and the food has been heavily influenced by it, which you can observe as you travel across the island and see the influence of the weather and Brits (e.g. in Nuwara Eliya, where you can get a fantastic high tea), the movement of the Tamils (we loved eating dosa in Kandy) and the use of vegetables and fish that you wouldn't think are native to an Asian country (we saw cabbage, carrots and peppers growing everywhere!).

So I booked a cooking class in Unawatuna, the little seaside village outside of Galle that we were staying in. There are quite a few cooking classes on offer, so I shopped around a bit (whilst sitting on the hot hot beach outside our hotel) and decided to go with Nautilus Cooking class. This is run by a local restaraunteur Yamuna, in her little restaurant/home kitchen, and she is a absolute delight. Great value for money at £15/head and the class is held privately (so I didn't need to put up with other annoying humans). And I learned so much, as you're about to hear...

Class kicked off bright and early at 9am....not an easy wake-up on holiday, I'll tell you! It took place just round the corner from our hotel though, so wasn't too difficult to get to. And immediately, we set off on an adventure, as our teacher's brother picked us up in his tuktuk and drove us to the markets in Galle to buy our own food! I must say this was an exceptional element to the day - getting to observe where the locals do their food shopping and which foods they buy felt like a key part of immersing ourselves in the cooking culture. So first we went to the vegetable market, where we picked up a coconut, bag of chillis and three veggies of our choice (we went for pumpkin, green beans and aubergine). The vegetables were all so vibrant, most likely because they were super fresh and local, and the store owner let us take loads of pictures as we selected our produce. Top notch!

I can't even name half of this produce!

Up next we went to the spice store. This was probably the only commercial part of the cooking class - it was an opportunity to buy spices to take home so naturally we obliged by buying some special recipe garam masala and a curry mix. We didn't want to buy too much, because we knew it would be cheaper from the supermarket, but also because we hadn't done the cooking course yet and didn't know what spices we'd need that we couldn't get in the UK! Looking back, I would have stocked up on pandan leaves....

Fresh fishies

Last stop - fish. At the beginning of the day, we were given the option of cooking either a fish or a meat curry. Since neither of us had much experience with fish curries, we went with this slightly 'different' option. Correct choice. Our host drove us up to a fish stall on the side of the road (not quite what I expected) and we picked up a piece of tuna. This was also quite unexpected - my sole experience of fish curries is to use white fish and I was a little sceptical at the time that this was going to turn into something I actually wanted to it. But I'm open to new things, so smiled, nodded and back we went to the kitchen to get our cook on!

Now the first thing I noted about the cooking class was how exceptionally clean Yamuna was. Every ingredient we used she made us wash thoroughly several times. Very encouraging to see, and raised my opinion substantially of cooking standards in Sri Lanka. But after that I didn't notice much else, because I was so enthralled with the cooking.

Yamuna washing the lentils

You know how when you cook an Indian curry you fry off the onions, then add the spices, then other ingredients? There's a whole process to cooking? Sri Lankan cooking is entirely different, or at least the dishes we cooked were entirely different. It was all very simple, and every single dish started in exactly the same way: wash and chop all the ingredients, put them in the pot, add the herbs and spices, add the coconut milk or water, stir well then boil rapidly until cooked. Completely different to any other kind of curry I've ever made. It's made me wonder whether the Western way of cooking Asian curries has evolved quite differently to the actual methodology, or whether this is a method that's only true to Sri Lanka.

There was a little bit of prep work to be done before assembling the curries however. Remember that coconut that we picked up from the market? That was needed to create the coconut milk that would go into virtually every recipe. So Yamuna picked up a giant cleaver, split the coconut in half (the water went EVERYWHERE!) and handed it to us to remove all the coconut flesh, which incidentally is a very tedious job. It involves using a table top grinder and using this to grind all the flesh into a bowl, which probably took about ten minutes between me and Husband. Hard work, but it does give you a huge amount of coconut flesh to work with. Water is then added to the bowl and then you need to pour it through a sieve and squeeze it, three or four times over, to create the coconut milk. Somehow, the coconut flavour infuses into the water and thickens it, but you don't actually use the flesh in the final product. 

Husband looking very proud
of his ground up coconut

Once the coconut milk was ready to go, and we had washed all the rice and lentils (which has to be soaked, rinsed and drained four times over), we got on with the actual recipes, which was the bit I was excited about. We were making eight different dishes, as follows:

• tuna curry
• green bean curry
• pumpkin curry
• aubergine curry
• lentil daal
• flavoured rice
• coconut sambol
• poppadoms

I won't put the recipes here (although if you want them, I've got the recipes she gave you and can send pictures if you message me). But I thought I'd talk through some of the key components of some of the recipes.

Dishes prepped and awaiting
coconut milk

First of all, all the vegetable and daal recipes had a substantial amount of chopped red onion, garlic and chilli. The tuna recipe had no onions, but it did have both chillis and chilli powder, as well as something called gambodge paste, a very dark brown paste made from the goraka fruit, which is both acidic and fruity, and is typically used similarly to tamarind. This gives an amazing flavour to the tuna, and I brought a substantial amount of it back to the UK with me to use for future tuna curries. All of the curries also had a substantial amount of curry leaves and pandan leaves included. The latter, also known as rampé, was a new one to me and I must say that it adds a really delicious flavouring to the dishes. Yamuna was extremely kind and gave me a huge bag of pandan leaves to bring home with me, as I wasn't sure if I could buy them in the UK. Turns out I can get them from Chinatown...

On top of those ingredients, each dish had its own unique variation of spices feeding in. The pumpkin curry, which needed to be cooked for longer, had cinnamon and cardamom pods, which gives it quite a deep flavour. It was also the only vegetable curry to take roasted curry powder, which is typically only used in meat and fish dishes. The other vegetable dishes had unroasted curry powder, lots of pepper and then some lighter spices. Needless to say, everything had chilli and that made me happy 😏

So after an hour and a half of intensive cooking (ok, it wasn't that hard), we got to the end point: eight dishes of absolute deliciousness. And this was, of course, the best part, because we then got to sit down with our meal and enjoy it all! And to be perfectly frank, it was up there as one of the best meals we had in Sri Lanka, partly because we were enjoying the fruits of our labour and partly because it was just that delicious. Everything was super spicy, just how we like it. And that tuna curry - now that was a revelation and we simply have not looked back since having that - it's become a staple at home. As have all the rest of these recipes: we now eat a Sri Lankan feast once every couple of weeks and it is honestly one of the best things imaginable. So if anyone has any recipes from Sri Lanka that they want to share with me and expand my skills, please do!!! 

From left to right, top to bottom: pumpkin curry, aubergine curry,
green bean curry, rice, coconut sambol, tuna curry, dal and poppadoms

My plate of yumminess!

A very proud me!

A very happy (and full) husband