While variety isn’t exactly a strong point of Sri Lankan cuisine, some of the staples are pretty damn good. Of course there are bland versions and excellent versions of every dish depending on the amount of love put into it. The basic meal, available everywhere, is rice and curry but what comes with that can vary quite a bit. It may come with a big pile of rice and one type of curry or as many side dishes as could possibly fit on a plate. At times it could be difficult to find a proper restaurant but street vendors are usually around selling small snacks which could make up a meal, although probably not the healthiest one. Another phenomenon, which I’ve noticed in certain other countries as well, is that there seems to be an abundance and variety of decent quality inexpensive fresh ingredients available – produce, meat, herbs, and spices, but you wouldn’t think this was the case by looking at restaurant menus. In fact some of the preparations can be appallingly unimaginative, but I can fantasize about what I might do with those ingredients if I had a kitchen of my own. I’m not going to give a full rundown of Sri Lankan food but here are a few things that stood out to me:
Wood Apples
These fruits are unlike anything I’ve seen before. They don’t appear to be botanically related to any fruit that we have in the US. They grow on trees everywhere and they’re sold by the pile in front of people’s homes or at nearly every produce stand. The average size is about the size of a tennis ball, they have a very hard woody outer shell almost like a coconut that must be cracked open by whacking it against the ground, and when they’re ripe they smell like blue cheese. I don’t mean that if you close your eyes and use your imagination you might be able to visualize some blue cheese. It has a strong pronounced blue cheese aroma. Crack one open and inside there’ll be a lump of slightly fibrous brown stuff that sits halfway between liquid and solid, with a few edible seeds mixed into it. Honestly, it has the look and feel of poop.
OK, now that we’ve gotten past the wood apple’s outer defenses, it’s time to scoop that stinky turd out of the shell and take a bite. Mmmmmm, delicious. It definitely doesn’t taste like blue cheese (or poop). It’s tart, slightly sweet, with a rich and complex flavor, maybe a little molasses thrown in there. Most commonly it’s blended up with a little sugar into a juice or blended with curd (yogurt) for a thicker beverage. The blue cheese smell disappears once it’s out of the shell although it does have a little bit of a pleasant fermented quality. You can also just eat them plain, which is what Fern and I did most of the time. I also went through a short curd phase and this stuff is very good spread over a bowl of curd. The famed durian has a reputation as one of the world’s stinkiest but best tasting fruits but I would argue that the wood apple is better. It’s smell may not permeate it’s surroundings quite as much as the durian’s but it is every bit as stinky.
The wood apple has a closely related cousin known locally as a beli fruit. It’s not nearly as common as the wood apple, in fact I don’t think we saw them for sale anywhere but we were introduced to them by a very nice lady who really wanted us to try them. (I’ll talk about her in a later post)
The beli fruit has almost the exact same physical appearance as the wood apple except that it’s a greenish color, it doesn’t smell like blue cheese. and the flavor is more of a bitter citrus, like lemon or lime zest. It’s also really delicious if you can find it.
Curd
Basically the same thing as yogurt, curd is available all over Sri Lanka. That may not seem very exciting but there is something special about Sri Lankan curd. It’s available in buffalo and cow varieties and it’s delivered each morning directly from the farm to various small produce shops and market stands. Packaged in short, wide ceramic vessels with a simple piece of paper loosely folded over the top, they’re very inexpensive if bought at the local shops. I don’t think the fat is reduced at all for these, making them very rich, creamy, and flavorful. I was especially fond of the buffalo version with it’s even higher fat content and slightly smokey flavor.
Curd is commonly served as a dessert in restaurants in the form of curd and treacle – treacle being a sugary syrup that can be plain or come in different fruit flavors. In theory treacle is a specific product made from the extract of a certain type of palm tree but in reality it’s available in a highly processed and artificially flavored form in any supermarket. I’d just as soon pass on the treacle and drizzle some honey over it, spread some wood apple on it, or eat it plain. Yum!
Samosas and other fried snacks
Walking around the busy streets it doesn’t take long to find someone selling samosas. They usually have a variety of packages of different shapes and sizes and I think they may have different names but since I’ve determined that the samosa is my favorite I just think of them all as variations of the samosa. They’re usually a blob of vegetables, herbs, and spices wrapped up in a thin sheet of pastry dough and deep fried. Some of them have egg or meat in them but most are primarily potato with a small amount of carrot or peas. There are two things that make a samosa stand out as a good one. They have a very flavorful and spicy seasoning mixed into the vegetables and the texture of the fried dough is just right. Some especially bad ones have been sitting around for an extremely long time or they may have been fried in rancid overused oil. Unfortunately it’s not always easy to tell just by walking up for the first time and taking a look. This makes it absolutely necessary to try at least one from every samosa stand, otherwise I would spend the rest of my life wondering if that particular place had the best samosas but I passed them over for some reason or other.
A good samosa is a seriously satisfying treat and some of the ones we had in Sri Lanka were top notch. They have a lot of competition after all. I eventually figured out which ones I liked and found myself planning my walking routes to make sure that I passed by the samosa stand, preferably before they ran out of the good stuff.
Our best meal in Sri Lanka
The funny thing is that our least favorite place, Ella, happened to be where we had our best meal during our month in Sri Lanka. It actually wasn’t in Ella, but outside of it at the homestay where we landed. The place itself wasn’t really anything special but the lady of the house offered home cooked meals. She spoke almost no English so we didn’t really know what to expect. Since the place had such a humble feel about it I thought we would just be eating whatever she and her family ate, which would probably be rice and curry, and that would be fine with us. She sent her son to knock on our door and let us know that dinner was ready and we came over to the main porch and sat down. Wow. I guess you could call it rice and curry but all the extras were included. Not only was there an impressive variety of traditional Sri Lankan dishes, some of which we couldn’t find anywhere else, but it had that special quality that home cooked food can have – clean and fresh ingredients carefully prepared according to recipes that have probably been passed down through the family.
Of course there was rice, the backbone of every Sri Lankan meal, and the main curry was jackfruit curry. Jackfruit happens to be a fruit that Fern and I have focused a lot of attention on. The fruity parts of it are delicious but I discovered that the seeds are also edible if cooked and they’re very nutritious. Most people don’t bother with the seeds so they can be found with a little searching for ridiculously cheap. Or you can buy a whole jackfruit and get the fruit and seeds from it but whole jackfruits tend to be HUGE. Like, ranging from 5 – 20 pounds.
While in Thailand we experimented a little bit with cooking jackfruit seeds and using them for all sorts of things but I’d never had them anywhere else. This jackfruit curry, which I believe had the fruit and the seeds in it, was amazing. It was rich and hearty and had a prominent roasted garlic flavor. The meal also included caramelized onion sambol (which is sort of like a chunky sauce or chutney), citrus coconut sambol, crispy fried curry leaves, roasted pumpkin, beans, salad, fruit, and papadum. It was a feast and Fern and I felt lucky to have such a meal.
jim@snorkelbandits.com