Mouth Watering Cuisine

Sri Lanka is home to a wide range of delicious and mouthwatering culinary dishes and delicacies. Sri Lankan cuisine is widely known for its very particular and unique blend of spices, vegetables, fish, meats, and fruit. Being a tropical country with a deep-rooted history of hydraulic civilization, the Sri Lankan diet primarily revolves around rice and coconut. But across the country, with the diversity in culture, economy, and values, you can find the food also changing to match the local specialties and ways of life.

In the Sri Lankan diet, rice and curry are king. In virtue of the island’s historically strong paddy cultivation, a wide range of rice varieties such as ‘Kakulu,’ ‘Naadu,’ ‘Suwandal,’ ‘Dik Wee,’ ‘Kalu Heenati,’ ‘Maa Wee,’ ‘Pachchaperumal,’ and many more. Each variety has its own unique taste, texture, smell and goes with different combinations of curries. Speaking of curries, a typical Sri Lankan rice and curry dish is often accompanied by six to seven complementing curries. Delicious vegetable curries such as ‘Polos’ or baby jackfruit, tempered dhal curry with red chilies, ‘Thumba Karawila,’ ‘Bandakka,’ and ‘murunga,’ greens such as ‘Goto Kola’ and ‘Kathuru Murunga,’ and traditional meat and fish dishes such as black pork curry, chicken curry, and ‘Maalu Ambul Thiyal,’ or sour fish curry, which is a local favorite, would surround a steaming and fragrant plate of rice. Of course, no dish is complete without the delectable ‘Pol Sambola’ or Coconut Sambol or some Sri Lankan chili-paste to give the food an additional spicy kick. For dessert, a beautiful curd, or ‘Kiri,’ served up in the very clay pot in which it was fermented to perfection, paired with a serving of treacle. Treacle is a sweet and tart-y extract taken from either Kithul, coconut, or sugarcane. Each variety of treacle has a distinctive flavor and aroma, complementing the creamy sourness of the curd with a blast of sweetness.

To bring out the best flavor of Sri Lankan cuisine, however, you must follow traditional cooking recipes and techniques passed down from generation to generation. An electric rice cooker is convenient, but cooking rice in a traditional clay pot on a wood fire stove and serving it up on a steamed banana leaf gives you an experience of bliss and ecstasy that you have never had before. Of course, eating with your hands, just like the locals, generously mixing the fragrant rice and the beautifully spiced curries together, is the proper and best way to enjoy a good rice and curry and to bring out the complementing flavors and aromas. Eating with your hands, in addition to bringing together completing flavors, also incorporates the lips into the tasting process, which is a sensation often missed when eating with utensils. If you are culinarily inclined and want to experience a colorful and gastronomic journey of flavors, aromas, and spices, come visit Sri Lanka for a journey of a lifetime.