Recipes for Maldivian Cuisine -The Art of Making Delicious Tropical Delights

The shimmering waters surrounding Maldives are teeming with fish of many species and flavours. Among these is tuna, a fish that is so popular in Maldives that there a variety of delicious dishes made using it. One such dish is mas huni. Made with smoked tuna, coconut and other fresh ingredients, mas huni was originally consumed for breakfast. However, if you check in to luxury restaurants in Maldives like the ones at Adaaran Prestige Vadoo, you will find them integrated to the lunch and dinner menus as well.
To make mas huni, first dice the smoked tuna. Add chopped onions and capsicum to it. Grate coconut and add to the tuna mix. Season with lemon juice (can use lime as well); salt and pepper and mash together all the ingredients.

Mas huni is eaten with Roshi but you can try it out with rice as well.

Every cuisine has its own type of bread, and when it comes to Maldives, Roshi the most popular bread of all. The commonly found types of roshi are plain roshi and huni roshi, the last of which is made using coconuts. Let's find out how to make huni roshi or coconut roshi.
First off, measure four cups of flour. Then combine the flour with 1 ½ cups of scraped coconut and 1 ½ teaspoons of salt. Take 1 ¾ cups of water and keep on adding to the flour mixture until it becomes a non-stick, smooth dough. Divide the dough into balls (makes about four) and flatten them out with your palm. Heat a little bit of oil in a frying pan and cook until both sides of the bread are fried until crisp and golden brown.
Now if you wanna do things a bit extra, you can try making Mas roshi- mas huni + roshi = mas roshi! This is made by baking roshi with mas huni inside.

What onion soup is to the French and chicken soup is to Americans, is Garudhiya to Maldivians. This ultimate comfort food is a blend of feisty flavours and fresh ingredients out of which tuna is the main component. Garudhiya is perfect
To make garudhiya, boil together 200g of cubed tuna fish, curry leaves, 50g of chopped onions, dried chilli, 10g of garlic, 20g of Maldivian chilli and 20g of fried onion, in 1L of water for 30 minutes over low heat. Take off the stove and season the soup with 20g of lime juice, salt, and pepper.

Now it's time for something sweet. If you have never tried out sago, saagu bondi bai is the perfect way to try it out for the first time. Maldivian sago pudding is a mouth watering dessert of which the main components are coconut milk, condensed milk and of course, sago.

This recipe is made from 150g of sago. Before you start cooking the pudding, you must soak the sago seeds in water for about 15 minutes. Boil the soaked sago together with 80g of coconut milk, 10g of pandan leaves, 80g of sugar, 20ml of rose water and 5g of cardamom in 200ml water. When it's boiled, remove from heat and serve with a generous drizzle of condensed milk.