5 Sri Lankan Dishes That You Simply Must Try - A true taste of Lanka!

A lunchtime staple for Sri Lankans is freshly cooked local red or white rice with a bunch of curries. Most Sri Lankan curries are cooked in coconut milk and use an abundance of spices and seasonings. A selection of four to five curries or more gets served at most meal times. Popular dishes include dhal curry, baby jak fruit, pumpkin, soya meat curry, cooked melon, snake gourd, eggplant, winged beans and green beans, among many others. A green salad like Asian Pennywort (gotukola), mukunuwenna or a cucumber salad is also served. You can also get a protein of your choice like fish, chicken curry or a Sri Lankan-styled omelette. Many hotels in Sri Lanka, such as the likes offered by popular chains such as Cinnamon Hotels & Resorts will always have a fantastic spread in the rice and curry department. 

Kottu roti is everyone's favourite fast food, usually in urban areas. When nighttime rolls, the sound of kottu being prepared is as familiar to Sri Lankans as the sound of tooting cars. Shredded godamba roti is combined with vegetables, eggs, and a curry sauce. This mixture gets chopped and blended with two metal shards. Egg, chicken kottu, and chicken and cheese are the hot favourites! Soak your hot kottu with more curry and wash it down with an Elephant House Ginger Beer for a street-side Sri Lankan feast. 

A fermented rice flour batter is what it takes to make a hopper! It is popularly eaten for breakfast or dinner. Other types of hoppers include the egg hopper, treacle hopper, and milk hopper. They are best eaten fresh off the hopper pan with condiments like coconut sambol, lunu miris (spicy onion sambol), and seeni sambol (spicy caramelised fried onions). A spicy curry like fish, chicken, jakfruit or potato will also taste amazing with hoppers.

Milk Rice is a traditional dish served during auspicious events and festivals, as well as for everyday breakfast. This simple preparation of rice cooked in fresh coconut milk yields a creamy, sweet and coconutty rice mixture. Milk rice is usually eaten with lunu miris, a spicy onion sambal. You can also pair it with seeni sambol and a curry like fish or chicken for a perfect Sri Lankan breakfast. 

Traditional dessert items like sweetmeats are usually prepared during festive events like Sinhala New Year's and weddings. Most traditional Sri Lankan sweets are plant-based, and free from eggs, dairy and refined sugars. You can find them in many sweet shops across the country, although homemade preparations are far superior. Be on the lookout for 'konde kavum' (oil cake), mung kavum (mung bean flour and treacle-based sweet), kokis, and kiri/ kalu dodol, made from kithul treacle, coconut milk and rice flour. Aluwa, udu wal, aasmi, milk toffee, coconut toffee, jaggery toffee, bibikkan, sesame seed rolls and halapa are also among the favourites.