Sri Lanka's national cuisine is rooted in plant-based foods. It includes ingredients such as rice, corn, peas, lentils, various legumes, and a variety of grain legume flours and vegetables, all of which are fundamental components of the local cuisine.
The basis of most national dishes in Sri Lanka is, of course, rice, eaten with curries, spices, and other ingredients, with seafood and fruit, with coconut and vegetables, and in the most unthinkable combinations.
Food is traditionally cooked in handmade earthenware or metal dishes over an open fire. In traditional Sri Lankan cuisine, there are a huge number of spices and sauces, so it is almost impossible to recognize the original taste of the product. The most popular spice is curry. Also common are spicy anchar sauce made from fruits with spices, red-hot masala sauce, thick coconut milk mithikiri, thinly sliced mixture of onions with salt, dried fish, red pepper and lemon lunumiris, ginger root in syrup and other exotic seasonings.
Lankans consume a huge number of fruits and greens. They prepare salads from a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables, as well as simply greens in bunches or as green salads, using both traditional tomatoes, peppers, onions or bamboo shoots, and a variety of exotic herbs, leaves of special trees, banana palm or cactus flower, as well as some algae. Meat is not eaten much, as cows are sacred animals here. But seafood is eaten in countless quantities and in all kinds.
Foods of Sri Lanka
- Roti. Rice cakes are an everyday dish of Lankan cuisine.
- Appu. Pancakes made from rice flour and coconut milk. Slightly similar in appearance to ours, but much paler and more transparent in appearance.
- Indiappa. Rice vermicelli. Cooked, of course, from rice flour.
- Pitta. Steamed rice-coconut mixture in a bamboo stalk.
- Kiribad. Pink rice cooked in coconut milk.
The main beverage of Sri Lanka is, of course, tea. They also drink a lot of fruit juice and coconut milk. But for the local alcoholic drinks, it's better for travelers not to indulge. Although the alcoholic drink Arak, as well as gin and whiskey of local production, are very interesting to taste, the process of purifying local alcohol from syrupy oils is practically absent, and it may not agree with European digestive systems. However, the local beer "Lyon" is prepared according to classical recipes. It is inexpensive and quite tasty.
