Cycle 3 – Item 325

25 (Sun) November 2012

Sri Lankan Devilled Chicken

1.5

by me

at home

-Oksu, Seongdong, Seoul, Republic of Korea-

with W, DJ, In-Laws

Project 30/30/30: 25 of 45 (see also 45/45/45)

Throughout this November, I am challenging myself to eat 30 dishes from 30 countries over the course of 30 consecutive days.

Sri Lanka is the 25th country.

Devilled Chicken is a Sri Lankan dish.  It consists of chicken – though beef and other alternatives are equally common – tomatoes, and peppers sautéed in a chili sauce.  As noted by chef Peter Kuruvita in his cookbook Serendip: “It is found on almost every menu in Sri Lanka; or you can request it, as everyone knows how to make it.”

Indeed, I did see many devilled dishes on restaurant menus during my recent trip to Colombo.  I never got around to ordering any of them, however, leaving me to assume that it would be hellishly hot, given the name of the dish and the Sri Lankan propensity for heat, which I’d quickly come to accept as a given.

So, my first devilled chicken would have to be home-made.  The recipe was from the aforementioned Serendip.  Arguably the simplest recipe in the book, it just required chopping the chicken and veggies into a small pieces, tossing them a pan for a few minutes, then adding “Sri Lankan chilli tomato ketchup.”  I took that to mean something along the lines of the KIST-brand Chilli & Garlic Sauce, which tastes exactly like spicy tomato ketchup, a product that I’d brought back from Sri Lanka .  The resulting dish, somewhat reminiscent of a sweet & sour stir-fry, felt East Asian (e.g., Chinese) rather than South Asian (e.g., Indian); Sri Lankan cuisine generally tends toward the latter.  Not what I’d expected, not really my kind of thing.

(See also GLOBAL FOOD GLOSSARY)