Sri Lankan Street Food - Egg Hoppers + Kottu Roti in Colombo, Sri Lanka

Posted by Raj Mohamed on June 22nd, 2019

Great way to start this Sri Lankan food tour. We're moving on to the next place. (upbeat music) - Hello, hello! - Good thank you, how are you? Oh, yeah! So actually the day that we made this food tour, the street food, the Colombo street food tour, this restaurant was closed. So we had to come back the next day. But this is a spot that Ruzaina said we could not miss, right? - No, no, not in this area. - In this area this is one of your favorite spots? And what are we going to eat here? - Uh, what do you want? There's an array of stuff - Definitely everything. - You want the beef as well? - Sure. How are you? - Hi, I'm good, fine. - Good good, you like the food here? - Yes.

- Great, we got here at the right time. The food is fresh, it smells so good. You walk inside and you smell the aroma, like filling the humidity of the air. - Okay, it's pumpkin. - So this is one of those restaurants where they have everything in the cabinet display, and it's such an incredibly hard to chose what to order. So we just decided not to make that choice, and just to get everything they have available. So they pushed us out, they were nice to dish us out little portions of everything. We put chili all over it. There's coconut, is that a symbol? - Yeah, that is a coconut sambol.

And there's the onions sambol. - Oh nice! - This is the salted fish - Oh that's salted fish with-- - With capsicum and onions and tomatoes, it's like a caramel, a caramel ala the dala. - The salted fish. Scoop some of that salted fish with that chili capsicum. Oh, that looks good. Some pumpkin. It's a pumpkin curry? - Yes, it's pumpkin. - Have a little bit of that. Nice, yes the coconut sambol. Alright, I think that's good to begin with. He just brought us over some fried-- - Poppadoms and chilies. - Poppadoms and chilies. that is a necessary addition. - It is a must. - Alright, I think I'm going to begin with that salted fish. Mix it in with the rice. Mmm mmm. Oh, yeah. Oh, wow, that's good! Okay, the salted fish, such a depth of like salty flavor.

And the chilies, kinda crisp, kinda like just flavorful, like almost citrusy tasting. This one is the pumpkin curry. Oh, and you can see just how the sauce is like made up of pumpkin, it's kinda like disintegrated into it. I'm going to re-pumpkin. Actually the entire sauce is just liquid pumpkin. (laughter) - Good right? - There's coconut milk in it too, right? Oh, wow, oh that's insane! - Yeah. - That's like liquid pumpkin with liquid coconut milk. The richness of it, the like creaminess of it. - So much flavor and it's so good! Cheers! - Cheers! Oh, just completely crispy. Not really spicy, but really fragrant. Sri Lankan fired chicken. And what's the batter, is there spices in it, it there--? - Yeah, they cook it in like a gravy sauce.

- Okay. Get my first time, my first time for Sri Lankan fried chicken. - Yep! - Mmm, yeah. It is good. It's got a light spice but really crispy. And then this fried chicken is always good. - Aha, yeah. - It's kinda like dehydrated, you see the chilies on there, you see the curry leaves again, you see the onions and the tomato. Oh, it's good. Kinda gotta like chew with the grain. It is a little bit tough. But because it's such a huge chunk, you've kinda gotta like, you wanna like nibble off little bites at a time. - Sorry. - No it's okay. And then dal just to like wrap it all up. Onions sambol. It's like a creamy dressing. Oh, it's amazing, yeah. It's wonderful.

- They make it sometimes with coconut milk, and sometimes with curd. (speaks in a foreign language) - Thank you very much. The restaurant is called Milano Hotel. Amazing food, the mix of dishes. That salted fish, what else was, yeah, everything was just good. That's just a classic rice throw down meal. Yeah, and those are some like, yeah, hearty portions of delicious Sri Lankan food. Alright. (upbeat music) It would not be a complete Sri Lankan street food tour of Colombo without eating egg hoppers. And egg hoppers, it's one of my favorite, like, snacks in Sri Lanka. It all begins with a batter that's made from rice flour and coconut milk. And it has this like runny texture. As soon as the rounded pans are hot, he scoops in a ladle of the batter into the rounded pans, and it's all about that flick of the wrist. Because the key of hoppers is to have it be the batter be thin around the edges, but be thicker on the bottom.

You can either order plain hoppers or an egg hopper. If you order the egg he drops in an egg immediately, he waits 'til it's cooked and then one version he makes, he like whips up the yolks, so that pops the yolks so that it's like a scrambled egg in the middle. And then one version he makes with the entire yolk still in place, so you get to pop it on your own. I got the two different versions of the egg hoppers, one with the yolk still in. It's just like an entire fried egg in the middle of a circular concave, it's like an edible bowl. It's like a contact lens, or an edible contact lens. Roll it up, the sauce is all on the inside. It's already starting to drip and that's before the yolk is even popped. - Mmm. - Mmm. Oh, yeah! Oh, that's awesome. - Yeah. - The sauce is incredible. Really what I love so much about hoppers is the dual textures, the crispy edges, the like spongy, soft bottom center.

And I don't even think I've hit that old yet. - No, you haven't, you haven't. - I need to take another bite. - Mmm, mmm. - Mmm, mmm. Oh, yeah. I think I got that entire yolk in one bite. It's actually dripping down my arm. (laughter) - One more re-saucing and I think I can finish it all in one bite. I think that's a one-biter now. This could be a messy bite. Mmm hmm. And that right there is one of the best Sri Lankan snacks you could ever have. That is exactly what you want to be eating. Nice to meet you. When you have an afternoon snack in Sri Lanka. Yeah, it's so tasty, it's so good, it's so like. It's so simple but all about that experience, that flick of the wrist to swirl the batter perfectly so that the textures are correct. (upbeat music) We drove over to an area, a big section of Colombo called Pettah. This is a market area, it's one of the busiest, business districts of Colombo. The railroad station is here. It's really like the heart, the beating center of Colombo. And so we're going to walk around here, we're going to eat a lot of food, and just explore.