Sri Lanka - Pol roti

I love baking, and especially making bread. What's more I travel a lot, and always try to find the local breads - to taste, of course, but also to see if I can figure out how they are made.

So a simple mix of these elements has to be a blog about breads, but not just ones I have discovered (although there will be some of those too) but ones that fit the national day of a country.

Today is Sri Lanka's national day - Independence Day since 1948 when the country achieved autonomy from the UK.

One bread that many Sri Lankans enjoy is pol roti (coconut bread) a flat bread often enjoyed at breakfast with a hot, hot curry.

These are super-easy to make (well, even accomplished Sri Lankan cooks don't have endless time at breakfast!) and cook quickly. In Sri Lanka every kitchen has a dead-flat cast-iron pan on which all these flat breads are cooked, but in western countries these may not be in every kitchen. So I found an alternative and it works better than the authentic one (and yes, I do have one of those too).

Here's my recipe using my trusty Cafe Press (electric sandwich toaster). If you choose to use this, make sure yours has flat plates.Or you can use a heavy cast-iron frypan or pancake pan.

Pol Roti (makes six small ones)

1 1/2 cups plain strong bread flour

3/4 cup desiccated coconut

good pinch salt

1/4 cup oil

140ml can coconut milk

extra water if needed

Place the flour, salt and coconut in a bowl and mix together. Pour in oil and coconut milk and mix together until the dough comes together (which it will do easily) adding more water if necessary. Cover with plastic and let rest for 30 minutes if possible.

Cut into six equal pieces and roll each into a ball. Oil the kitchen bench or a board and roll out each piece thinly to about a 15cm round. Preheat cafe press or pan and place one or two breads on the base. If using the cafe press you will not need to turn the breads as it cooks both sides at once. You can lift the lid a little towards to end to allow the bread to puff. 

If using a pan and the bread begins to puff, encourage it by holding a spatula  or teatowel gently on top until it does.

Enjoy these with curry or with almost anything you like. Enjoy!

Watch a video of a Sri Lankan chef making pol.

PS: After I posted this I checked another book, Flatbreads and Flavors, a favourite of mine by two amazing people, Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid, who have written a number of cookery books for many regions of the world. Each one is meticulously researched by one or the other of them on extensive field trips to the areas they are writing about.

And, yes, you guessed it! I found a different recipe for pol there. This one was almost a batter, and even more surprising, I could see from the notes I had written in on the recipe, I had cooked it. According to the date I had also put there it was in 1996!

(NOTE: to those purists who - like I used to be - feel it is almost sacrilege to write in a book, I have now rationalised it as 'this is my book, my research notes, and it's the best place to keep them'.)