Unlock Sri Lankan Flavors With O Tama Carey

Learning to cook Sri Lankan food doesn’t have to mean memorizing a list of traditional recipes. Just ask Australian chef, author and restauranteur, O Tama Carey. In her Milk Street class, , livestreaming on February 5th, she’ll give you the keys to start exploring Sri Lankan spices without limits, sharing three recipes that can add a Sri Lankan edge to your cooking. You’ll see her spin on chili crunch, learn to make a fragrant coconut milk gravy called Kiri Hodi, and build your own white curry powder—a balanced spice mix you can use as a base for building mild curries, or as a dry seasoning for finishing off dishes.

Read on to learn more about what inspires O Tama in the kitchen, what excites her most about her newly released cookbook, Lankan Filling, and where Sri Lankan cuisine is headed in her kitchen and beyond.

You've cooked a lot of different types of cuisine in your career. What inspired you to focus on Sri Lankan cooking?

So my mom's Sri Lankan, I'm half Sri Lankan, and I just felt like there was a bit of a space for it. I felt, in terms of restaurants in Sydney, there's not a lot of modern Sri Lankan restaurants. If you want Sri Lankan food, you kind of have to go to the suburbs. Also, it's very much an at-home cuisine anyway, even if you go to Sri Lanka—the best food’s always in people's homes. So I felt like it hadn't gotten that much exposure.

We used to have “hopper parties” where you hire some people to come and cook you hoppers (a Sri Lankan bowl-shaped pancake made with fermented rice flour batter), and they also make curries and stuff. For one birthday, we did a hopper party in my backyard. It was a massive party. A family came, they cooked hoppers and they made a couple of curries, and people were so excited about it, because it was such a different cuisine. No one had really experienced hoppers before. And, you know, from there it seemed to make sense. Sri Lankan food is something that I really love. I'd left my last job, didn't know what I wanted to do, and opening a Sri Lankan restaurant just seemed like a good idea at the time.

The thing that I love most about what I did there [at the restaurant] was talking to lots of second generation Sri Lankans, or people who've grown up here [in Australia], who've been able to bring other people to my restaurant and show them like, “This is what I mean by Sri Lankan food.”

What are you most looking forward to sharing from your new cookbook, Lankan Filling?

For me, it’s not any particular recipe but more about trying to show people how you can cook with the flavors of Sri Lanka, but you don't have to be tied by tradition. You can play with the flavors a lot more.

There's one recipe which you guys probably won't be able to cook over there, a kangaroo tail curry. Kangaroo tail is very similar to ox tail. It's a really gelatinous meat that works really nicely with slow cooking. But that particular recipe is a black curry, which is really quite distinct to Sri Lanka—the spices are quite strong, and there are lots of sweet spices. But kangaroo is such an Australian ingredient that you probably wouldn't find it much outside of Australia. So we’re doing traditional Sri Lankan flavors, but in an Australian context.

Do you often incorporate Sri Lankan flavors into Australian dishes?

Oh, definitely. But I think that's something that's slowly come about in my cooking. About a month after we closed the restaurant, I cooked a curry at home because we had all this goat. [I thought] Oh, my God, I haven't actually cooked a curry at home in I don't even know how long, because I was doing it all at the restaurant. It was really nice to just do a simple curry at home—but not a traditional one—just using what I had around.

For those who haven’t cooked Sri Lankan food before, what’s a good dish to start with?

I actually think one of the dishes that we're cooking in the Milk Street class, the Kiri Hodi, is a really perfect starting point because it's quite gentle. If you're scared of spice or chili, you know, it's a really gentle easing in. When I started cooking Sri Lankan professionally, understanding the spices was the way into Sri Lankan cooking. And of all of the spices, there’s nothing that you wouldn't get anywhere in any other cuisine. It's just the balance of it and the way you make curry powders and stuff—I think that can be scary for some people. But you just need to look at it like different flavors and balancing those different flavors. And once you're comfortable with that, then it's really easy to get those flavors into your cooking—and it doesn't have to be a strictly traditional Sri Lankan meal either.

What's special about the Sri Lankan white curry that you’re making in the class?

It's a bit of a misnomer because it's not really white, it's yellow. So basically, with Sri Lankan curry powders, you get red curries, black curries, all other curries. And when they say white or yellow curries, it's kind of a sign that it usually doesn't have chili in it, or maybe very little. And often white curry powders are a lot more simple than the other ones with only five to seven different ingredients.

And also the colors are a way to balance a meal. So often in food, you want an arrangement of colors, because they're going to give you different flavors, different textures. Generally, in a Sri Lankan meal, you would probably have a whole ring of dishes. So you'd have rice, you'd always have dal. When they have proteins, you usually only have one meat curry, or one fish thing. You wouldn't have lots of different curries, but you'd have sambals and you would have mallungs, like vegetable dishes. Then probably you'd have one main curry.

You're also making Sri Lankan chili crunch in the class, what was the inspiration for that?

That actually came about because we did a series of collaborations. I had a three-month series where each week I had a guest chef come and do their own version of a biryani. It was super fun; there were basically no rules. I have an American friend who is a chef from Miami, and I think Cuban. So we ended up doing a Cuban-Sri Lankan kind of collaboration biryani. Another chef did a Korean version of what a biryani would be with side dishes. But one of my friends, we would do a lot of the prep together, and we were just chatting. He was saying, "I want a chili crunch to go on top of it." And so we began talking about the ingredients of a traditional Chinese chili crunch, and how we could make it Sri Lankan—just tweak the spices slightly to give it a little hint of Sri Lankan flavor. Which, again, is so much of what my new book is about.

Where do you think the next generation of Sri Lankan cuisine is heading?

I think, especially for Sri Lankan food, there are not a lot of restaurants, and [currently] Sri Lankan restaurants are quite traditional. In Sri Lanka, you don't go out to a restaurant to eat Sri Lankan food there. If you go out to a fancy restaurant, you eat European food. There's a lot of Chinese food, but there's not that expectation that when you go to a restaurant, it’s the fancy version of Sri Lankan food. I don't think they have that whole process of modernizing it a little bit, whether it's in Sri Lanka or somewhere else. You see it happen in a lot of other cultures. You know, Thai people do it so beautifully, and Japanese and Italian—that's so common. It gets tweaked so much, but that hasn't happened as much in Sri Lankan cooking. That's been really slow there, but I think it is slowly starting to happen.

Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Pinterest.

And if you're looking for more Milk Street, check out our livestream cooking classes with our favorite chefs, home cooks and friends for global recipes, cooking methods and more.

Allie Chanthorn Reinmann

Allie Chantorn Reinmann is a Digital Staff Writer for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street. She’s a Thai-American chef who earned her diploma for Pastry and Baking Arts at The Institute of Culinary Education and worked professionally for over a decade honing her craft in New York City at places like Balthazar, Bien Cuit, The Chocolate Room, Billy’s Bakery and Whole Foods. Allie took her know-how from the kitchen to the internet, writing about food full-time at Lifehacker for three years and starting her own YouTube channel, ThaiNYbites. You can find her whipping up baked goods for cafés around Brooklyn, building wedding cakes and trying her hand (feet?) at marathon running. She’s working on her debut cookbook and lives in Brooklyn, NY.