Sri Lankan · Sauce
Pol Sambola
- Easy
- 15 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
Leads with a warm current of chile, acid holding everything up to the light.
Ingredients
- 200 g freshly scraped coconut
- 15 g Maldive fish, umbalakada
- 1 small red onion, 60 g, roughly chopped
- 6 dried red chillies, or 2 tbsp Sri Lankan chilli powder
- 1 tsp salt
- 0.25 tsp ground black pepper
- juice of 1 lime
Equipment
Mortar & pestle
The skills inside
The words inside
Mortar & Pestle: Molcajete, Suribachi, Granite
Allergen screen
Found: fish
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Pound the dried chillies with the salt in a mortar to a coarse flake, then add the Maldive fish and work it until no hard splinters remain.
- Add the onion and pound to a rough wet pulp; the mixture turns bright red as the onion water releases the chilli.
- Work in the coconut a handful at a time, pressing rather than striking, until it is stained an even brick red and beads of oil show on the pestle.
- Squeeze in the lime, add the pepper, and press the sambola into a fist a few times; it should hold its shape when released.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Mashing & puréeing 114 recipes
- Smooth to the degree the dish asks for, judged on the tongue rather than by eye: no lumps, no fibres, no grit, unless texture is the point.
- No gluey elasticity: a spoonful drops cleanly off the spoon rather than stretching in a rope behind it.
- The consistency holds: it mounds on a spoon and stays there, neither slumping flat nor standing so stiff that a spoon has to cut it.
- Nothing separates on the plate: no water or fat weeping out into a ring within a minute of serving.
- The colour is even throughout, with no streaks of unincorporated fat, liquid, or seasoning at the edges of the bowl.
Where it goes wrong A starchy ingredient met a high-speed blade, so the cells burst and released their starch: what should be light comes out as an elastic glue that lifts off the spoon in one mass.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Off-dry Riesling (Mosel Kabinett)
- Also Right
- Gewürztraminer or off-dry Chenin
- From the Taps
- Crisp lager or pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- Agua fresca or iced jasmine tea
Sugar, cold, and low alcohol are the fire code: sweetness tames capsaicin while acid resets the palate; tannin would fan the flames.
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