By Home cook Sharmini Jayawardena
This delightful flat bread can be had as a main breakfast meal or for dinner or as a snack. Accompanied with one or all of the many Sri Sri Lankan sambols like lunumiris, katta sambol, seeni sambol and pol sambol. It’s ideal along with any vegetable curry, chicken curry, wild boar curry or mutton curry. Also goes well with fish curry. Eaten hot with a generous knob of melting butter on top is beyond! Kids and kids-at-heart alike love it with jam or honey 🍯.
Ingredients
5 cups plain wheat flour or unbleached flour
3 cups scrapped coconut
A few pinches of salt to taste
Room temperature light coconut milk as required
Method
1. Sift the flour. Scrape the coconut.
2. In a bowl, mix the flour and coconut together with the salt and set aside.
🔘At this point, you can add chopped onion and green chili for a truly exciting savoury pol roti or add raisins for a sweet delight for the kids, who simply love it. (This is optional).
3. Add little coconut milk at a time to the mixture at regular intervals while kneading the dough as you go along.
4. Aim for a smooth dough that does not stick to your fingers.
5. Form balls of the size of a golf ball.
6. Add some flour to a smooth surface like a pastry board, chopping board or a banana leaf lined plate, and flatten each ball of dough at a time, into a thin flat round bread.
7. Warm a skillet or flat iron over an open flame and place each flattened bread on it pressing it down with a flat spoon on each side.
8. Turn it over and apply pressure to the surface as you proceed to bake the bread.
9. Once it’s done, when the surface of the bread turns an opaque white/brown randomly, remove and continue with the rest of the flattened dough balls.
Serve “hot hot”, as they say in Sri Lanka 🇱🇰 😁😋
Serves 4-5 persons
