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CeylonCookingAuthentic • Sri Lankan • Recipes

Pickles, Sambols and Preserves

Mango Pickle (Amba Achcharu)

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Unripe mango cut into batons and pickled sharp, hot and still crunchy.

  • Salted before pickling, so the fruit stays crunchy
  • Vinegar and mustard led, with almost no oil
  • Unripe green mango, cut into batons
  • Properly hot, the way achcharu should be
  • No artificial colour or preservative
$9

Available to pre-orderSKU: CC-PIK-MNG

Size: 200g

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Description

Green unripe mango, salted, then pickled with mustard, chilli and vinegar in the Sri Lankan achcharu style. Sharper and hotter than an Indian mango pickle and far less oily, with the fruit still holding a proper crunch rather than collapsing into a paste.

Sri Lankan achcharu is a different animal from the oil-heavy mango pickles most people know. There is almost no oil in it. The bite comes from vinegar, mustard and chilli, and the fruit stays firm.

That firmness is down to the salting. The mango batons sit in salt first so the water comes out, and only then does the vinegar go in. Skip that and you get soft fruit swimming in cloudy liquid within a week.

It goes with rice and curry, obviously, but the real use is smaller than that. A spoonful on the side of a plain plate of rice and dhal turns a dull lunch into something worth eating.

How to Use

  • A spoonful beside plain rice and dhal
  • With a rice and curry plate as the sharp element
  • In a cheese sandwich, which is not traditional and works
  • Alongside cold roast meat

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Frequently Asked

Oil, mostly. Indian mango pickles are usually preserved in a lot of mustard or sesame oil and taste rich and deep. Sri Lankan achcharu is built on vinegar, mustard and chilli with barely any oil, so it comes out sharper, hotter and much lighter.

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