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CeylonCookingAuthentic • Sri Lankan • Recipes

Curry Powders and Blends

Pol Sambol Mix

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The dry half of a pol sambol, ready for coconut, lime and five minutes of your time.

  • Real Maldive fish, not a fish-flavoured seasoning
  • Ground coarse, the way a sambol needs
  • Ratio already worked out, so nothing is guesswork
  • You supply the coconut and lime, because those must be fresh
  • Enough in a pouch for roughly ten sambols
$8

Available to pre-orderSKU: CC-MIX-POL

Size: 100g

  • Carefully packed and shipped to your door
  • 14-day replacement on damaged items
  • Secure checkout

Description

Everything that goes into pol sambol except the fresh coconut and the lime: dried red chilli, Maldive fish, onion, salt and a little black pepper, ground to the right coarseness. Add scraped coconut, squeeze a lime over it and work it together with your hands, which is the only part that cannot come from a pouch.

Pol sambol is the first thing most people cook from this island and the one they keep coming back to. Scraped coconut, chilli, Maldive fish, onion, lime, salt. Six things, and the whole point is that it is fresh.

So a mix has to be honest about what it can do. It cannot give you the coconut, because scraped fresh coconut is the dish. What it does give you is the part that takes the shopping trip: the right chilli, actual Maldive fish rather than a fish-flavoured powder, and the ratio already sorted.

Work it together with your fingers rather than a spoon. The heat of your hands is what pulls the chilli into the coconut and turns six ingredients into one thing.

How to Use

  • Mix with scraped coconut and lime, working it with your hands
  • Stir a spoonful into hot rice for a fast lunch
  • Rub over fish before frying
  • Fold into an omelette with onion

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Frequently Asked

Because pol sambol is fresh scraped coconut and everything else is seasoning. Dried coconut in a pouch would give you a dry, sandy sambol, and putting it in would be selling you the wrong dish. Buy a coconut, or use desiccated soaked briefly in warm water if you truly cannot.

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