Photo: AntanO · CC BY-SA 4.0
Lamprais (Stock Rice and Curries Baked in Banana Leaf)
A banana-leaf parcel from Sri Lanka's Dutch Burgher community: rice fried in butter and cooked in meat stock, with a meat curry, an aubergine and plantain curry, meatballs and an onion sambol, each made separately, wrapped in one leaf and baked.
Ingredients
- Stock and rice
- bone-in chicken thighs · meat for the curry, bones for the stock600 g
- beef brisket · for the curry300 g
- water1.2 L
- short-grain rice · Sri Lankan samba rice is traditional400 g
- butter or ghee60 g
- onion · thinly sliced1
- cardamom pods4
- cloves4
- cinnamon1 piece
- curry leaves · optional1 sprig
- Meat curry
- roasted Sri Lankan curry powder2 tbsp
- garlic4 cloves
- ginger1 thumb
- coconut milk200 ml
- Aubergine and plantain curry
- aubergines2
- green plantain · or a firm potato1
- turmeric0.5 tsp
- vinegar2 tbsp
- sugar1 tsp
- Frikkadels
- minced beef250 g
- breadcrumbs · half in the mix, half to coat40 g
- egg1
- To finish and wrap
- seeni sambol (sweet onion sambol)4 tbsp
- hard-boiled eggs · frying them is optional4
- banana leaves · about 40cm square4
- neutral oil as needed
- salt to taste
Steps
- ⏲ 60 min
Take the meat off the chicken bones for the curry and simmer the bones in 1.2L of water for an hour. Skim, strain and salt the stock.
- ⏲ 50 min
Meat curry: fry the garlic and ginger, add the chicken and beef with the curry powder, then the coconut milk and a little water, and simmer until the meat is tender and the sauce has cooked down thick.
- ⏲ 15 min
Cut the aubergine and plantain into long pieces, rub with turmeric and salt and fry until golden, then toss with the vinegar and sugar over the heat until almost no liquid is left.
- ⏲ 10 min
Mix the mince with half the breadcrumbs, the egg, salt and pepper and roll into small balls. Coat in the rest of the crumbs and fry, turning, until cooked through.
- ⏲ 25 min
Melt the butter in a pan and fry the onion and whole spices. Add the rinsed, drained rice and fry it until the grains turn translucent, then pour in hot stock at one and a half times the rice by volume, cover and cook gently for 15 minutes; leave off the heat for 10.
- ⏲ 10 min
Pass the banana leaves over a flame to soften them. On each leaf lay a mound of rice and arrange meat curry, aubergine curry, two frikkadels, sambol and a halved egg around it.
- ⏲ 23 min
Fold each leaf into a square parcel and secure it with string or a cocktail stick. Bake at 180°C for 20-25 minutes, until hot right through. Serve in the leaf and let each person open their own.
Variations
- Three meats. Traditional lamprais puts three meats, such as beef, pork and chicken, into one curry. This recipe uses two.
- Belacan. A spoonful of fermented prawn belacan belongs in the original parcel.
- Fish or vegetarian. Modern versions use a single meat, fish, or no meat at all.
- Fried egg. A deep-fried hard-boiled egg is common, but it is not part of the traditional set.
Tips
- Fry the rice in butter first. Until the grains turn translucent.
- Cook it in stock, not water. The bones from the curry chicken make it.
- Cook the curries down. A wet curry soaks the rice.
- Soften the leaves over a flame. They fold without tearing.
- The oven only heats it. Everything inside is already cooked.
More detail and the reasons why (2)
- What the bake is for. A wrapped dish usually does one of two things: it is cooked after it is wrapped, or it is assembled from finished parts and nothing happens to it afterwards (wrapping and sealing). Lamprais sits between them. Every part is cooked separately, and the parcel still goes into the oven. The oven cooks nothing; it heats the parcel through, with the curries and the rice pressed together inside one leaf. Frying the rice in butter is what lets that work. As cooking rice puts it, fat coats each grain and slows the water reaching its starch, so the rice can bake against wet curry and still come out as separate grains. Cantonese lo mai gai also cooks its rice before wrapping, but for another reason: a sealed parcel in a steamer has no water inside it.
- Dutch for a packet of rice. According to English Wikipedia the name comes from Dutch lomprijst, and the dish was created by the Burgher community that grew up while the Dutch ruled the coast of Sri Lanka. It is thought to have roots in Javanese lemper, glutinous rice wrapped in banana leaf, and its first appearance in print is a 1929 cookery book. Set beside kiribath from the same country, it shows rice cooked in coconut milk against rice cooked in meat stock.
The basics behind this dish
- Browning and the Maillard ReactionMeat fails to brown for one of three reasons: it is wet, the pan is cool, or you put too much in at once. Plus how the brown film stuck to the pan becomes your sauce.
- Cooking Meat: Temperature, Resting, and Cutting Against the GrainDoneness is a core temperature, not a number of minutes. What resting actually does, how to handle a thick cut, and why the direction you slice changes the texture.
- Knife Skills: Grip, Cuts, and Why Size MattersHow you hold the knife matters more than how fast you cut. The pinch grip, the claw hand, and why uniform size is a cooking decision rather than a cosmetic one.
More of the same kind
More from this country
Sri Lankan →
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