Hoppers

Hoppers are a Sri Lankan-style rice-flour preparation cooked by swirling batter around a rounded hopper pan. Roshani Wickramasinghe’s selected plain version uses a long-fermented rice-flour, yeast and water base, followed by coconut milk, sugar and salt.

The author recalls hoppers as a childhood breakfast and describes their later place as dinner and street food. She favours the long-fermented version for its fermented flavour and describes the cooked hoppers as crispy, tangy and coconutty.

Rice flour, a little yeast and the main water are mixed into a thick dough-like paste. It is covered and fermented for the recipe’s specified long rest, until bubbles appear and the paste rises a little.

Sugar and coconut milk are then mixed into the same paste, with the milk added gradually to reach a moderately thick batter. After a further covered rest, salt is mixed in.

For the selected nonstick hopper pan, the author skips her egg-and-oil pan-conditioning step. A ladle of batter is poured into the heated pan, swirled to coat its inside and cooked covered to make each plain hopper.