What? You don’t know rampeh leaf? I guess that’s OK. I didn’t know what it was until a few years ago, which is quite embarrassing given my Sri Lankan heritage.

Rampeh, otherwise known as pandanus amaryllifolius ,or screwpine, is a tree that grows in South East Asia. They can look pretty damn bizarre as they’ve got roots that stick out into the air, like a mangrove tree.  The leaves have a very distinctive smell, which is caramel-like and nutty, and for this reason they’re cultivated and used to flavour food.

I mostly come across rampeh in Sri Lankan cookery, although I’ve seen it mentioned in Thai and Indonesian recipes as well. Usually, a few inches of the leaf  are tied into a little knot and fried up with spices in the early stages of making curries.

Before this week, I’d never cooked with rampeh before, mostly because it’s a bit of a nuisance to find in Britain. You need to go to a specialist shop and even they seem to run out of it reasonably quickly. But, oddly enough, Dad had come across a shop which stocked loads of the stuff,  in Paris of all places! So he brought home a load and I took a few leaves for myself, in time to use them for Weekend Herb Blogging. 

Rampeh and some spices

Since everyone in the world apart from me already knew what weekend herb blogging was before Scott at Real Epicurean decided to host it, I don’t there’s any point in me saying much about it. If you don’t know about it yet, then get with it already!  Start by reading this post at Kalyn’s Kitchen and Scott’s post here.

Anyway, since I conveniently had my rampeh, I thought I’d take the opportunity to make a  authentic (hopefully) Sri-Lankan chicken curry. I did this a few months back, long before I got the hang of this photography business. I didn’t have rampeh then, so it seemed a good dish to try to find out what difference rampeh really made.

My parents make a load of Sri-Lankan curry powder in one go to save time. I don’t make Sri Lankan curries often enough to do this so I tend to do enough for the one curry I’m making that day. The spices above  (cumin, mustard, cinnamon, cloves and cardamom seeds) are dry roasted in a pan seperately until golden brown to enhance their flavour and then ground together into a fine powder. In that picture there should also be fennel and coriander seed but Goon was still rooting around in the cupboards for those when I took the picture. 

The powder you get is much darker than normal curry powder from the local store. The roasting gives it this deeper colour and also enhances the flavour and  aroma.

So now to make the curry. I used skinned chicken thighs and drumsticks for this because, wherever you go in Sri-Lanka, that is what the chicken curry is made from. I have NO IDEA what the hell they do with the breast and wings, but I’ve certainly never seen them in a genuine Sri-Lankan curry!

The recipe for the Sri Lankan Chicken Curry (Kukul Mas)  has been here for ages. I tweaked it just now to include the rampeh. Serve it with kiribath (or string hoppers if you’re lucky enough to have them) and curried lentils or vegetables. 

The verdict on Rampeh: There was a definite difference in flavour between the curry without rampeh and this one, but it’s very hard to describe. Nuttier maybe? I don’t  know -  the flavour is so unique. Anyway, it was a GOOD flavour.

So, my rampeh leaves have now gone in the freezer until the next time I want them, along with some nice looking curry leaves that I’d used to make the lentil side dish for this meal. I’m actually scared by how much that curry looks like the chicken I’d find in Sri-Lanka. Particulary the  dodgy ones you can buy from the little roadside “hotels,” which are damn tasty but tend to leave you bathroom-bound for a few days after.

Fortunately there was none of that with this meal…  just tasty, spicy chicken and lentils with creamy, garlicky kiribath, washed down with a nice medium Riesling from Jacob’s Creek.