Egg Hoppers, with or without the egg. Thanks Michael.

So I just finished reading Michael Ondaatje's The Cat's Table, which may or may not be an autobiographical or fictional account of his own voyage from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka, of course) to England when he was 11 years old.

I visited Sri Lanka in the 90s, and I've always loved reading Ondaatje. The English Patient is his most famous novel because it was made into a major Hollywood film, but In the Skin of the Lion is also a fantastic novel, and his poetry, in particular The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-handed Poems, and There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do: Poems are two of my favorite works of post-modern poetry. Elimination Dance/La danse eliminatoire is irrationally funny to me. I love his writing.

He is also roguishly handsome:



Anyway, in The Cat's Table, the narrator, whose name is Michael, and may or may not be the author as a young boy, reminisces with one of the other soon to be ex-patriots about the wonderful Sri Lankan food, as immigrants are wont to do. Food is such a powerful receptacle and carrier of memory and identity. These poor souls have not even been a week out of port before they are missing Sri Lankan food. And with good reason. It is some of the best food in the world. They talk about eating Egg Hoppers, a singularly Sri Lankan dish. I had Egg Hoppers in Sri Lanka, and it is true that they are wondrously divine and culinarily mysterious. And after reading that chapter, I wanted some too.

Knowing that they are notoriously difficult to make, I decided I would attempt to tackle them in my Canadian kitchen, as I stared out into an April snow storm. I felt like a bit of a fool. I mean, most self-respecting Sri Lankans would not do  this. They would never be so arrogant as to make them-- not when the Egg Hopper man who sells them just up the street makes them so perfectly. And they are not something that you generally plan to make. They are the kind of food that you kind of just suddenly want- and need- so you run out and get one from that ideally situated Egg Hopper man- fresh and hot off the grill. With or without the egg.

Fool that I am.

The first thing to realize about Egg Hoppers is that they may or may not have an egg in them. You can order them with an egg, but you don't have to. The essential part of them is the Hopper, or more correctly, the Aappa- a delicate but hearty coconut rice crepe. They had me at the words coconut and crepe.

They take a lot of planning ahead to make. The batter must be allowed to rise for 8 hours. So, if you want them for breakfast, prepare the batter the night before so that the batter can rest and rise overnight. If you want them for supper, prepare the batter in the morning.

You would think that with two little kids I would have something better to do. And I do. But this was more fun than vacuuming and washing diapers. Yes, I wash diapers.

Here's what you do:

Make a yeast sponge:

      2 tsp yeast granules
      1 tbsp sugar
      1/8 cup lukewarm water

once it is foamy and active, add it to:

4 cups rice flour ( I didn't have 4 cups of rice flour, so I ended up using 1.5 cups of rice flour, 1.5 cups of potato flour, and 1 cup of quinoa flour. I don't advise doing this as it altered the taste too much- just use rice flour)
1 cup lukewarm water 
1 cup lukewarm beer

mix well

Drink the remaining bottle of beer and let this batter sit until it has doubled in quantity,  for approx. 8 hours. Finish reading The Cat's Table.

When the batter is ready- it will look like this:

now add:
1 13 oz can of coconut milk + maybe 1/2 can of lukewarm water, depending on whether your batter needs to be runnier.
2 tbsp sugar

 and mix it well.

Heat a bit of peanut oil in a wok over medium heat. When the wok is warm, ladle some batter into the wok. And swirl it around. This is the magic part.

Continue to cook it until it looks like this in the pan:

and like this when you take it out and flip it onto a plate:

Now, if you wanted your Hopper with an egg, you needed to add it before you remove the Hopper from the pan.

I prefer my hoppers with other accompaniments. For instance, I actually used some more of that darn left over Easter turkey made into butter chicken (well butter turkey, I guess, but no one would know what I was talking about) and poured it over the Hopper. I also ate one Hopper straight up with chutney, and one with Salsa Verde. Why not? It was delicious, if culturally hybrid. And I was hungry.

And for a moment- just a moment, I was transported back to that dreamy, troubled jewel of an Isle in the Indian Ocean.

xo Jo