Seeni Sambol - Sri Lankan sweet onion sambol

To make your new year table complete here is my seeni sambol recipe. The longer you cook it, the better it gets. It also freezes well so it makes sense to make more than you need to heat up later. In fact it sometimes tastes better when you reheat it! I bet it can also be canned or put in a jar. It's best to make it at least the day before you need it so that the flavours can intensify.

Preparation time: Minimum 2 hours (up to 4 hours); makes 4 cups 

Ingredients:

1 kg	Red onions, Big onions or Bombay onions (depending on where you live and how old you are!)
250 g	Shallots (Rathu lunu, small red onions)
1/4 cup	Oil
3 sprigs	Curry leaves
2 inches	Rampe leaves (pandan leaves)
200 g	Tomatoes, diced
1 tbsp.	Garlic pulp
1 tbsp.	Ginger pulp
1 bulb	Lemon grass (sera)
3	Chilies
2 tsp.	Chili powder (you can put more or less depending on your taste)
2 tsp.	Salt
10	Cardamoms, bruised
10	Cloves
4 inches	Cinnamon (Sri Lankan)
2 tbsp.	Tamarind pulp
1 tbsp.	Lemon or lime juice
1/4 cup	Sugar
250 g	Maldive fish (makes it non-vegetarian but more traditional)

Method:
This is quite easy to make. The most trouble you will have is with getting the ingredients (if you don't usually cook Sri Lankan food and don't live in Sri Lanka) and cutting the onions. The part I hate the most is peeling and cutting the onions. I cry, my nose runs, my glasses get sticky, and the kitchen stinks!! To reduce the pain I use a kitchen machine to do the actual cutting. The difference between a refined seeni sambol and a regular one is how fine your onions are cut. The finer the better.

Above you can see what I mean by red onions and shallots. European shallots are much larger than Sri Lankan ones and thus easier to cut and clean. If you want to make your life easy you can just use the bigger onions (so 1.25 kg). If you want more taste you can use a ratio of 1:1. 

Make sure you have prepared all your spices before you continue. Bruise the lemon grass and the cardamoms (i.e. hit them with a rolling pin so that they release their flavour). 

Cinnamon, ginger, green chilies, garlic, lemon grass

Cinnamon (again!), cloves, chili powder, cardamom

The amount of chili you use will depend on your taste. (I cut my green chilies into large pieces so that they can be picked out). The best cinnamon to use is Sri Lankan. It is still rolled by hand and gives the best flavour. As you might notice some of my spices are frozen i.e. lemon grass, chilies, rampe and curry leaves. 

Red onions, rampe, curry leaves

I find that they keep best frozen. Curry leaves are okay dried but freezing really retains the flavour of the leaves much better. I don't like using pre-pulped garlic and ginger. It tastes weird, so I grate mine fresh each time.

Once you have everything ready heat the oil over moderately high heat and once the oil is hot fry the curry leaves, rampe and a handful of chopped onions. Once the onions are soft you can add the rest of the onions and then the tomatoes, garlic, ginger, lemon grass, chilies, chili powder, salt,  cardamoms, cloves, cinnamon and tamarind. 

In Sri Lanka this dish is not traditionally vegetarian. Usually people add a type of dried fish called Maldive fish. It is very hard and used to be only available as a hard block. I remember my mother chipping off pieces of the rock hard fish with a nut cracker while watching the sun go down over the hills. Knives couldn't get through it and electric grinders would break. Sri Lankan's usually pound it in this primitive pounder (Vangediya).  

Nowadays you can buy it pre-pounded in Sri Lanka. It's hard to get anywhere other than a Sri Lankan store and even they might not carry it. But if you like fish add this to your sambol now.

Stir everything together and cook over a low flame forever. 

I cooked mine for 1.5 hours. After which I put up the heat and cooked off all the moisture. Be careful to stir to prevent burning. For some reason this took around 30 minutes, but I was in the kitchen anyways! Now it's time to add the sugar and lemon juice. Stir them well. After that I let it cook on low heat for another 15 - 20 minutes, got bored, put the cooker off and went to bed. Of course you could cook it for less.

This morning I picked out all the inedible spices like the rampe, cinnamon, lemon grass, and put it in a bowl to serve with milk rice for new year. 

Actually looks darker than this!

You can eat seeni sambol with anything. It goes exceptionally well with milk rice. Another much loved way to eat it is in seeni sambol buns. Just make a regular bread dough and stuff this inside. We also use it to fill sandwiches with thickly spread butter. Plus you can eat it as a side with rice and curry. Try it, you'll love it!