Felicity Cloake’s perfecct Sri Lankan chicken curry. Photograph: Robert Billington/The Guardian. Food styling: Loïc Parisot. View image in fullscreen Felicity Cloake’s perfecct Sri Lankan chicken curry. Photograph: Robert Billington/The Guardian. Food styling: Loïc Parisot. How to cook the perfect ... Curry How to make the perfect Sri Lankan chicken curry – recipe There are as many variations are there are cooks, but every interpretation of kukul mas bears the country’s classic bold aromatics and adrenaline-pumping flavours
Felicity Cloake Sun 6 Sep 2026 14.00 CEST Last modified on Sun 6 Sep 2026 14.02 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google “E very family in our sunny little island craves this creamy chicken,” says Sri Lankan journalist Zinara Rathnayake , “devouring each morsel with carbs of choice: string hoppers, thin rice noodle mats; hoppers, bowl-shaped pancakes; and kiribath , slender rice cooked with coconut milk. All our family recipes may slightly vary, but this glorious dish pins down the labour and love that goes into every Sri Lankan curry.”
After all, Sri Lanka is a country that’s “rich in spices”, chef Peter Kuruvita explains. “Most Sri Lankan cooking,” he writes in Lands of the Curry Leaf , “features unapologetically punch-you-in-the-face, get-the-adrenaline-pumping flavours. But [in part thanks to tropical crops such as coconut, lemongrass and pandan leaf] the heat is more an intensity of spice than actual physical ‘chilli heat’.” Boldly aromatic rather than delicately fragrant, rich and light at the same time, kukul mas , which SH Fernando Jr’s book Rice & Curry calls “a mainstay of Sri Lankan cuisine”, is surprisingly quick to make once you’ve prepared, or bought, the spice blend, yet it tastes as if it’s been simmering for hours.
View image in fullscreen ‘Unapologetically punch-you-in-the-face’ spices: SH Fernando Jr’s Sri Lankan chicken curry. All thumbnail photographs by Felicity Cloake. “Choosing a chicken is a fine art,” Kuruvita writes in his book Serendip , “and there are two types: a curry chicken and a broiler … The chickens were always sold skinless, as it was a lot quicker for the men to rip the feathers off with the skin rather than to pluck them. The meat was cut up for us and placed in a large ‘elephant ears’ leaf. When we got home, all we had to do was add the spices and cook the curry.” Most recipes indeed call for whole chickens, cut up on the bone – a good cleaver should make this easy, or, if you’re buying from a butcher, they’ll do this for you even quicker. That said, I’m with Fernando , who writes: “I use thighs with the bone in when I make this dish as breast meat tends to dry out.” If, like Karan Gokani of Hoppers , you use thigh fillets, you may wish, as he does, to replace the water with chicken stock; I also favour removing the skin, but that’s up to you.
Many recipes, as Kuruvita notes, simply add the chicken to the pot as it is, but Gokani, Kuruvita and Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid in their book Mangoes & Curry Leaves all marinate the meat first: Gokani in ginger, garlic, turmeric, curry powder and salt; Kuruvita in vinegar and curry powder; and Alford and Duguid in curry powder and garlic. Though all the curries taste great, the marinated chicken comes out a clear winner with my testers and I, “because it seems to marry better with the sauce”. If you’ve bought, or already made your curry powder, there’s no need to delay cooking for too long, but it’s well worth blending it while…