Making Chicken Curry in the Wilderness

What do you do when you’re tired from all those bushwalking adventures, but not quite in the mood to while away your afternoon in the wild bath or hammock? Well, learning to make traditional Sri Lankan chicken curry in 2260-acre savannah wilderness is essentially bucket list material! The Ahaspokuna Bushwalks Camp dining tent isn’t limited to just eating in the wild, but cooking in the wild as well! This is no ordinary masterclass; you’ll learn to make dishes enhanced by special ingredients and herbs, sourced directly from the surrounding forest patches with Ahaspokuna’s executive chef! We picked chicken curry, as our in-camp activity for the day, to be cooked in traditional clay pots with herbs foraged from the wild.

Side note: If you’re not a fan of shortcuts i.e. mise en place, let the chef know early. We started with marinating the chicken in vinegar, tamarind juice, curry powder, salt and pepper. Then heated coconut oil in a clay pot and sautéed sliced onion, green chilles, cardamom pods, cloves, curry leaves, ginger, garlic, and a cinnamon stick. Before adding each ingredient the chef introduced us to the local names of each spice and let us get a whiff of it. Sri Lankan spices are quite bold and wonderfully pungent, and you can’t help but feel a little light headed afterwards!

We then filled the fragrant, sizzling spice pot with the chicken, a little water, and tomato paste. We let that simmer and then added roasted curry powder and coconut milk. Finally, it was time to tuck in! This private culinary class really gave us the whole Sri Lankan food experience, complete with having it as the pièce de résistance for lunch. Perhaps it’s something other safari camps offer, but it was definitely cooler doing it in secluded wilderness with the addition of foraging for herbs from the forest!