Kiri Kos

Sri Lankan mature jackfruit and its seeds simmered in coconut milk with turmeric, green chilli, curry leaves, and rampe until soft and creamy: the white curry of the jackfruit season

Origin: Colombo & Sri Lanka

From the journey of Jackfruit.

Kos is the Sinhala name for the jackfruit when it is full-grown but not yet ripe, and kiri kos, milk jackfruit, is the way it is most often cooked: the bulbs and their seeds simmered with green chilli, onion, garlic, turmeric, curry leaves, and rampe (pandan) in thin coconut milk until soft, then finished with thick milk, so that the curry is pale, creamy, and gently spiced. It is a kiri curry, one of the white curries of the Sinhala table, and the seeds, kos ata, go into the pot with the flesh. The stages Sri Lanka names today are the ones Robert Knox heard in the 1660s. Knox, an English sailor held captive in the kingdom of Kandy for nineteen years, recorded that the people called the young fruit polos, the full-grown fruit cose, and the ripe fruit warracha or vellas, and that they gathered it before it was ripe, 'boreing an hole in them, and feeling of the Kernel' to know whether it was ready, and then 'being cut in pieces they boil them, and eat to save Rice and fill their Bellies'. One fruit, he wrote, would feed six or seven men. The island still calls the tree bath gasa, the rice tree. In 1918 Arthur V. Dias began a campaign to plant it across Ceylon, handing out seeds and seedlings free; he is remembered as Kos Mama, Uncle Jack, and the trees his campaign planted are widely credited in Sri Lanka with carrying households through the rice shortages of the Second World War and of the 1970s.

Ingredients

Kos

  • 800 g mature unripe jackfruit bulbs (kos), seeded and cut into thick strips
  • 15 jackfruit seeds, white skin removed, halved
  • 0.5 tsp ground turmeric
  • 1 tsp salt

Curry

  • 1 red onion, sliced
  • 3 garlic cloves, sliced
  • 3 green chillies, slit
  • 1 sprig curry leaves
  • 5 cm piece of rampe (pandan leaf)
  • 3 cm piece of Ceylon cinnamon
  • 0.25 tsp fenugreek seeds
  • 1 tsp unroasted Sri Lankan curry powder
  • 350 ml thin coconut milk
  • 200 ml thick coconut milk

Method

  1. Oil your hands, the knife, and the board. Cut the jackfruit segment, pull out the bulbs, and set the seeds aside. Cut the bulbs into thick strips.
  2. Boil the halved seeds in water for 10 minutes; they take longer to cook than the flesh. Drain.
  3. Put the jackfruit, seeds, onion, garlic, green chillies, curry leaves, rampe, cinnamon, fenugreek, turmeric, curry powder, and salt into a clay pot or heavy saucepan and pour over the thin coconut milk.
  4. Cover and simmer gently for 25 minutes, stirring now and then, until the jackfruit is soft and the seeds are cooked through.
  5. Stir in the thick coconut milk and let it come just to a simmer for 3 to 4 minutes without boiling. Taste for salt.
  6. Serve with rice, pol sambol, and a dhal.

Notes

Kos is the full-grown but unripe fruit, starchier than the young polos and firmer than the ripe fruit. The young fruit makes polos curry, which the atlas also carries. Kiri kos is often better the next day, when the jackfruit has taken up the coconut milk.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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Ingredient originTrade or transit route
Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control
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