Iddi Appe - Stringhoppers - Tonight

Stringhoppers, or Idde Appe, are mostly a breakfast food in Sri Lanka where the women there often awake around 4am to cook them, especially when friends and the extended family are visiting. You can also snack on them as you travel around the country, stopping at small stalls along the roadsides. If you do this, be sure to also pick up some coconut sambol and a lentil curry with lots of gravy.

In our family, stringhoppers are a  festive food. Most family celebrations will have trays of them and accompanying curries and sambols filling the dining table.We still smile at the memory of our daughter's friend on her first sleepover at our house when she ate them for the first time. A few days later her mother remarked that we certainly ate different  food and that her daughter had told her that the "grasshoppers" were lovely. 

So, what are these stringhoppers? The best description I can give is that they are strings of dough which has been forced through a perforated disc on to mats and then steamed so that they look like soft vermacelli mats.

Stringhoppers, Idde Appe, made from red and white rice

In the "old" days we made this special food by steaming the flour, either wheat or rice, for about thirty minutes and then engaging in the tiresome process of pounding the resulting lump into power again, sifting it at least three times to obtain the finest powder possible. Nowadays we simply go down to the local Asian food store, especially one that stocks Sri Lankan food, and pick up the ready to cook packets of flour.

Stringhopper equipment and flour

The equipment needed is a steamer, cooking mats and the machine to force the dough through small holes in strings. The main ingredients are the flour, hot water and salt. Red rice is apparently more nutritious with a lower GI than most white rice varieties but it is not popular with small children so we generally make both red and white stringhoppers.

Start of the Stringhopper making process 

The present Stringhopper Cook in our family has perfected the traditional recipie with the addition of an egg. [ Sorry to any traditional Sri Lankan cooks reading this with horror. Just give it a go yourself and you may just like the result.] So, put the flour into a large bowl with some salt -think about the state of your arteries use less of this, rather than more. One cup of flour makes about 9 or 10 stringhoppers. We use two and a half cups of flour. Make a well in the centre of the flour and drop in one egg and add some hot, but not boiling water. 85C is the recommended temperature for the water. [ That's the advice of the cook - engineer.] Mix the flour, egg and water, adding more water to make a soft dough. When I do it, I use my hands but a spoon will do. Add a drop of Olive oil to bind the mixture.

Dough ready to be formed into stringhopper mats

The next thing to do is to put some of the dough in the cylinder of the forcing machine. I usually roll a dough sausage but you can simply push it in with a spoon.

Putting the dough into the machine, ready to make the strings

At this point you need to have the cooking mats prepared by greasing them so that the cooked stringhoppers will fall off easily once they are cooked. You can either use a spray or some oil on a paper for this. You also need to have your pot of water boiling merrily with the top steamer at hand to go on top of the pot. You definitely need a lid.

Making the stringhoppers

Here comes the exciting part ! Force the strings from the machine onto the individual mats with a circular motion, starting on the outside and moving into the centre.

The picture below shows how it is done using the traditional Sri Lankan Stringhopper moulding machine. The new machine is far easier!

The younger generation learns how to make stringhoppers

Once you have about five mats filled, put them into the steamer but not in a stack otherwise they won't cook evenly  and you'll get uncooked centres and dry edges. They will take about four minutes to cook so that's about enough time to have the next batch ready on mats to go into the steamer. You'll know they are cooked when they spring up when you press on them. Don't get burned as you test them.

Stringhoppers steaming

 Use tongs to gently loosen and put onto into a dish and cover with a lid until serving time.

Serve with hot coconut sambol and curries that have plenty of gravy such as pumpkin, lentil. Chicken, pork and lamb curries are great too.

My Sri Lanka with Peter Kuruvita and Charmaine Solomon's Asian Cookbook

I have used Charmaine Solomon's book a lot over the years as it has recipies for dishes from all around Asia. Nowadays it can sometimes be found in preloved book shops or weekend market stalls. The interesting thing is that she found Stringhoppers in the too hard basket and recommended cooking some vermacelli instead. That would not be acceptable for our family. Oh dear!

We loved Peter Kuruvita's cooking series my Sri Lanka because he manages to be an inventive and creative cook as well as a traditional one. The scenery is not bad either.