Tasting
Traveling with Your Sense of Taste
On our travels, we often ask locals about traditional dishes and ingredients, as well as the way they prepare and season their meals, so that we can try them at least once and experience authentic cuisine. We especially enjoy going to places where the locals themselves eat. Sharing a meal among people in a peaceful atmosphere, in an environment where food holds cultural and social significance, is always a special pleasure for us and something we deeply appreciate.
In countries where special attention is given to nutrition and flavor to promote balance in the body and support health, we can gain valuable insights for our own well-being.
Travel also reveals to us the incredible variety of fruits, vegetables, spices, herbs, cooking methods, and dishes that exist around the world – a diversity that can nourish us on the road and enrich our meals back home as well. It doesn’t take exotic, let alone expensive ingredients to create a truly special culinary experience. Sometimes, just a few high-quality ingredients are enough.
Ways to enjoy a wide variety of foods include:
- shopping for ingredients and preparing meals yourself
- taking local cooking classes
- asking locals to prepare traditional dishes the way they cook for themselves
- visiting guesthouses, street food stalls, and restaurants that serve authentic cuisine
Whether while traveling or in everyday life, those who explore the local natural surroundings with open eyes often discover surprising culinary treasures right on their doorstep. Many edible plants – including herbs, nuts, seeds, and fruits – can be found outdoors and freely accessible, often inconspicuous and unfamiliar to most people: delicious and free of charge, unprocessed and nutrient-rich, fresher and more vitamin-packed than anything found in a supermarket.
Rasas in Ayurveda
The knowledge of life is especially taught in the Indian healing tradition of Ayurveda, which has also been practiced in Sri Lanka for over 2,000 years. Traditional Ayurvedic healers or doctors in the Indian and Sri Lankan cultural context are known as Vaidyas. We love the idea that some Vaidyas are only paid when their patients stay healthy.
In Ayurveda, food is closely associated with enjoyment. Great importance is placed on natural, unprocessed and fresh ingredients, which should ideally be eaten right after preparation. We learned that even fruit can be seasoned – with ginger, pepper, cardamom, cinnamon or lemon juice, for example – and that foods should be used in their entirety, including leaves, seeds and roots, as long as they are edible. Holistic and balanced meals that include all six tastes (rasas) – sweet, sour, salty, pungent, bitter and astringent – provide lasting energy, support vitality and promote health and healing. These are truly life-giving foods that nourish the body while offering rich sensory and culinary pleasure.
Seeing and tasting are closely linked. The pleasure often begins with the first glimpse of the richness that nature and local cuisine reveal to us. At the colorful markets and in the aromatic gardens of Sri Lanka, we discovered an impressive variety of fruits and vegetables as well as herbs and spices. With herbs alone, more than 100 different kinds are used. These impressions gave us plenty of inspiration for delicious dishes and sparked our curiosity. We definitely wanted to experience it all with our taste buds as well.
It was all the more surprising that this abundance was hardly reflected in the food served at guesthouses. The food was usually tasty, but the countless restaurants typically offered the same or very similar menus. Especially in tourist areas, there was little variety in flavor. We had the impression that only small amounts of herbs and spices were used, while rice was served in large portions, sometimes even French fries, and that meals had to be prepared quickly. As a result, we only occasionally experienced special flavors. The food was often spicy to hot but lacked refinement. It seemed as if the taste and price expectations of tourists were the main focus. An Ayurvedic herbalist we met in a spice garden confirmed this impression.
Only occasionally did we come across places where cooking truly embraced all rasas, the six tastes of Ayurveda. One of them was a small resort in Negombo whose cuisine deeply impressed us. You could taste that the food was prepared to nourish, not merely to fill you up.
We were especially eager to try lotus roots, as we had never eaten them before, as well as green herb salads like Mallung or Gotu Kola (Centella asiatica). It wasn’t until the last day of our several-week journey that we were lucky enough to taste a curry made from banana blossoms. It had a wonderfully bitter flavor and complemented the other, mostly sweet curries – such as those made with pumpkin, carrot or beetroot – perfectly. Probably due to its fairly bitter taste, it’s rarely offered to visitors, which we find a real pity. Other delicious curries were made with mushrooms (the main season in the south is April and May), radish, snake gourd, eggplant, beans or a colorful mix of ingredients.
We were always happy when a variety of aromatic spices and herbs were used, or when we encountered less common vegetables. What excited us most were the fermented side dishes (pickles) and homemade chutneys. The lemon or lime pickles we had the chance to try once were unlike anything we had ever eaten before. At first, we could hardly describe the flavor – it was so strikingly different.
Even though we did not find the culinary variety we had hoped for everywhere – especially in places where adaptation took precedence over diversity, spices were toned down, and dishes were simplified to suit tourists’ tastes – we still gained valuable inspiration and were reminded of almost forgotten principles. Among them are paying attention to the quality and freshness of ingredients, using as many different components as possible, such as spices and herbs, and preparing dishes with care.
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