SBS Food talks to Sri Lankan chef and yoga instructor, Channa Dayasanaka, as part of the Cooks and their Books series of interviews with Australia's top chefs and cooks.

Click here for a selection of recipes from Sri Lankan Flavours

Channa Dassanayaka likes the word healing. This is perhaps unsurprising, given that the Sri Lankan chef is also a Buddhist yoga instructor whose claims to fame include cooking for the Dalai Lama and 200 monks when the world leader last visited Australia. He believes that chefs have ‘an obligation to be healers’ and takes his spiritual approach to food very seriously.

“When food is made by someone who is very stressed that affects how you feel when you eat. When someone has calm, healing energy that also moves into the food. This is why food made by grandmothers and mothers is so nurturing,” says Dassanayaka.

Indeed, it was the cooking of his mother and grandmother that inspired his early love of food. Dassanayaka’s grandparents were village heads in Colombo, the former capital of Sri Lanka, and his parents were heavily involved in politics.

“Food was always a priority at gatherings and the aromas of coffee and spices and the roasting of curry powders had a profound effect on me at a young age,” he says.

After they discovered him doodling sketches of food and descriptions of recipes in his notebook instead of studying for his final high school exams, Dassanayaka’s parents relinquished their dreams that he would become a lawyer and sent him to the Ceylon Hotel School instead.

However, after many years working in and running restaurants throughout South East Asia, Europe, the Middle East and Australia, Dassanayaka grew frustrated with the high stress levels of the industry. Following the tragic death of his mother in a car accident in 1997, he returned to his native country. Back in Sri Lanka, he lived in an Ashram for a time, studying study Buddhist philosophy and yoga; something he says changed his life forever.

Nowadays, in between cooking with ingredients from his large organic vegetable garden, the chef teaches yoga classes at a private studio at his home in Northcote. He says he would like to open a restaurant again some day but that this time it would be a vegetarian restaurant with a focus on ‘healing food’.

His book, Sri Lankan Flavours, published by Hardie Grant Books, aims to educate readers about Sri Lanka’s “very old, very beautiful” culture, as well as its food, and is packed with useful tips and hints for Western chefs including substitutions, a glossary of ingredients, and advice on how to pair and serve dishes. Its 70 recipes range from street hawker snacks to curries, pickles, roti and rice dishes.

Sri Lankans serve dinner in a similar manner to how Indians eat thalis – a selection of curries, including a meat or fish curry, alongside one or two vegetarian dishes. There will generally be one wet and one dry curry, served with pickles, sambols, chutneys, rice and roti.

Although these days Dassanayaka is primarily a vegetarian, some of his favourite recipes in the book are meat dishes, including beef godambah, a street food or ‘short eat’ of fried dough balls filled with meat, mashed potato and vegetables.

Another favorite is the famous Sri Lankan hoppers – crispy bread made of rice flour, coconut milk and water. Dassanayaka says that Westerners often spoon their curry into the bread bowls but, in fact, hoppers should be broken up and used as ‘tongs’ to scoop up the curry.

The tomato and onion sambol recipe is a great accompaniment to hoppers and curry, which also pairs well with western beef dishes or as a spread on a sandwich or chicken roti wrap.

The curd and treacle recipe will intrigue Australian cooks. Traditionally, Sri Lankans eat sweets before the main course and then finish the meal with a curd dish made of buffalo yoghurt and treacle, which is believed to aid digestion.

“In Sri Lankan homes, tea and sweets, and sometimes bananas, are served before the main meal. Then, if conversation goes well you will be invited to sit down for a meal. This is the best way to eat.”