Havaadhulee Bis

Making Havaadhulee Bis might seem a bit challenging to those who haven’t done it before. There’s making the dough, making the filling, making the curry sauce, getting the filling inside the dough, rolling them into an egg shape, cooking them and getting them covered in the curry sauce. With that in mind, we tried to explain the steps of this recipe as simply and as clearly as possible.

Before we begin there are a couple of things that we have to note. First of all we’ve made ours with canned tuna and you can use an equal amount of valhomas if you want. Second, we’ve used coconut milk and tomato paste when making the curry sauce, but some people would just use water instead of the coconut milk and omit the tomato paste. While on the topic of curry sauce, our version does not use a premade curry powder mix although we’ve seen a lot of recipes out there that use different curry powders such as chicken curry powder, hanaakuri havaadhu and even Addu havaadhu. Lastly, different people have varying preferences when it comes to the dough to the filling ratio. We like the dough to be on the thinner side and hence our recipe is designed to produce Havaadhulee Bis with a slightly thinner dough, but you can change it up if you want to.

Makes: 14 Havaadhulee Bis

Making the dough

Ingredients:

• 1½ cups flour
• ½ tsp. salt
• ¾ tbsp. oil
• 13 tbsp. warm water

Instructions:

1. Pour the flour into a bowl and add salt, also mix it a little bit to distribute the salt.
2. Pour in the oil and mix it a little bit again.
3. Add the water gradually, a couple of tablespoons a time, while mixing. At this stage you will have to use your hand so that you can tell when the dough feels right. When it’s right, it shouldn’t be sticking to your hand and it shouldn’t be dry. Rather, it should feel a bit soft and elastic and easy to handle.
4. Divide the dough into 14 equally sized portions and roll them into balls. The easiest way to divide the dough is to roll the dough between your hands so that it becomes long and a bit cylindrical and then figure out the length of the individual pieces that will eventually yield you fourteen.

Make the filling

Ingredients:

• 1 can tuna in brine
• ½ cup scraped coconut
• 1 small onion
• ¼ tsp. turmeric
• ¼ tsp. ground black pepper
• ¼ githeyo mirus (or to taste)
• ½ lime (or to taste)
• ¼ tsp. salt (or to taste)
• 3 curry leaves
• ½ tsp. grated ginger

Instructions:

1. Slice the onion thinly. We first cut the onion into four parts prior to slicing since by doing this we get smaller slices that are easier to mix.
2. Mince the curry leaves and the githeyo mirus.
3. To a bowl, add the sliced onions, scraped coconut, ginger, salt, pepper and lime, and by using your fingers crush and mix them together until the onion becomes soft and release its juices.
4. Add the curry leaves, tuna, githeyo mirus and turmeric, and mix well again.
5. Divide the mixture into 14 equally sized portions and roll them into balls. If the filling feels really juicy, you might want to squeeze some of the liquid out when making the balls as this will make it easier for you to stuff them into the dough.

Stuffing the bis

Instructions:

1. Take a ball of dough and flatten it out using your fingers.
2. Hold the flattened piece of dough with one hand and place a ball of filling on top of it.
3. Close the dough so that it would completely enclose the filling and gently by using your hands roll it into an egg shape.
4. A couple of things you have to be careful about: One, be sure to not leave any gaps that expose the filling. Two, when you are stuffing the dough, make sure that the dough is not stretched too thin as then it might break open when they get boiled. Dividing both the dough and the filling into 14 parts works for us, but it might be a good idea for you to do a stuffing test on one and see how it turns out and make any necessary changes for the rest.

Make the curry sauce

Ingredients:

• 1 medium sized onion
• 1 tsp. grated garlic
• 3 inch piece of raanbaa
• 4 curry leaves
• 2 tbsp. oil
• 4 tsp. ground coriander
• 2 tsp. ground fennel
• 1 tsp. ground cumin
• 1 ½ tsp. red chilli powder (or to taste)
• 3 tsp. tomato paste
• ½ tsp. salt (or to taste)
• ½ cup coconut milk
• 1 cup water

Instructions:

1. Slice the onion thinly.
2. In a large frying pan, heat up the oil and once heated, add the onions, curry leaves and raanbaa. Keep the heat on medium.
3. Stir and cook until the onions soften and begin to take on a brownish colour, and then add the garlic and mix well. The garlic is going to cook really quickly so just proceed to the next step quickly.
4. Add the coriander, fennel, cumin and chilli. Stir and cook for around 30 seconds, just until the spices release their aromas.
5. Add the tomato paste, mix to combine and add in the coconut milk, salt and water, and stir to combine again.
6. Cook the mixture until it bubbles.

Cooking the bis

Ingredients:

•  5 cups water
• ½ tbsp. oil

Instructions:

1. Bring the water to a boil in a large pot. We used one with a lid to speed things up.
2. When the water begins to boil, gently place the stuffed bis inside the pot. Add the oil as this will prevent the bis from sticking to one another.
3. Turn the heat to medium and let it cook for 15 minutes.

Coating the bis with havaadhu

1. Remove the bis from the water gently and place them in the curry sauce that you’ve already prepared. You might want to use a slotted spoon so as not to get too much cooking water into the curry sauce.
2. Gently roll them around in the havaadhu to get them coated evenly.