Spice Garden Tour & Sri Lankan Cooking Class with Seven Curries Ella

The family-run spice garden in Ella

The experience takes place in a family-run spice garden of about 2.5 acres on the green slopes around Ella, said to be the largest spice garden in the town, with more than a hundred plants. Rather than a quick look at a few bushes, the garden tour lasts a full hour and is led by a guide who has grown up with these plants and explains how each one is cultivated, harvested and used in the kitchen and in traditional medicine.

Many travellers searching for a spice garden in Ella want to see where the flavours of Sri Lankan food come from, and here you see them growing side by side on a working family property. There is a small spice showroom where you can see the dried products, and the garden is a calm, shady place to walk before the busier part of the day in the kitchen.

Spices of Sri Lanka, plant by plant

Sri Lanka has traded spices for centuries, and true cinnamon, often called Ceylon cinnamon, is native to the island. In the garden you see how its thin inner bark is peeled from young shoots and rolled into quills. Nearby grow nutmeg trees whose fruit hides both nutmeg and the red lace of mace, clove trees, pepper vines, cardamom, vanilla orchids climbing their supports and cocoa pods growing straight from the trunk.

You will also meet plants that rarely appear in spice shops abroad: garcinia, known locally as goraka, whose dried fruit gives fish curries their sourness, and curry leaves, the fragrant leaves fried at the start of almost every Sri Lankan curry. Your guide lets you touch, smell and sometimes taste the leaves and seeds, and explains which ones are used for teas, balms and traditional remedies. By the end of the hour the cooking class makes much more sense.

Cooking on a traditional wood fireplace

After the garden you move to the kitchen, where the class runs for about three hours. Cooking happens the village way, on a traditional wood fireplace with clay and metal pots, which gives a gentle, smoky heat that gas burners cannot copy. Your English-speaking instructor guides you step by step with simple, easy-to-follow explanations, so no cooking experience is needed.

One of the first tasks is making coconut milk from scratch: you grate the coconut flesh and squeeze it by hand to get thick first milk and lighter second milk, both essential to Sri Lankan curries. You then temper spices, fry curry leaves and onions, and learn why each curry gets its own mix of roasted or unroasted curry powder. It is a hands-on Sri Lankan cooking class in Ella in the true sense: you chop, stir and taste throughout rather than watch a demonstration.

Rice and seven curries on banana leaves

Together you prepare a full Sri Lankan rice and curry meal: white rice, pumpkin or dhal curry, potato curry in coconut milk, mushroom curry, green bean curry and chicken curry, with coconut sambol, crispy banana chips and papadam on the side. Each dish shows a different technique, from slow simmering in coconut milk to quick dry-frying, which is why a single meal in Sri Lanka can have so many flavours.

When everything is ready, the meal is served on fresh banana leaves, the traditional way, and you sit down to eat what you have cooked, followed by dessert. Vegetarian and vegan versions of the dishes are prepared on request. Before you leave you receive the recipes as a PDF book, so you can recreate the seven curries for family and friends long after your trip.

Ella and the hill country

Ella is a small town in the hill country of the Uva Province, at roughly a thousand metres above sea level, surrounded by tea estates, forested peaks and waterfalls. It is one of the most popular stops on a Sri Lanka itinerary, reached by the scenic railway from Kandy and Nuwara Eliya or by road from the south coast, and it is known for walks to Little Adam's Peak, Ella Rock and the Nine Arch Bridge.

A cooking class fits well into a day here: the morning class at 10:30 leaves your afternoon free for a hike, while the 16:30 class makes a relaxed evening and dinner after a day of sightseeing. The cooler climate of the hills makes the garden walk comfortable most of the year. The drier months from around January to April are popular, but the class runs year-round, as the kitchen is covered.