How do you eat an egg hopper? For the hopper neophytes out there a hopper or Appa in Sinhala is made from a fermented batter of rice flour, coconut milk and apparently a dash of palm toddy (though I doubt this happens very often in my house). It is crisp on the outside and soft in the middle, my personal favourite the egg hopper is cooked with an egg in the center. Over the last 25 and a half years of my existence I have perfected what I would like to think is the ideal way to consume the gastronomic delight that is an egg hopper.

You need the following ingredients, one egg hopper and two regular hoppers, preferably both steaming slightly fresh off the stove. The other essential ingredients are a spicy parippu (or dhal) curry, redolent with turmeric and a whiff of garlic, a good sharp katta sambol and a meat curry of some sort. The poison I picked for myself today was a lovely, orangey prawn curry. What I like to do then is rip an end of the crispy shell and carefully, with surgical precision work the rip down to where the brown of the appa meets the gooey whiteness of the egg, glistening with minute salt crystals and spotted with black pepper. I then further this incision about half a centimeter into the egg white, take a right angle, a few more centimeters and then another right angle and up. This gives me a rectangular piece of hopper with a sliver of egg white which I then, with a pleased chuckle to myself, proceed to dip into the parippu, diluting the egg white into a dull yellow, brightening it up with a bit off the red katta sambol, wrapping the whole parcel around a curled up shrimp and popping the result into my mouth.

I repeat this process until all the crispy part of the hopper is gone, leaving a disembodied yellow yolk floating in the white of the egg. Grabbing a new hopper I continue the process, scything away at the egg white until all that’s left is the yolk, shivering in its transparent sheath. That of course is when all the fun starts; with a fresh piece of hopper I dig a crispy dagger into the heart of the yolk. I time my consumption so that by this time all the prawns are gone and all that is left on the plate is the gravy from them, mixed in with the remaining parippu and sambol. Once all the yolk flows into this mix I dab the hopper into the yellow mass in the middle, gouging out pieces, sop up the mess at the bottom of the plate and continue contentedly munching away.

That is the way I eat every egg hopper that I am ever served. It usually gets me odd looks from the relatives at family functions and exasperated snorts when they realize they can’t leave the table because I take twice as long to eat my food as normal people. Not that I really care though, the hoppers are usually far too good for me to even acknowledge the disapproval. So that’s my technique for tackling the egg hopper, how do you eat yours?