Her culinary ode to Sri Lanka
Savindri Perera in the MasterChef kitchen. Pix courtesy Endemol Shine Australia
It started with kiribath. Kiribath with blackened coconut snapper, lunumiris and Sri Lankan treacle—the very first dish presented to the judges of the much-loved MasterChef Australia cooking competition by Savindri Perera, which received rave reviews and placed Savindri, or Sav, on everyone’s radar. Photographs and clips of this innovative take on a traditional Sri Lankan breakfast were soon shared on social media, launching the fascination with the MasterChef Australia contestant, who continued to dazzle with her culinary masterpieces with a Sri Lankan twist.
Having been placed third in the competition, Sav has exchanged the heat of the MasterChef kitchen for the humidity of Sri Lanka, providing the Sunday Times with an opportunity to take up a few minutes of her time to talk about her life before moving to Australia at the age of 18, her foray into cooking, and the pressures of the competition.
Sav, who attended Musaeus College in Colombo, credits her rich and diverse childhood to her parents and extended family, who made it a point to travel to places within the country, often going on family trips to Nuwara Eliya and down South. “We were always doing family things, and it was always around communal food. We were always at dinner parties at each other’s houses, so there was always that real sense of community and belonging,” says Sav. This also may have been what sparked her zeal for cooking. “Some of my favourite memories are actually cooking over a little wooden fire with my cousins as a child. Just cooking absolute nonsense—not actual food but just pretend play.”
Talking about life, her foray into cooking and pressures of the competition: Savindri Perera in Colombo. Pic by M. A. Pushpa Kumara
Her passion for cooking grew over time due to growing up in a family of food enthusiasts, especially uncles, aunts, her mother, and grandmother who were excellent cooks and always being surrounded by great food. “It was after the move to Australia that I realised I knew what good food tasted like but not how to make it.” Sav was hugely inspired by Nigella Lawson and started experimenting with cooking at home, making pasta, stir-fries, and other dishes instead of traditional Sri Lankan food. Her interest deepened when she had more freedom to buy any ingredient she wanted and cook at any time, her skills improving while cooking for her sister, who lived with her at the time.
Once she began getting better at cooking Sri Lankan food, Sav, an avid reader and writer, started writing these recipes down for her blog as she realised there was a lack of proper recipes online, often cooking the recipes repeatedly to test and refine them and for the sake of taking appealing photographs. As much as she loves eating Sri Lankan cuisine, Sav is not quite fond of the endless prep and time-consuming nature. “Even now, I typically make rice and curry once a week due to the time-consuming preparation. Cooking Sri Lankan food involves endless chopping, which can be exhausting, not to mention cleaning up afterwards. So, I usually prepare it on weekends with my partner’s help,” she laughs.
After a period of feeling stuck in a place since the passing of her mother in 2017, Sav quit her job in the financial services industry as a banking consultant and decided to enter the rigorous and demanding MasterChef competition as a way of pushing herself out of her comfort zone. “Competing requires immense resilience, as it’s exhausting. I wasn’t in the right head space earlier, but in 2023, I felt ready to apply.”
Describing herself as an introvert, who tends to go into ‘hyper-focused mode’, Sav initially found the disruptions of filming and questions when cooking difficult but soon trained herself by realising early on that a concise and witty response was all she needed to get back to the task at hand.
After receiving acclaim for her first dish, Sav says she felt a lot more pressure and scrutiny, not just from setting that standard in the competition but also from representing Sri Lanka. She continued to constantly impress the judges and the rest of the world with her take on other local classics like hoppers, crab curry, seeni sambol, egg and prawn buns the latter served with a prawn aioli and tomato sauce. She also demonstrated her ability to adapt during the French mystery box challenge—her least favourite type of challenge as it lacks creative freedom—where she made pan rolls coated with oven-dried croissant crumbs.
‘What are you cooking Sav?’: With judges Poh and Sofia
Most of what Sav cooks is rooted in nostalgia, often tied to memories of her mother, like her version of her mother’s chicken curry, which she calls her hardest cook, and her dessert, ‘Tea in the Garden,’ which was inspired by having tea on the verandah with friends—a typical Sri Lankan occurrence.
Despite an elimination in May, Sav received a chance at redemption when she was given another chance to compete. “When I got called back into the competition, I didn’t have time to process it. I was told I was going home and walking out the doors, then just minutes later, the producers told me I had to come back the next day. It was almost like it never happened. It took a couple of days to realise, ‘oh God, I had technically gone home’.”
Sav returned to the competition with a second wind and produced one of the best dishes of the season, the Lamprais, in a stressful and risky 90 minutes. “Just that moment, watching the judges dig in with their hands—it was just amazing. This is Sri Lanka; that’s what it’s about,” recalls Sav. “It was a big moment for me, but I didn’t realise what a big impact it would be for everyone else as well, and I think that’s what’s humbled me quite a bit, and it actually caught me off guard—not realising how much it would mean to people.”
Another significant Lamprais-related moment that happened on camera but didn’t make the final edit into the show was the spontaneous hug she received from the normally reserved Andy Allen, who remarked that in his seven years of judging, four dishes were his best and favourite, and the lamprais had just become the fifth, adding that it was a privilege to have eaten it.
Starting with a bang: The kiribath special
In her final cook of the competition for the semi-final, Sav presented a three-course meal with an entrée consisting of a kalupol pork belly, a main dish of ghee-poached lobster with chilli dhal puree, and a tropical jelly dessert.
Although some opined that Sav needed to vary things with her cuisines, she didn’t receive any criticism on the actual dishes she had cooked. “I think it’s because Sri Lankans love seeing their cuisine represented. Even though my presentation isn’t traditional, the preparation methods, spices, and flavour combinations are true to Sri Lankan cuisine. I wasn’t going to serve a family-style meal on MasterChef, so I presented familiar flavours in an elegant way. People recognised that I knew how to prepare traditional dishes properly, which gave me the confidence to experiment.”
A tropical jelly dessert: Sav's delicate dish in her final cook
Now that her MasterChef journey has concluded, Sav hopes to work on a few projects in Sri Lanka, but her main goal is to elevate Sri Lankan cuisine beyond traditional rice and curry and modernise it to showcase its potential in contemporary dining. She also has a few collaborative projects lined up as well as planning some educational classes in Adelaide to share the richness of Sri Lankan cuisine and dispel any misconceptions.
Sav is very grateful for all the support she has received. “I went in with my personal development goals in mind. The fact that I’m Sri Lankan wasn’t a card that I was playing because it was just who I was the entire time, and that’s the representation that I wanted to do. I didn’t anticipate the public response – I just wanted to give my 16-year-old self someone to resonate with, cooking the food my mom used to cook for me, and I got to give that gift to someone. The positive public reaction and the impact on viewers have been deeply humbling and rewarding.”
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