I was recently asked "Are roasted and unroasted interchangeable?" - Well to a traditionalist they strictly aren’t but the results will be different.

    I was also asked "any idea why it’s called thuna paha??" - Well I think that traditionally the mix was of five ("thuna") spices, and even though it is more elaborate now a very basic powder mix would consist of five of the base spices in the originally posted recipe.

    In an attempt to bring some balance to my blog postings. I got on the phone to my tamilian friends soon after posting, to ask if they knew of any other curry powder recipes. Well the good news is that they did it was for a far hotter version of the roasted curry powder. It is made traditionally in a "Thaachi" which they described as being a large pan of sorts. The ingredients are sufficiently different from the sinhalese version that I will describe them below :

500g dry chillies
100g black pepper
200g white cumin
10cm of un- ground tumeric or use 5g of ground
500g coriander
100g sweet cumin
50g fenugreek (optional)
a handful of curry leaves

Break the dry chillies into large pieces (use gloves if needed).
Place the chillies, coriander, pepper, tumeric and curry leaves into your dry pan and dry roast on a medium fire until the curry leaves go crisp. Keep the mixture moving to avoid burning, remove and set aside.
Mix the sweet cumin, white cumin and fenugreek and dry roast until cumin seeds are golden brown in colour.
Mix all the roasted ingredients and grind as before in small batches in a coffee grinder or work-out using a pestle and mortar.

Store the resulting powder in an air tight container away from humidity.

Note:
To temper the mix should it turn out too hot - Add between 250 and 500 grams of roasted coriander. Alternatively use more coriander to chilli in the mix.