Suddenly unable to differentiate between two entire nations and a single city, Luxe City Guides have just released a guide concatenating Cambodia and Laos. The official guide of the Wallpaper* set has obviously decided that these two nations do not have enough opulence to fill their requisite two A4 sides of $9 folding guidebook.
I was hoping to pitch for Luxe’s Phnom Penh next time I was out of work, but it looks like I’ve missed that boat full of luxury cash.
See: Luxe City Guides at Amazon.
It is sometimes amusing to uphold the myth that I’m leading a fantastically unattainable food lifestyle: up at the crack of dawn to scour Cambodia’s markets for the rarest ingredients, plotting my meals in advance. But it is a myth. I hate the morning and when I’m feeling lazy, Cambodia’s improving supermarkets fill the gap. Lucky for me, Lucky Supermarket has recently introduced packaged fresh ingredient kits for Cambodia’s favourite foods: a few offal and sour soups, tom yam, stuffed bitter melon, and something that I rarely cook myself, samlor karko.
Samlor karko (literally, “stirring soup”) is made in infinite variations depending on the availability of ingredients. It ranges from watery broth to a chunky stew, but the core components are prahok (fermented fish paste); a mix of Cambodia’s more common vegetables: pumpkin, green papaya, green jackfruit, green banana, snake beans, eggplant; a lemongrass heavy spice paste (kroueng); and some random, esoteric leaves that I can’t regularly identify. These things need some serious stirring. I’ve seen versions with every meat imaginable, but tend to prefer pork or chicken.
On disengaging the vegies from the cling wrap and polystyrene tray, the Lucky kit seemed a little short on pumpkin and green jackfruit for my liking. No green banana, for which I don’t care; no eggplant. The leafy greenery is mrum leaf (Moringa oleifera) , and the baggies contain kroueng and ground roasted rice.
To make from scratch, if you’re slightly less lazy:
250 grams of pork ribs
1 tbsp prahok
500 grams of vegetables – any mix of green papaya, green banana, green jackfruit sliced thinly; small eggplant or pea eggplant, pumpkin in chunks; snake beans cut into short lengths.
2 small chillies, chopped
6 cups of water
30 grams of lemongrass leaf, 10 grams of lemongrass stem
1 tbsp of krachai
a small piece of fresh turmeric
4 cloves of garlic, peeled
1 tbsp of oil
2 tbsp of ground roasted rice
2 tbsp of palm sugar
2 tbsp of fish sauce
salt to taste
1 cup mrum leaf (Moringa oleifera)
Make the kroueng:
Slice the lemongrass leaf very finely, roughly cut the rhizome, turmeric and garlic, then pound with a mortar and pestle to a paste.
Get your soup on:
Cut the pork ribs into bite-size chunks with a cleaver (or get your butcher to do it for you).
Fry the kroueng and prahok in oil until the oil turns yellowish-green. Add the ribs and brown quietly, taking care not to burn the kroueng.
Add a cup of water, palm sugar, vegetables, and chillies, stirring intermittently for about 15 minutes. Stir in the ground roasted rice powder.
Add the other 5 cups of water, bring to a solid boil. Give the vegies a poke to see if they’re done. Add fish sauce, salt to taste. Add more sugar if necessary.
Add mrum leaf and remove from heat. Serve immediately.
For a vegie version (samla karko sap): Omit anything flavoursome, replace with vegetable-based substitute. Sorry, I meant to say “replace meats with firm tofu or textured vegetable protein, and fish sauce with vege-substitute fish sauce”.
Lucky Supermarket Samla Karko kit (labelled “karkou”): 1000 riel ($US0.25) with about a dollar worth of pre-cut pork ribs.
Cheers to Austin for pointing out the Souper Challenge Blog Event
Tourist season seems to be hotting up in Phnom Penh, or at least, more people seem to be wearing daypacks and standing on street corners, ineffectively using their Lonely Planet to swat at the emergent swarm of informal motorcycle-taxi drivers. The Cambodian Ministry of Tourism, realising that Cambodian food may attract tourists rather than repel them has added a few recipes to their website. From their fish amok instructions:
- Break the coconut fruit, squeeze the nut to get its milk by making the phase-one milk and phase-two milk
- Cut the ripe bell pepper into two
- Pour half of the phase-one coconut milk into a frying pan to cook until it turns a litter brown
- Then, put into the pan the spices and the mash mixture, and stir it up
- Add the phase-two milk and turn off the cooking gas after the solution becomes cooked and dry enough
In this instance, a Cambodian ministry’s heart is in the right place, but their translator’s mind isn’t.
For brutally slagging off Water Festival, I received a brutal cold which disabled my palate for the last week. The upside was that I did spend some time in Phnom Penh for the Water Festival atoning for my sardonicism and despite the excess of public relievers about town, it was amusing. The locals should be proud for running a festival that brings an overwhelming number of people into Phnom Penh with so little violence, and as far as I know, only one shooting that was the direct result of public urination. The crowd that strolled the length of Sisowath Quay on Phnom Penh’s riverfront (above) remained in a jovial mood throughout.
Ministry of Tourism barge illuminates the crowd.
Inanimate num pao (steamed pork bun) vendor plies his wares to an inattentive crowd.
Apart from the decorative façade that is added to Phnom Penh over the festival, Water Festival (Bon Um Tuk, next week) is the worst time of the year to be in Cambodia’s capital. If “attempting to set a new world record for mass public urination” is your idea of a great festive atmosphere then this end of rainy season party is for you. About a million Cambodians from the rural provinces come to Phnom Penh for Water Festival to piss in the streets and act generally bewildered. There are guest appearances by the King; dragon boat racing and the consequential drownings; and fireworks to provide the crowds with both entertainment and further bewilderment. Food-wise, vendors flock to riverfront to hawk their wares, if you’re willing to battle the swarming masses to find them.
My pre-festival highlight this year has been the first capture of Kampuchea Krom terrorist suspects whose arrests seem about as valid as an increasingly oligarchic government that installed itself in a coup boasting its respect for democracy and the rule of law*.
I’m not going to have any other festival coverage because I’ll be out of town, eating my body weight in naem. No updates for a week or so until I roll back into Phnom Penh.
Continue reading Water Festival to set new public urination record
Over the border in Vietnam, mam is used as a catch-all fermented aquatic animal word: nuoc mam is fish sauce; mam tom is shrimp paste; bun mam is purported to be the best noodle soup in Saigon.
On my Cambodian side of the border, mam is mam. It refers to the above salted, fermented fillets of snakehead fish, to which roasted red sticky rice and palm sugar are added during the fermenting process to impart an earthier and sweeter flavour. The sugar and rice also lends the ingredient a reddish tinge. From the time that the fish is filleted, mam can take over a year to reach maturity. According to the unsubstantiated rumours that I transcribe as actual history, mam originates from Kampuchea Krom territory, the wedge of the Vietnamese Mekong Delta that was previously under Cambodian ownership.
What to do with it? You ask with veiled incredulity. Being the crème de la crème of rotting yet edible aquatic vertebrates, mam is versatile. Like the more pedestrian prahok, it’s added to soups, noodles, or steamed on its own but unlike it’s poorer grey fermented brother, mam adds far less pungency to dishes and a little more fishy subtlety.
Cambodian street food acts as an indicator of the global and historical tensions on modern Khmer culture. The pull between different cultural and historical influences is literally played out in the street food. It isn’t uncommon to see food that was transported to Cambodia about a millennium ago served next to food that first arrived a decade ago. Occasionally, like this flat bread, both the influences and timing are difficult to place.
I’ve heard this variously referred to as Chinese pizza or in Khmer, num pan chen (literally Chinese bread). My regular vendor at Psar Orussei has a sign that proclaims it “Stone Leek Bread”. It is certainly not a traditional Khmer recipe but seems to have come via China and capitalizes on one of France’s lasting colonial legacies in Cambodia: the ability to bake bread.
Where the Chinese version is simply fried, the vendors that I have seen around Phnom Penh simultaneously bake and fry the bread in a miniature commercial pizza oven. The dough proves in a plastic tub until a likely punter arrives, whence the vendor picks out a lump, adds a handful of chopped spring onions (scallions, for non-Commonwealth readers), gives it a quick knead and roll with a length of blue plumbing pipe and frys away.
Hot off the press, the bread is soft, elastic, and remarkably similar to good Turkish bread. It doesn’t keep particularly well but is so good that it is unlikely you’ll have leftovers.
500 riel (US$0.12) for an eighth of a pizza.
Location: The above vendor has only been open for a week at Stall 572, on the northern side of Psar Toul Tom Poung (Russian Market), amongst the motorcycle parts. There another talented spring onion bread baker near the southern entrance of Psar Orussei.
See also: A recipe for Spring Onion Bread mercilessly lifted from Bill Granger’s recipe book Bills: Breakfast, Lunch + Dinner
Phnom Penh is blessed with a handful of good secondhand bookstores which have managed to allay my initial fear in Phnom Penh that I would run out of anything worthwhile to read. Chea Sopheap, Cambodia’s only nuclear physicist fanboy and owner of Bohr’s Books gets profiled in today’s Telegraph (UK)
“I started from zero. I left my job and spent my time buying book stocks here and there from leaving expats with savings made over the previous three years. I built up a stock of about 600 titles at home. I opened my own second-hand bookshop two years ago, and now I have 4,000 titles in stock.”
While on the marginally food-related subject of literature, Bohr’s worthy rival, D’s Books has a grand sale this weekend.
When you first step foot into a Cambodian market, the first thing you’ll notice is the smell. Within that complex and fertile aroma, there is always the warm earthy scent of dried salted fish. In the markets, the dried fish is completely inescapable, and in Cambodian food, even more so. While most dishes use it sparingly, this simple omelette recipe is a great way to show that you have bought salted sun-dried fish (trey ngiet) and you’re not afraid to use it brazenly. You can even omit the pork and increase the fish content for a halal/kosher variant.
What you’ll need
3 chicken eggs (porng moan)
60gms of trey ngiet (or trey prama, a slightly better grade of semi-fermented, semi-dried fish)
100gms of boneless pork meat (sach chrouk sot)
Method:
Mince the pork and finely chop the dried fish. Beat the eggs. Fry the pork with the dried fish. Once the pork is cooked, pour the egg mix over the top. Fry to your heart’s content and flip into omelette-shape. Serve with a few slices of cucumber and green tomato.
For the five people in Japan reading this, Shin at Eline Saglik has been translating a few of the Cambodian recipes from Khmer Krom Recipes into Japanese. Judging from the photos, samlor machu sach moan can be easily replicated in your average Japanese kitchen. The recipe does however make the slightly bizarre suggestion that vinegar is a suitable substitute for tamarind water, so I’m not sure how far the recipes can be trusted.