Author: Phil

Chbbar Ampouv Market: Snakehead heaven

chbar-ampov
Watching the fish circus at Chbbar Ampouv

Unless you happen to work at Cambodia’s Ministry of Fish, it’s unlikely that you’ll ever hear about Chbar Ampouv. If you eat fish in Phnom Penh, you will have certainly eaten something that has changed hands there, most likely, trei ros.

snakehead fish

The ubiquitous snakehead fish arrives at the Chbbar Ampouv landing point packed live in thin metal boxes, baskets, and tarpaulin-lined Toyota Camrys literally filled to the roof with flapping farmed fish. The modified Camrys drive straight into the unloading point; open the doors and a wave of fish slops out onto the concrete to be sorted into boxes of living and dead by the waiting attendants. A tango of weighing, tallying, repacking and on-selling ensues. The thousands of tons of snakehead that change hands at Chbbar Ampouv dock every year are redistributed by truck and motorcycle to Phnom Penh’s more consumer-oriented markets and a few cases make it across the street to the neighbouring bulk market.

chbar-ampov3

Snakeheads are the perfect fish for Cambodia. They eat anything, grow quickly and can survive out of water for hours thus guaranteeing freshness in even the worst Cambodian transport and market conditions (Coincidentally, these are the same qualities that make them the scourge of fisheries elsewhere in the world). For eating, they’re a firm-fleshed fish. In Cambodian food, they tend to turn up in soups; fried whole with a sauce; or as dried fillets, both sweet and salty.

Location: The Chbbar Ampouv landing point is just south of the Monivong bridge in Phnom Penh, starts at dawn, and apart from the boxes of fish there is not much else to see. The opposite market (Psar Chbbar Ampouv) is one of Phnom Penh’s larger wet markets.

How I missed World Fish Day

Suesdei tngai trei!

The first of July in Cambodia was World Fish Day. I somehow missed it, despite having a huge banner draped across a street near my house saying “Place save fish resources for Cambodian future”, which would have been much more apt if the first word had been “plaice“.

Maytel at Gut Feelings and John at Jinja have coverage.

The plan: picking a perfect plate of pepper crab

Pepper Crab in Kampot

It is a rare day in Cambodia where everything goes to plan, more so when that plan involves cooked food. Austin and my plan was relatively simple: drive to Kampot then Kep on Cambodia’s south coast and eat pepper crab until we received a plate worthy of a food magazine money shot. Getting to Kampot these days is easy: a five-hour busride on Highway 3 that skirts Phnom Voar and the limestone karsts near Kampong Trach where the Khmer Rouge bookended their decades of terror by kidnapping three foreigners and a group of Cambodians in one of their final acts of banditry in 1994. Things can still go wrong but not nearly that wrong.

Getting perfect crab should have been more difficult. We hit Ta Eauv Restaurant in Kampot straight from the bus, just as the local Lexus-driving CPP apparatchiks were finishing their midweek crab meals and bottles of lunchtime Johnny Walker. It is never a good time to hit a Cambodian restaurant late at lunchtime, mostly because they tend to run out of food rather than the risk of running into a boozy, politically-connected four-wheel drive enthusiast.

We ordered the crab, stripped the table of its cheap lace tablecloth to reveal the sort of perfectly-scratched patina that food stylists probably carry about with them and were presented with the best looking plate of crustacea that I’ve ever seen. By all rights, my job should be much harder and Ta Eauv should be charging more than $4 a plate.

My Pepper Crab Recipe

This recipe is one that I made up based on many a crab meal: it skirts more closely to Cantonese territory than Cambodian. I go heavy on the pepper and don’t add any other green distraction. A more Cambodian version of pepper crab would also include more palm sugar.

Ingredients:

4 mud crabs
100 grams of fresh green peppercorns on the vine (brined peppercorns can be substituted, but wash to remove excess salt)
3 cloves of garlic, roughly chopped
4 tablespoons of light soy sauce
4 tablespoons of oyster sauce
2 tablespoons of oil
2 teaspoons of palm sugar

Method:

Boil the crab. Drain. Clean the crab and cut into quarters.

Heat the oil in a large wok and fry the peppercorns and garlic until the pepper is fragrant and slightly soft. Add the oyster sauce, soy sauce, palm sugar, and mix until the sugar is dissolved. Toss through the crab pieces and serve.

Will Cambodian food catch on in NYC?

In short, no.

In New York, transplanted Hong Kong hands have a couple of Chinatowns to choose from. Colombians can head out to Queens for an oblea caramel wafer and yucca bread under the elevated train tracks. Eastern Europeans longing for a borscht can ride the F train to Brighton Beach. West Africans have the Bronx, North Africans have the East Village — and even the Uighurs, the Sephardim of the Silk Road, can find home cooking out in Rego Park. But for Cambodians (and nostalgic travelers like me), a taste of home remains elusive.

Matthew Fishbane attempts to answer the eternal question about Cambodian food: why isn’t it anywhere apart from Cambodia? He answers with a good round-up of the trials and tribulations of Cambodian restauranteurs in the USA.

See also: Khmer food is good, you just suck at eating it, On the trail of Cambodian food in New York

Dirty street charcuterie

Cambodians are world champion charcutiers. What the locals lack in quality produce, they make up for in sheer volume and world-beating determination. A Cambodian household that doesn’t dry its own fish, meat scraps or leftover rice is rarer than one that doesn’t enjoy the sublime beauty of prahok. Everybody knows how to sun-dry their own ingredients: probably the best way to spot a non-Cambodian household is to pick the one without a tray of leftovers soaking up the sunlight at the front of the house. It’s a response to the seasonal nature of Cambodian food. The frequent boom and bust cycles of local agriculture and fisheries have forced everyone to develop a taste (and huge amounts of skill) for preserving everything that they can eat.

Dirty Street Charcuterie

The Cambodian sausage is much maligned. It’s palm sugar-sweet, composed of half pork gristle and half pork fat, sometimes a touch of chilli for color, sold grilled on the dirtiest streets imaginable. They are inspired by Chinese sausages (laap cheong(?)) but will also be sold as small ball-shaped sausages as well as the more recognisable links. Vendors make their own links which they hang from a clothes rack to semi-dry before barbequing over hot coals. While hanging, the sausages pick up a little of the smoke-flavour from their charring compatriots as well as a good deal of dust from the road. Of all Cambodia’s streetside foods not deliberately involving fermentation, this is the one that I approach with the most trepidation.

Dirty Street Charcuterie

The above sausage was served on a stick; a one-handed food in the parlance of modern convenience cuisine. More often than not, it is plated up with a basic pickle of shredded green papaya, carrot and vinegar that slices through the sausages’ sweetness and fattiness.

Location: Near Psar Chas, Phnom Penh. 500 riel per stick.

On the road again

I’m on the road with Austin from RealThai, visiting all the food hotspots in Cambodia that begin with the letter “S”: Siem Reap, Snoul, Skuon and Sre Ambel. As such, things are going to be a little slow at Phnomenon for a few days. I suggest catching up on some great food bloggers from the 1800s:

  • The Art of Dining; or Gastronomy and Gastronomers by Abraham Heyward (1852) – The Derby Reporter says “No Housekeeper ought to be without this book, which is adapted to every class of society, the rich, the middle classes and the poor”.
  • The Physiology of Taste by Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (1842) – Anyone famous enough to have a cheese named after them as well as having the temerity to say “a dessert without cheese is like a beautiful woman who has lost an eye.” is worth a read.

As full as an egg

Thy head is as full of quarrels as an egg is full of meat, and yet thy head hath been beaten as addle as an egg for quarreling.

So says Mercutio, regarding the “Egg Man” debate currently raging in The Cambodia Daily letters page. For those of you playing at home, Phnom Penh’s aural landscape is punctuated by motorcyclists with a cartful of eggs and a loudspeaker that intones the looped words “PORNG MOAN AING PSOUM KROUENG PISEH” (Barbecued eggs with special sauce!). He’s up there with my favorite street vendor sounds: not as good as the Lambada-obsessed icecream vendor but more entertaining that the bread delivery guy who yells “nuuuuuum pan” (Breeeead!).

A few days ago the Cambodia Daily published a letter from an incensed expat, disturbed at 9am by an Egg Man’s call. This followed with an outpouring of support for the Egg Men, along with a follow up from the original writer pointing out that Phnom Penh has banned mobile loudspeakers. Essentially this is as good as local coverage of street food gets.

John from Jinja follows up with an interview with the Egg Man.

The minimal kitchen: A rare victory over acquisitiveness

The minimal kitchen

One of the horrors of leaving your home for a foreign country is leaving a life’s worth of accumulation behind. One of the joys of arriving is accumulating anew and realising that a huge amount of what you’ve previously accumulated is ephemera. Left is a photo of the entirety of my current cookware in Cambodia. Most of it is so cheap, it’s practically disposable but in accumulating anew, I’ve pared the kitchen back to what I consider to be the bare essentials. When you have the rare chance to populate your kitchen with tools in a single hit, you tend to focus on the utilitarian rather than the meretricious.

Only two items are particularly Cambodian. The opaque bucket on the left is a cheap ceramic filter (locally marketed as ‘Rabbit Filter’) which lets you enjoy the fresh, cholera-free flavour of Phnom Penh tap water without the risk of death. Between the vegetable peeler and the waiter’s friend on the right is a tool to shred green papaya and green mango. The other local element is the quality of the appliances – the combined purchase price of the pictured rice cooker and blender is not more than $30 : and so it is within reason that they’ll catch fire at an inopportune moment.

Omitted are our set of knives – a full block of Victorinox knives, a single 20cm chef’s knife, and sharpening steel : they were returned to Australia on our last trip in preparation for leaving Cambodia. My predilection for travelling with carry-on luggage only and the airlines’ aversion to knife-toting passengers are a poor mismatch. I also couldn’t find the bread knife when I took the photo. The remaining knives are the Thai Kiwi-brand cleaver and mini cleaver: these are the tools that I’ve seen locals do everything from gut pigs to carve fruit with, and so they’ll suffice for the next few months.

Also missing is the bakeware and turbo oven, a mini convection oven that is a remarkably good oven analogue for a machine that looks like a glass basin attached to a hairdryer. I’ve recently discovered that the ‘defrost’ setting cooks at just above 60oC which is perfect for toying with meat in a manner that would make Hervé This proud.

While it will be heart-rending to part with the 1960s yellow glass dinner set that I methodically collected through a decade of thrift shop trawling and the Mexican iron tortilla press, I can do without much of the kitchen junk that I have in storage. And disposing of it gives me an excuse to acquire again.