Parachute Foodblogging: 5-hour Kuala Lumpur mission

One of the greatest perks of food writing is that I can justify certain types of extreme eating behaviour in the name of “business”. This weekend I had a five hour stopover in Kuala Lumpur which I could breakdown as 30 minutes to clear Malaysian customs, 28 minutes on the train to Sentral Station (RM70, return), two minutes to Chinatown (RM1), an hour of finding and assessing streetfood vendors, an hour of eating, return journey, dash to my plane before I they start referring to me as “Mr Lees” over the loudspeaker.

I’ve been to Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown once before, about 15 years ago, and am now not sure if I remember eating there or if I’ve supplanted all of my Malaysian food memories from KL with Robyn and Dave’s photographs from EatingAsia. What had remained unchanged over the last decade and a half was that Chinatown’s central road Jalan Petaling is still filled with the type of souvenirs that can be classed as Southeast Asian Generic Tourist Crap: faux-sneakers; pirated CDs; t-shirts for pan-Asian beer brands; fishermen’s pants; tschotchkes made from either coconut shell, wire or discarded beer cans. I believe that I may have bought a pair of parachute pants there in the early-90s and that these same pants are still on sale. I would still wear these pants if MC Hammer had not betrayed his more secular audience by recording “Pray“.

More heartening than both the tourist trap and Hammer’s continued career is that the streets and alleys around Jelan Petaling are filled with great streetfood that can be found by someone not at all familiar with KL.

Claypot chicken and rice from KL

Sweet Chinese sausage, chicken and rice: it takes some clever cooking over an open flame to both cook the chicken to the perfect consistency as well as delicately charring the rice so that it’s both burnt and delicious. The gelatinous result was topped with spring onions and filled with fresh ginger and a little soy, and a world away from the following ten hours of inflight entertainment and plane food.

Spy Vs Spy: Spy Black and Spy Ice

Spy

Brewer: Siam Winery Co Ltd

Spy Black Wine Cooler : A delicious blend of the finest wine, sparkling mineral water and natural ingredients: the Siam Winery Co has the temerity to write those exact words on the bottle. Maybe the finest wine that Thailand has to offer actually is in Spy, hidden beneath Thailand’s finest sugar and edible industrial chemicals. It pours as black as it looks but with a faint portwine edge. As much as I was hoping for either ‘Guinness’, ‘Black Pudding’ or ‘Coal’ flavour, the chemical nose betrays the taste of faux-grape and sugar syrup. Alcohol by volume 7%.

Spy Ice Wine Cooler : Anything that is advertised as ‘ice’ flavour that is neither based on crystal methamphetamine nor frozen water is cause for immediate suspicion. Ice is a naturally occurring crystalline solid and calling it anything otherwise is an affront to physics. Slight nose of lemon-scented car freshener. Syrupy mouthfeel. Like a drunken, van-less Mr Whippy had stirred a lemonade-flavored icy pole through a glass of stale Spumante. Altogether, the best Spy I have ever tasted and the clear victor. ABV 4%.

Location: Most larger drink stores, Cambodia-wide

Price:3000 riel

Wiener-related crime on the rise

Via DAS, Phnom Penh Post:

APRIL 23: Four suspected robbers were shot dead after preparing to commit robbery at 9pm in Russey Sang village, Prey Veng province. Police said the four exchanged gunfire and tried to escape on a motorbike after they were ordered to stop for inspection. Police confiscated two AK-47s and 43 bullets, three flashlights and a plastic bag of poisonous hotdogs.

Hotdogs: bringing out the wurst that humanity has to offer.

Amokalypse Now: Fit for a 50s princess

I’ve been having an argument with a few other Khmer cuisine aficionados that ‘Royal Khmer Cuisine’ never existed before the 1950s and was an elaborate confection of the post-colonisation royalty both as a response to Royal Thai cuisine and France’s desire for Cambodia’s cultural history to mirror its own.

I’ll happily admit that I’m wrong and I am being too much of a smartarse about food and culture.

In part because I recently received a copy of The Cambodian Cookbook of HRH Princess Rasmi Sobhana from reader Jo, originally sold in the 1950s ‘for the benefit of the Cambodian Red Cross by the American Women’s Club of Cambodia’. It is packed full of recipes for Royal Cuisine, which as far as I can analyse, means that everything contains either three different meats at the same time or veal.

The amok recipe for a ‘pork amok’ is particularly intriguing involving chicken, pork and a pound of crab. The spices are inconsistent with my scant knowledge of amok because I suspect that the ingredients were both Westernised in the translation and by HRH Sobhana’s royal upbringing. Lining the cups with basil is certainly a response to the difficulty of finding slok ngor leaf outside Cambodia, and I suspect that by ‘citronella’ they mean ‘lemongrass’ and ‘citron’ to be substituted by kaffir lime. I have not cooked this amok and will leave to your discretion as to whether it is a futile waste of crab or not.

HRH Princess Rasmi Sobhana’s Amok Chrouk

10 ½ oz pork
10 ½ oz chicken
5 large pimentos
2 T. shelled garlic
2 T. shallots
1 t. romdeng
2 T. chopped citronella
2 t. fennel roots
½ t. zest of citron

Pound the condiments to a paste. Chop fine the pork and chicken. Boil 1 lb of crab and add to the chopped pork and chicken. Add a beaten egg, several T. of coconut milk, salt, pepper, sugar, nguoc-mam. Put into molds or cups, the bottom of which are covered in basil leaves. Cook in a double boiler. Garnish the top with fennel or parsley leaves, and chopped red pimentos.

Won’t you take me to funky town?

Traditional whipping boy of the Cambodian expat dining scene, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, has hired Clinton Webber as new Group Executive Chef to overhaul its menu.

“It’s going to be a whole new thing,” says Webber. “There’s going to be lots of fusion and touches of Khmer cuisine. The emphasis is on being more funky. Think funky, rustic fusion.”

When I think funky, rustic fusion, I think of George Clinton playing a banjo.

See: FCC

Amokalypse Now: Khmer Surin

Fish Amok - Khmer Surin
Located in the middle of NGO-infested suburb Boeung Keng Kang 1, Khmer Surin restaurant has started to accept tourists by the busload. For anyone living locally looking to lunch on a lazy amok, this is as bad news as my ham-fisted attempts at alliteration. The huge villa seats patrons over three levels and while the second floor boasts the nicest furnishings, the best tables are on the top floor where you can rail against the Gods in their full view for not providing an evening breeze. Be sure to sit away from the edge of roof on a rainy night.

While the surrounds are fancy pants, the service can be burlap sack on a slow night. One evening the waiter responsible for our floor decided to take off his shirt and have a nap in the corner suggesting that he already knew that Australians have appalling record at tipping. On many nights Khmer Surin provides a traditional Khmer band to keep its employees awake, which to my uncultured Western ears sounds as romantic as playing a marimba with a live weasel. If you live in Cambodia, you get enough traditional music anytime there is a wedding in your suburb. The common practice for Cambodian weddings is to have a tent set up out the front of the happy couple’s house, serve 300 of your closest friends a few Chinese-Khmer meals and play about eight hours of Khmer traditional music at ear-bleed levels. This is only punctuated by monks, who say “hello hello hello hello hello hello” into the microphone at 4:30am and then rock the mike with seven hours of groaning in Pali, a language that few Khmer folk understand or enjoy. Come to think of it, I haven’t met any Khmer people with a pure love of traditional music either.

Surin gets top marks for nontraditional presentation. Their fish amok arrives on a divot-filled plate with 7 individual servings of the curry that challenges you to play a clever game wherein you battle your tablemates for the final nugget of fish. I was going to call the game ‘Hungry Hungry Subsistence Farmers’, but it doesn’t really have much of a ring to it when I write it down. The sad part is that this amok is all bling and no substance. It’s the MC Hammer of fish curries (minus the later career as a celebrity judge on Dance Fever and his current career as a blogger). Relatively heavy on the lime leaves, shredded chili and MSG but otherwise pared down to a very minimal spice blend, coconut and a small amount of yesterday’s fish, served cold.

Location: #9 Street 57, Phnom Penh. Fish amok, US$3.50.

6 rules of Cambodian street food eating

My reliable source of Cambodian food paranoia, the Lonely Planet Cambodia (4th Ed.) opens their paragraph on Cambodian food with the

…colonial adage that says ‘if you can cook it, boil it or peel it, you can eat it…otherwise forget it’

Following with bleak warnings against ice, shellfish, salad, steamed foods, empty restaurants and vendors wallowing in their own insalubrity. I don’t ascribe to the maxim that you should look at whether the vendor looks healthy because maybe he’s had a rough night on the Mekong whisky and I’d hate to deny him a round of his favourite tipple after an oily day behind his deep-fryer. Short of the vendor suffering something that can be recognised as transmissible via food, I’ll give them my time of day and fistful of riel. Originally I set myself the rule that I’d never knowingly eat in a village where somebody had recently died from diarrhoea but after consulting some World Health Organisation statistics on childhood diarrhoea mortality I realised that in most of rural and urban Cambodia, I would be going hungry a good deal of the time.

I tend to eat more food from the street in Cambodia than your average tourist as well as eating everything that the LP warns me against and tend not to ever injure myself doing so. I don’t have a cast-iron stomach and accordingly, I eat in a way that I consider sensible. Here’s my rough guide to surviving street food.

1. Heat : Hot food should be served hot. Your pho should steam. Your deep-fried banana should burn the tips from your fingers through the inadequate newspaper wrapping. If it doesn’t look like it might lift the skin off the roof of your mouth, don’t order it. Avoid foods from the streetside bain maries in Cambodia: generally you can get exactly the same dish cooked for you fresh in most small Khmer restaurants for less than a dollar more with better produce and surroundings to boot.

2. Cold : Cold is an entirely different matter. Ice tends to be a problem where the water has been contaminated prior to being frozen or the ice has been contaminated in storage or transit. If you’re having a bad day, both. Cambodia’s drinking ice supply is excellent: the only people that I’ve met who have been sick from the ‘ice’ has been when it was combined liberally with a dozen beers. The only cold food that I avoid on the streets is the ice cream as vendors commonly unfreeze then refreeze their wares, coupled with the ice cream itself not being tasty.

3. Timing : In Phnom Penh, people stick to rigid schedules. Many are up at dawn and thus breakfast starts roughly after sunrise and continues no later than 8:30am. Breakfast foods, especially the ubiquitous pork and rice, are best consumed early. For most office and factory workers, lunch begins at exactly 12:00pm and runs until 2pm. Hitting a roadside lunch spot after 1pm often will mean that you’ll get the dregs of the soup and the fried fish that the rest of the locals rejected. With the exception of mixed fruit smoothie (tuk alok) and the occasional fried noodle vendor, there aren’t many late night street food options yet.

4. Other patrons – This is important for two reasons. Firstly, if people are spilling over onto the pavement and into the street, it’s an accurate indicator that the food is either tasty or underpriced. Even if the food is dirt-cheap, if people are pulling up to a stand in both Landcruisers and Honda Chalys, it gives a good indication that the food crosses economic boundaries and that it is worth people stepping down from their high (or in the case of Chalys, low) horse to dine amongst the plebs. Secondly, it’s a great indicator of how quickly the food turns over. Busy venues tend to be constantly cooking or at least refreshing their food as quickly as possible and thus you’re likely to receive fresher produce.

5. Family tag team – if the more than one member of the same family works at the stall, this is always an excellent indicator of a top notch venue. It means that their stall is lucrative enough to support the entire cohort. Be on the lookout for husband and wife teams, and award bonus points if they have kids in school uniforms (outside of school hours), because they’ll be the ones starting the next Jollibee.

6. Don’t eat stupid things : A good guide to judging the stupidity of a food is that if the locals believe primarily that a food will give you strength or vitality in the pants department rather than chiefly eating it because it tastes appealing. Some foods stay as provincial delicacies for one of three reasons: they’re either shit, endangered or they kill you. If snake’s blood was really that delicious, McDonald’s would have a cobra-flavoured sundae. I’m all for eating new and random (but not endangered) things but remember to keep your expectations very low and your bowels at maximum readiness, because when you do discover something that is loosely edible, it will taste like the food of the gods.
Continue reading 6 rules of Cambodian street food eating

Amokalypse Now: Anlong Veng

Anlong Veng’s claim to infamy is not its food. On the Thai border in Cambodia’s un-touristed northwest, Anlong Veng was the last home of the Khmer Rouge leadership and the location of Pol Pot’s unceremonious cremation on a pile of flaming refuse. A few surviving top cadres either wait for their day at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal or their death in the comfort of their own homes in and around this minor border town.

The food this close to the Thai border does show the influence of the northern neighbour. Chilli and lime leaves are ever-present and the food displays less of the palm-sugar sweetness of many Cambodian foods. Fresh chilli is sold at Anlong Veng’s Psar Thmei by the kilo rather than in more measured doses.

amok kchok from anlong veng

This fish amok from Pkay Preuk Restaurant on the edge of town was roasted in a foil wrapping instead of steamed (amok kchok) and was dominated by chilli with what seemed to be equal parts of the fermented fish paste prahok and fresh snakehead fish. Along with the herb slok ngor, Thai basil (chee krohorm) was abundant making for a richly aromatic dish. The amok was almost baked dry rather than mousseline.

Location: Pkay Preuk Restaurant, Anlong Veng, Oddar Meanchey province.

As a non-food related bonus: for anybody thinking of doing the loop from Beng Melea to Koh Ker to Prasat Preah Vihear by dirtbike/Camry during this hot season, the roads are all in good shape. The road from Koh Ker to Tbaeng Meanchey then Tbaeng Meanchey to Preah Vihear (Road 62) has recently been improved. It is still dirt with plenty of corrugations but not impassible as most guidebooks mention, making it possible to do a long day from Tbaeng Meanchey to Prasat Preah Vihear then onwards to Anlong Veng well before nightfall.

If you feel like taking it easier, there are a few guesthouses at the base of Prasat Preah Vihear’s mountain. The worst stretch of road is a few patches of potholes between Prasat Preah Vihear and Anlong Veng which could turn much nastier depending on how much of the timber-smuggling traffic takes that route. Anlong Veng seems to be booming at the moment with a choice of about five guesthouses and a few new restaurants.

A minor annoyance is that if you’re keen on visiting the ‘River of a Thousand Lingas’ at Kbal Spean or the temples at Banteay Srei on the return journey to Siem Reap from Anlong Veng (Road 67), you’ll need to have bought a temple pass in advance from Siem Reap. Sokimex has probably not considered that tourists will be coming in via Anlong Veng.