Street food – Page 3 – Phnomenon: food in Cambodia

Vegetarian noodles at Psar Orussei

Psar Orussei is the market where you can find all of the crap that you can’t find at any other market in Cambodia. My first impression of the place was that it was extremely handy if you lived in Phnom Penh, but nigh on useless if you were just passing through. Partly, this was because I had never arrived there at seven in the morning for both breakfast and to find cardboard boxes with a vegetarian.

I hold the strong belief that vegetarians are nuts. If the Gods had wanted us to eat only vegetables, they would have sent forth a bacon tree and possibly a steak bush to keep the halal and kosher folk prostrate in veneration for Them as well. Thankfully for vegetarians, a very small handful of Cambodians are pro-herbivore and much less on the militant carnivore jihad than I am. Let it be known that I tolerate vegetarians, if only to convert them to my true faith.

At 7am, the central food vendor section of Psar Orussei is buzzing with locals looking for their morning noodle or pork and rice injection. The vegetarian specialists were easy to find: they all have “VEGETA RIAN” or variants thereof plastered across the front of their stalls. After much conferring, Stall 177 was deemed the pick of the anti-meat vendors. I opted for the rice noodle soup (khtieav).

If I happened to be shipwrecked on a vegetarian island, after I had eaten my comrades and my stock of human jerky began to dwindle, wheat gluten would become my favourite meat analogue. In my soup, you will notice two distinct forms of gluten, fecklessly pretending to be meat. A few rubbery mushroom balls, lettuce, spring onions, and a single slice of carrot provide some more flotsam in the thin vegetable stock. Proportionally, there was an excellent ratio of rice noodle to flotsam. My vegetarian friend heartily approves.

One third condensed milk, two-thirds coffee: from zero to toothless crone in a single glass.

Vegetarian khtieav and a cup of coffee (2500 riel, US$0.62)

Location: Stall 177, ground floor, Psar O’Russei, Phnom Penh

Donuts at Bokor Cinema

Come rain or shine, this husband and wife donut duo never move from just outside the Bokor Cinema on Mao Tse Toung Boulevard. They’ve always got a customer or four hanging around which generally bodes well. I’m almost embarrassed when I drop in because I see them every day on my way to work and am yet to purchase a single deep-fried product from them. Through sheer weight of luck, I happened upon them when they were cutting up a fresh batch. The process is as follows:

Firstly, remove your dough from the plastic bag underneath the roof of your cart, where it has been proving in the scorching heat.

Secondly, clean the surface of your cart (as unbelievable as this may sound) and give it a liberal dusting with riceflour. Flatten your wheat/rice flour dough out with a rolling pin.

Thirdly, cut into strips, paying attention not to accidentally remove your enormous, decorative thumbnail in the process. Roll into flat disks and dust with a few sesame seeds. Hand over to your wife, the deep frying expert.

Serve to the Westerner who is paying far too much attention and asking too many questions for your liking. Charge him 500 riel (12.5 cents) for four.

I’m glad that I didn’t drop in earlier as I’d probably be about ten kilos heavier by now. These yeasty pillows are packed with chewy deliciousness: hollow to the core, only slightly sweet, and blisteringly hot out of the fryer. Sadly, I didn’t get the Khmer name for them, although I had a longer than usual, Beckettian interrogation of the vendors that ran along these lines:

Phil: What are these?
Vendor: (Nervous laugh) You understand Khmer.
Phil: Yes. A little. What are these?
Vendor: Food
Phil: Bread?
Vendor: Yes. Bread.
Phil: Fried bread?
Vendor: Yes. Fried bread.
Phil: Are they chaway*? or fried bread?
Vendor: I don’t have any chaway.
Phil: Yes, I understand. What are these?
Vendor: Food.
Phil: (Clutches head in hands)

Location: Just west of Bokor Cinema, near the corner of St. 95 and Mao Tse Toung Boulevard, Phnom Penh

* – Chaway are the donuts that you often have with soup, similar to the Chinese donuts that you eat with congee.

Addendum (21 June 2006): As a very weird aside, according to AsianWeek in 2000, 90 percent of California’s independent doughnut stores are owned by Cambodian expats.

Mobile Ice Cream: Droppin’ Science

Just as I was finishing my year-long opus on the microbiological make-up of Phnom Penh’s streetside icecream, I discovered that the French beat me to it by almost ten years. Damn you, Institut Pasteur du Cambodge. To wit:

A study of the microbiological quality of ice creams/sorbets sold on the streets of Phnom Penh city was conducted from April 1996 to April 1997. Socio-demographic and environmental characteristics with two ice/ice creams samples were collected from vendors selected in the city. A total of 105 vendors and 210 ice/ice creams samples were randomly selected for the study period. Ice/ice cream vendors in the streets of Phnom Penh were adults (mean age: 28 years old) with a male predominance (86.5%). Mean educational level of vendors was 5 years with no training in mass catering. Most ice creams and sorbets (81.7%) were made using traditional methods.

Microbiological analysis performed in the laboratory of Pasteur Institute of Cambodia indicated the poor bacteriological quality of the samples. The proportions of samples classified unsafe according to microbiological criteria were 83.3% for total bacterial count at 30 degrees C, 70% for total coliforms, 30% for faecal coliforms, 12.2% for Staphylococcus aureus and 1.9% for presence of Salmonella spp. These bacterial results suggest that many other food products sold in the streets may be similarly poor. Safety measures should be undertaken to avoid potential threats. Regulation of the street food sector should be part of a larger strategy for enhanced food safety and environmental quality in the city.

Things have either improved in the last ten years or I just happen to pick the 16.7% of icecream vendors who are free from bacteria, assuming that there is a high degree of cross-contamination and my secret superpower is not the ability to digest anything.

The full report has some great demographic info to spice up your icecream vendor-related dinner party conversation:

Average number of years in the profession was 2 years.
Average number of working days was 6 per week and each vendor worked 47 weeks during the year.
65.4% of vendors made their own icecream, 16.3% bought from other small vendors, and 18.3% bought theirs from a larger icecream business.
The average number of portions sold per day was 177.
The average daily profit was US$2.30

My only question is: how do I get funding to study street food for a whole year?

See: Kruy Sl, Soares Jl, Ping S et al. Microbiological quality of ” ice, ice cream sorbet” sold on the streets of Phnom Penh; April 1996-April 1997. Bull Soc Pathol Exot 2001; 94 (5): 411-414. Original PDF in French. Includes photos of the four distinct modes of icecream vendor .

Previously on Phnomenon: Icecream Sandwich on Wheels

Great Balls Of Coconut, Laos

There are very few street vendors that manage to bridge the sweet/savory divide, but this one has managed to construct an appropriate overpass using sweet coconut balls and quail eggs at Talat Sao in Vientiane, Laos. The balls are formed from a sweet, coconut-infused batter which I believe also contains a good portion of rice flour to make the balls slightly gluey on the inside, but still slightly crispy on the outside.

After cooking a few rounds of balls, she alternates to meticulously cracking open and frying half-spheres of quail eggs in her aebleskiver-like pan. The eggs are served with Laos’ favorite condiment: fish sauce. Balls were a few hundred kip each.

Laos Food Bonanza

When my commentary on Khmer food slows down, I’m usually out of Cambodia and this time it was in the only Indochinese country described as sleepier than Cambodia: Lao PDR. Thanks to having some friends in Vientiane, I did get to eat a fairly representative sample of the local delicacies.

Sticky rice (kao neaw) is both self explanatory and ubiquitous as the national staple. The process to make it seems complex enough that it involves a fire, a purpose-built basket and constant attention; akin to the early years of ballooning but with slightly less chance of setting yourself on fire and crashing back to earth in a ball of fiery death. It might give the rice a stickier and more fibrous texture, but I think that I would rarely have the time on my hands that it takes to prepare.

In more proof that if you can grind up an animal, you can eat it, laap, the ever-popular minced meat salad, is available in every imaginable meat. I managed to fit in laap in five different ground animal flavours but none in the evil non-meat equivalent, tofu laap. Whenever I attempt to build myself some laap, I can never balance the chili/lime/galangal/fish sauce properly, and so every Laotian laap I ate fills me with both shame and meaty deliciousness. I heard tales of iguana laap but had no success in finding a local lizard grinder or procuring myself an iguana. The local Laos green papaya salad (Tam Mak Hung) is spicier than our Khmer variety and there also seems to be a marked preference to go a little crazy on the fish sauce.

Rice cakes drying in Luang Prabang, Laos

Roadside rice cake production, Laos-style

For me, the two main drawcards of Luang Prabang seemed to be the town’s World Heritage listing and a regionally famous snack made from dried sheets of river algae that comes with a buffalo rind and chili sambal.

From the early part of the dry season, northern Laotians harvest river algae (kai) that they then proceed to sun-dry before pressing into flat sheets with sesame seeds and local vegies. The resulting algae paper (kaipen) tastes like the kelp wrapping from a sushi roll, deep-fried; and the traditional accompanying paste made from ground chili and buffalo rind tasted much like someone had set a fistful of large, sliced rubberbands alight in my mouth with roughly the same texture. Before coming to Laos, I was told that it was “a great snack to eat with Beer Lao” which I should have translated as “a great snack to eat when incomprehensibly drunk”. The buffalo isn’t all bad, as Laotians also make an excellent buffalo sausage.

As for restaurants:

Moon The Night – Not a suggestion for an lewd gesture aimed at the evening but a local restaurant overlooking the Mekong, upstream from the main strip. Like every good local Indochinese restaurant, it blares local pop music at earbleed levels. Their duck laap was excellent although padded out with various offal. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

The strip of local restaurants that line the Mekong roughly opposite the Lane Xang Hotel seem to vary in quality with the weather, but are good for a cheap sticky rice and laap fix.

My brother, who worked in Laos for a while recommended me…

KhuVieng Fried Chicked (KFC). If this doesn’t make a phnomenon write-up, the universe is in a state of imbalance. The crispiness of the chicken puts the Colonel to shame, yet the establishment is somehow notably absent from my edition of the LP. It’s near a large tree about three-quarters of the way down Khu Vieng street if you’re heading towards the Australia Club. It’s on the right and easy to miss, so take your time.

…but I couldn’t find it in several very slow passes on my hired Suzuki Viva. However, just off Khu Vieng is a great spring roll store aptly named The Spring Roll Store. Their spring rolls aren’t bad but the mystery rice salad that accompanies the rolls is excellent. There are two ingredients in it that I can’t identify and I’ll mail a can of your choice of Klang to anyone who can speak enough Laotian to find out. If you’re in Phnom Penh, I’ll drop it by your house in person. One of the components is deep-fried (a spring roll part? Deep-fried leftovers?) and the other is a vegetable (Green papaya? Mango? Cucumber?).

I heart bacon

JoMa CafÃ© – So barang that it physically hurts but that didn’t stop me from visiting both the Vientiane and Luang Prabang outlet for Bagel Eggers (17000 kip, above; no relation to David) and good espresso with choice of local or imported beans. I’m on holiday. Your Cambodian breakfast bobor is no match for the true might of a bacon sarnie and decent coffee. Location: On Sethathirath Road in VT; Near cnr of Sisavangvong Rd and Setthatihilat Rd in LP

Night Market, Luang Prabang, Laos

Luang Prabang Night Market – At the end of the night market (opposite the daytime Handicraft Market), a small alleyway becomes a Laotian street food emporium. Despite being on the way to dinner elsewhere, I did my best to pick up a selection of deep-fried things (a few balls of deep-fried sticky rice coating a nugget of banana, 5000kip for a hefty bagful; spring rolls, 2000kip worth) to eat en route. There were some good sized racks of pork that I would have had a crack at, but thought it might offend my fellow diners if I rocked up with half a side of a pig.

The Apsara – Herbert Ypma’s Hip Hotels calls this place “the most chic hotel in Luang Prabang” which I only know because they had two different copies of Ypma’s trendspotting tome displayed on their coffee table. Seems to be the only modern place in town that recognises Luang Prabang’s period of suzerainty under Jayavaraman VII, at least in name although no Cambodian food from that era on their “Asian fusion” menu. Their $6 steak frites (below) was a cheap, unidentifiable cut but at that price I would be happy to gnaw on a another strip of buffalo. I take my iron where I can get it. Location: Ban Wat Sene, Thanon Kingkitsarath, Luang Prabang.

FILTHY MEATPORN

Are there any Laos food blogs out there? Comments are open.

Carl Parkes’ new contrarian pants

This post is probably gonna piss off a few people, and make other people doubt my sanity or street cred, but street food in Asia is almost uniformly bad. I’ve eaten from food stalls all across Asia, and most of the fare was pure crap. Boiled fishballs in water with seacress is not food – it’s fish food for goats.

But that’s what is usually served from food stalls in Bangkok, Pattaya, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Surabaya, Denpasar, Delhi, Varanasi, and Trivandrum. I’ve eaten street food in all those places, and mostly it has been less than garbage. Unless you have absolutely no taste or distinguishation in food, skip the street foodstalls and spend a little extra money and dine in a cafe where the chef actually knows how to cook.

Carl Parkes, Moon Guide author and acerbic critic of dire travel writing, has returned from his brief holiday wearing a new pair of contrarian pants. It’s an easy target to put the boot into every Asian street food vendor because they can’t fight back when you are out of reach of their razor-sharp cleavers, boiling oil and botulism toxin. The only expectation I have from a full meal that cost me less than 50 cents is that it will not permanently incapacitate me. You can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear, but you can make a non-lethal and tasty soup and possibly a selection from the Taco Bell menu. With this exceedingly low expectation as a starting point, I’ll occasionally discover something that befits any man or woman of distinguishation. At this stage, I’m not going to censure Carl for losing his marbles, street cred or dictionary because my personal theory is that he’s pitching for a job at an upmarket travel magazine and needs to offer them a low-budget food sacrifice as penance to the Gods of Luxury.

Satay Cart

Satay at Chatuchuk

Pristine white countertop, immaculately displayed satay skewers, and the sense of organisation and style that I have never seen within the Cambodian street food genre. Largely, because this satay cart wasn’t in Cambodia, it was under the stairs at the Mo Chit skytrain station near Chatuchak Market in Bangkok. If strolling over the top of a waft of satay smoke doesn’t make you hungry, I’m probably not going to be the first person to tell you that you live a life of olfactory impecunity.

Corn on the Cob with Grey Onion Sauce

Cambodian Corn Vendor

There isn’t a nation in the world that doesn’t sell corn-on-the-cob as street food and Cambodia is no exception. I have seen people barbecuing corn streetside in all the Cambodian provinces to which I have toured. This particular corn-griller was fired up in Hun Sen Park, but frankly, Phnom Penh is rife with them.

Cambodian Corn with Grey Sauce

What attracted me to this particular vendor was a curious pale grey sauce that she ladelled over the corn. As I am wont to pimp Cambodian culinary innovations, I bought one of the less dessicated looking cobs for a few hundred riel and asked for a dose of the grey stuff. I was hoping for prahok-flavour. The sauce had the consistency and flavour of warm dishwater after you had recently cleaned the plates from a meal that consisted solely of week old spring onions, chicken necks, and MSG. I now have a much deeper understanding of why this particular corn condiment hasn’t had the same global appeal as butter and ground pepper.

Addendum (18 April 2006): After a discussion with a workmate, the grey sauce is alleged to be coconut milk, salt, monosodium glutamate, spring onions, oil and fish sauce.

Icecream Sandwich on Wheels

There is an icecream vendor that plies his wares somewhere near my house at about 5:00 am each morning. I know this because he deploys the most common tactic to sell icecream in Phnom Penh: playing a garish electronic ringtone version of the Lambada. The process by which the Forbidden Dance came to be associated with mobile Cambodian icecream vendors is another story, a story that the pictured icecream vendor, Cheourn, couldn’t begin to answer because he uses the less sexy method of ringing a handheld bell to attract customers. Since Hun Sen placed the kibosh on broadcasting sexiness late last year, Cheourn’s more conservative approach is justified.

icecream sandwich

The icecream itself is made primarily from sweetened condensed milk and the block of cake surrounding it is carved from the same sort of rubbery foam from which they used to make Muppets, until the puppeteers began contracting a new form of hand cancer. Next time I’ll have a go at the sweet bread roll instead.

Lotophagi

Lotus flower head vendor
When Odysseus arrived at the island of the lotus eaters, he sent three men ashore to report on the locals. The men promptly got stuck into the lotus fruit, forgot their mission and desire to return home, and eventually had to dragged screaming back to the ship. Unafraid of the tales of Homer, I’ve been meaning to try some of these lotus heads ever since I’ve seen vendors balancing them on their heads down on the riverfront but never really knew how to open the things up and feast on the goo inside. Over the weekend, I ran into one of my work colleagues, a confessed lotus-eater, and he showed me how.

The heads
Firstly, acquire yourself a few lotus heads (1000 riel for three)

Separate the seed pods
Secondly, remove the seed pod from the shower head and remove the outer green casing to reveal the white innards.

mmm...lotus
Lastly, eat the white part. It tastes like slightly astringent snow peas and is probably one of the lowest yielding snacks around.