How to Cook Cambodian Cuisine

Hello again, blog world! I have to say, Cambodia completely surprised me and stole my heart. It might have had something to do with this guy. Have I fully introduced you to my wonderful, handsome, adventurous, wonderful boyfriend, Nate? Well…here he is. Almost six months into the journey of a lifetime, he has been everywhere from mushroom hunting on the Polish/Czech border to working on a kibbutz factory in Israel to sailing in Turkey (with me!) to motorcycling around India (…not with me) to now, volunteering in Cambodia. Luckily my job offers me a decent amount of flexibility for us to be able to experience some of these adventures together. Third stop for me on his journey was Phnom Penh, where we spent an “extended weekend” exploring Cambodia’s capitol city. I’ll go into more detail into other parts of our trip later, but he could not have given me a better birthday present to write about other than a full day Khmer cooking course!

Cambodian or Khmer (pronounced kmai - who knew?) food is mild and delicious.While it certainly doesn’t stand out among its SE Asian neighbors, I would characterize it as a much more tame cuisine than nearby Thailand and Vietnam. You certainly taste those influences in Khmer cooking. I won’t go into great detail into every recipe we made (boyfriend was a real trooper for this 4-course journey) but some repeated ingredients included coconut milk, lemongrass, rice, peanuts, and fish sauce. We started out the day in the marketplace!

Fresh veggies galore

Meaty little frogs! (or naked Barbies?)

After we learned about Cambodian produce and what you can buy at a market (i.e. everything) we headed over to the kitchens to start cooking. First up, vegetarian spring rolls! We shredded taro and squeezed out the moisture before mixing in carrot and peanuts. Wrapped them up in a potato rice paper and deep fried for fifteen (!) minutes. The part that brought this dish together was the dipping sauce. Half fish sauce, half sugar, lime juice with chopped shallot, chili and roasted peanut stirred in. Licking my fingers. Nate and I agreed that we didn’t need to re-make these spring rolls again - they were pretty greasy and not super flavorful - but the dipping sauce must be re-created. Next up was the famous Cambodian dish called fish amok. This is like the Khmer equivalent of the American cheeseburger - total classic. It’s a lot of hard work to make all of the little bits and pieces of this dish, but SO worth it! To create the simmer sauce, you have to manually grind up lots of little things - tumeric, galangal, kaffir lime, lemongrass, chili, garlic, shallots. After a while, I got tired and Nate ended up having to do double-hammering of the fish amok spice paste. I blame jetlag!
Beyond the sauce, you have to form your little banana leave pocket for the steaming. Essentially you sew two leaves together with toothpicks.

Mix the spice paste with coconut milk and more peanuts, put in your cubed white fish, and steam for fifteen minutes! Enjoy with Angkor beer and white rice. This was my FAVORITE. So by now we were pretty stuffed. And sweating a LOT. Boyfriend had successfully situated himself next to the fan, pretty much inside the beer refrigerator. Thankfully next course was a fresh salad, made from the banana leaf! This was super easy to make. Chopped banana leaf, chili, shallot, and then whole fresh herbs - thai basil, couple of different kinds of mint. We topped it off with the same dipping sauce/dressing as went with the spring rolls. I can’t wait to recreate this, but I’ll have to find the American equivalent of the banana leaf (white chopped up onion-y looking thing below). It tasted pretty mild - almost like texture of chopped fennel bulb. Boyfriend did some excellent food styling on his plate below. And we couldn’t finish off the cooking class without dessert. Mango sticky rice with coconut! The Cambodian mangoes are sweet and not too chewy. We artfully decorated, cooked the sticky rice, and topped it off with a sauce of coconut milk, palm sugar, and more fresh shredded coconut.. Added a few black sesame seeds, and now, time to eat. I love getting to know a new city or culture through food, and I have to hand it to the boyfriend for organizing this wonderful surprise. After we cooked and ate and sweat all day, we went back to the hotel for some R&R, AC and showering. If you are traveling to Phnom Penh and want to dive into the Khmer cuisine, check out the course we took - options for full and a half day. While Nate discovered this restaurant and course by word-of-mouth, it’s also recommended in Lonely Planet Cambodia if you need additional information!