Our dining experiences in Cambodia were all over the place. Some great, some not so great, and some that were just entertaining. It was an adventure, that’s for sure. I used to think that because Cambodia was sandwiched between the two very lively cultures of Vietnam and Thailand that they must have just absorbed culinary traditions from their neighbors. The fact that Cambodia was so much poorer probably had something to do with it. There just didn’t seem to be the same abundance. Now I think about it a bit differently. Cambodia may indeed be going through an economically depressed period compared to Vietnam and Thailand but the Khmer culture has been around for a long time and was powerful and influential in the past. Some things that I’ve always thought of as Vietnamese or Thai may have actually originated with the Khmer. In places where there is abundance, there is fantastic uniquely Cambodian food.
Most of the best food we had was in Siem Reap and Phnom Penh. Because Siem Reap has so many tourists it would be easy to only see the little bubble of western style bars and restaurants but it’s also easy to get outside of that and that’s where the good stuff is. For starters Siem Reap has excellent markets. Crowded, noisy, packed with piles of beautiful produce, live seafood flopping around on the floor, and vats of fermenting spice pastes.
There were many sausages sold by street vendors but there was a specific kind that I fell in love with. I believe it was a fermented sausage. Full of garlic and acidic bite. Bursting with flavor. One of the best sausages I’ve ever had. Actually more like 10 of the best sausages I’ve ever had.
Just down the street from our hotel one night we found some interesting looking street food. Grilled chicken feet. Fern and I had just been talking about being open-minded with new foods so we decided to give it a try.
I held up two fingers, one for Fern and one for me. We sat down and enjoyed the smell as he cooked them. Then he turned around with 8 chicken feet in his hand. Uh-oh. He thought we meant two…thousand riel worth – two orders, which would be 8 chicken feet. Just another instance of the old language barrier, which was not his fault at all. If he was standing there with 8 sour sausages I would have gladly just taken them and pigged out on sausage, but these were chicken feet. They take time and energy to eat. They’re good but you have sit there and gnaw on each little segment and spit out the bone. There isn’t a lot of meat on them. I didn’t care about the money (50 cents) but this was Fern’s first chicken foot so I didn’t want to sit there for a half hour eating 7 chicken feet. We convinced him to just give us two and he didn’t seem too upset about it. He just didn’t understand why anybody wouldn’t want eight chicken feet.
A common Cambodian breakfast is pork and rice, which may not sound very exciting but the way they do it is really good. A thin fillet of marinated pork charred on the grill with a small bowl of light stock with just a few chunks of root vegetables in it, a little pile of pickled green vegetables, and rice. Dress the rice up with some fish sauce and chili sauce and you have a very satisfying breakfast. It’s worth it to skip the overpriced toast and jam at the hotel and look for a place packed with locals at about 7:00 a.m.
The night market provided some nice treats too. It was mostly just cheap but colorful clothing and jewelry but there were food vendors out in the streets too. We found a nice array of sweet rice cake desserts. They were somewhat similar to the ones we enjoyed in Sabah and Sarawak (kuih?) but a little different. My prediction is that we’ll encounter variations of this dessert all over southeast Asia and someday I’ll have to learn how to make them. I don’t normally like sweets all that much but these usually aren’t very sweet and I love them. It’s more about texture and the richness of coconut milk.
We also found our first bugs of the trip at the night market. A guy was pushing a cart around with fried tarantulas, scorpions, and a couple of other types of large bugs. I couldn’t resist.
We only spent one night in Phnom Penh for various reasons but in that one night I learned that Phnom Penh has some serious street food. We took a walk in the evening to check out some temples and on the way there and back we were surrounded by incredible food. We stopped for a little dinner and had some delicious noodles and a fried fertilized duck egg. I’ve been wanting to try one of these for a long time. It basically just tastes like a hard boiled duck egg with a much more interesting texture. Bread it, fry it, and dip it in salt, lime juice, and chili paste. Yummy!
I’m going to include one other thing in this post from a tiny place called Otres Village on the southern Cambodian coast. It’s a very laid back little town with absolutely nothing going on but they have nice long gorgeous beach. I’ll probably go into more detail about the town in my next post. During the middle of the day when the beach is busiest there are these ladies who walk up and down the beach selling grilled octopus and squid and it is wonderful. They have a portable grill hanging from one end of a rod and a basket of fresh squid and octopus on the other end and they carry the whole thing around with them until someone says they’d like something.
They plop the whole thing down in the sand, brush a little bit of some kind of sauce on whichever you choose, and grill them up for you right there. The meat is just barely cooked but the tentacles get a little charred and crunchy. It’s so simple but absolutely delicious. Fern and I both became addicted to them and sought them out whenever possible. It was probably the best octopus I’ve ever had (the squid was really nice too) and at 2 octopus or 4 squid for a dollar we had quite a few of them.
It was too easy to spoil our appetite for dinner by eating too many of these things in the afternoon.
jim@snorkelbandits.com