Phnomenon: food in Cambodia

The true secret of the pig is not only that you can eat every part of the animal, but you can do so via barbecue. Spotted at Central Market, Phnom Penh.

Chef Rick Stein paid a visit to Cambodia over a year ago(?) to film the first part of his new series Far Eastern Odyssey and he comes away impressed with the food. His crew got in touch with me almost a year beforehand, but sadly, I was on my way out of living in Phnom […]

I’ve been teaching a friend’s grandmother, Channa, to make pizza. I literally have no idea how she got the desire to learn to cook Italian but she’s a relentlessly inquisitive student and masterful Cambodian cook. The exchange is a little one-sided – I tend to pick up about ten recipes for every one that I […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

The ubiquitous feature of the Cambodian rice paddy landscape are the sugar palms which punctuate the flat landscape, skinny fists of fronds lifted in the air like antennas to heaven. They’re a versatile plant providing fruit (palm hearts and pulp from the husk), fresh sap (which can be taken straight, fermented into vinegar or wine, […]

One of the rare disappointments that I’ve had when hunting the provinces for Cambodian food is finding Cambodian coffee. I’ve been to the far northeast, met the growers in their villages, and then wandered about Banlung in search of fresh Java with increasing and unfulfilled desperation.
What I ended up discovering in my brief Ratanakiri-ward sojourn […]

One of the few street food regrets that I have acquired is eating the above barbecued cake. I don’t know what it is named in Khmer and despite exuding the lush aroma of roasted banana and sesame seeds, it appears to be made of either papier-mâché or its even less edible substitute, taro. Taro is […]