Ten Days In Cambodia: Street Food, Spit Roasts And Freshly Boiled Crabs

Words and pics by Dom Bailey

Khmer food has never really been on my gastro radar. I've never reached for the phone book thinking "ooh I could murder a Cambodian".

Even after reading the recent posts on Chef Sandwich, I have to admit I was a little sceptical about the attraction of Cambodian food. The descriptions of dishes such as prahok mostly left me intrigued, but not salivating. Was it something I was desperate to try? I wasn't convinced.

My own experience of Asian food is the average British experience of Chinese takeaways, Thai restaurants/pubs, Nepalese and Indian curries, and the odd festival flirt with Tibetan cuisine. I often use Asian ingredients in stir fries, curries, soups, marinades etc but don't think I can say I've nailed a specific Asian dish.

But given the opportunity to visit my old friend Lennie Nash (below), I arrived in Cambodia with an open mind, hesitant palate, and high-strength stomach tablets.

THE CAMBODIAN capital, Phnom Penh, is a manic, vibrant and beautiful city.

Painted pagodas sit serene as life bustles past. The streets are alive with the endless drone of mopeds loaded to the hilt with anything from whole families, monks, sacks of rice (wife on top), bushels of grass, and even other motorbikes. Among them weave the tuk tuks, whose drivers relentlessly plague Westerners in hope of a fare.

Giant Land Cruisers and Hummers cruise the main drags, a reminder that there is a growing, privileged elite in Cambodia who are not struggling to get by on $2 a day. Besides the traffic chaos, the ubiquitous sight amid the palaces and pagodas, lady bars, mobile phone shops, and motorbike repair dens is food.

They say the Khmers graze - small meals throughout the day as and when - and there is certainly plenty to choose from. Food is everywhere - restaurants, market stalls, and street hawkers balancing crockery and cooking pots on either end of a shoulder-supported pole like giant weighing scales.

Toddlers selling boiled quails' eggs, juice sellers with giant mangles to crush sugar cane into a sweetly refreshing drink (the last crush always includes a segment of green orange for a deliciously zesty hit), and the street food heroes with their tarpaulin-covered mobile kitchens - the ultimate in fast food joints.

Street food around the world often captures the essence of the country - its aspirations, its roots, and its everyday fuel for life. And from Bogota to Benin to Bangkok, it is sold under a blue tarp with a dubiously attached light bulb, glass box showcasing the cooked wares, and some sort of cooking or reheating device.

In Cambodia, food hawkers offer everything from fried pork or Chinese-style roast duck, endless soups and noodles, beef stews, and grilled fish, to trays of fertilised duck eggs, pate-filled baguettes, green mango salads, fish fritters and dim sum.

These dishes are the real taste of the country. Restaurant chains may have their place - you know what you're getting, and there may be slightly stricter health and safety procedures - but street food has character and is what makes the everyday people tick.

YOU’VE MADE the effort to get there, and you never know, it may make you tick too...

Okay, it's rice three times a day - chicken rice soup or grilled pork, rice and pickles for breakfast, hot, herby noodle soup, or tom yam broth, at lunchtime in the tropical heat, with a side plate of rice, and fried or barbecued meat or fish with rice in the evening. Boiled rice, fried rice, sweet fermented rice, sticky rice you can heap on to chopsticks, rice to soak up the meat juices, mop up the soup, but always rice.

There's always a dipping sauce too - the salt, pepper and lime combination, or a chilli dip or soy sauce - basically, here's some rice and a little protein to fill you up, how spicy, sour, sweet, or salty you like it is up to you. The food is nearly always freshly cooked, you're eating outside, and there's no rush to clear your table for the next sitting.

One of the best meals I had wasn't in fact from the roadside freelancers, but it was along the same principles. Outside an open-fronted restaurant, with its plastic chairs and tables, packed with beer tower-glugging locals, was the star of the show - a whole spit-roast cow.

Okay, no head, but all the rest, unceremoniously skewered from end to end - nature obviously had this treatment in mind - and slowly spit-roasted over hot coals until the meat is perfectly pink. It's sliced off, grilled a bit more on the BBQ, and soon there is not a scrap left. Get to the restaurant too late and there’s often just a sorry-looking leg attached to the spit.

We stumbled across the start of the process during a bike ride along the Mekong one morning. A boy was washing down and preparing a calf’s carcass for that night's service. After carefully cleaning the skin, he poured a mixture of lime juice and spices into the stomach cavity, then a huge handful of herbs, before sewing up the gap with wire and transferring the meat to the spit. Hog roasters would look on with envy.

We returned a few hours later, and the meat was slowly cooking, but being tended to all the time. It was a mouth-watering smell and that evening we headed straight for our nearest BBQ cow (koo dut) joint.



Served with the chunks of succulent steak and ribs was rice, of course, with the salt-pepper-lime combo, which is perfect with spit-roasted beef and, I noted, the infamous prahok fermented fish cheese - "freshwater fish fermented in barrels of brine for so long they acquire the powerful, roof-of-the-mouth-etching taste of blue cheese."

It doesn't sound that appealing really, does it? But mixing some of the greyish sauce with a spoonful of trustworthy sticky rice, I was won over straight away. I really couldn't stop eating it. Dipping meat into it, or chunks of crisp vegetables resting on ice, or just spooning it over rice. Fantastic.

Sadly, not something that you could recreate back home without a whole lot of mess and fuss from neighbours and local cats. But maybe that is the secret - real Khmer food, you'll only find in Cambodia.

Heading south from the capital we hit the coast. Fried langoustine-type shellfish from beach sellers as you lounge by the sea, beautiful tropical fish - caught by bamboo rod and line (with these very hands) - and barbecued with a chilli, sugar, salt and lime rub by the crew.

Freshly-boiled blue swimming crabs crunched and cracked as the high tide lapped the edge of the restaurant shack in Kep. If you thought picking a crab from a tank is fresh, we watched as the waitress disappeared out of the front of the restaurant to reappear with the crab ladies on the rocks behind us. A crab lady then waded out to her reed-woven pots, pulled one ashore, picked out a few meaty crabs from the tiddlers, and handed them to the waitress, who tottered back to the kitchen.



Eating crabs is a slow, messy business, but even the smallest were packed with fleshy white chine meat and creamy, brown head meat. Taking your time cracking and slurping through the shells as the breeze blows in off the sea, is one of those holiday moments.

And then there was squid with fresh, green peppercorns, which were the discovery of the trip for me. Again, like prahok, it was a wow, that's a fresh new taste.

The little green corns, clinging tightly to the stalk, are stir-fried with squid or crab for no time at all. Fresh, peppery, slightly soapy (but not in a bad way) explosions as you crunch through the whole lot, stalks and all. And they are seasonal, so you can only really get them at their best between September and February, when the harvest moves on to the black and red corns for drying.

I did find some on my return to the UK in a Thai supermarket, but having travelled they were starting to go black and the stalks were tougher. Still, it was enough of a green pepper pop to bring memories of Kep’s famous crab market flooding back.

Ten days in Cambodia is only really enough to get the briefest of introductions to Khmer cooking - especially if the squid and green peppercorns is so good you have it a few nights running ("I really should try something else on the menu, but they've got squid and green peppercorns...”)

But it’s enough to get a real taste for the clear, zingy broths, simply cooked meat and fish with accompanying dips, fragrant herbs and, funnily enough, boiled rice.

:: Dom Bailey is a writer and singer-songwriter. His songs are here at domssongs.blogspot.com.

Phu Quoc: Black Pepper And Pearls

I’ve just spent a blissful two weeks living in a beachside bungalow on Vietnam’s largest island Phu Quoc, a place famed for its world-beating fish sauce, black pepper, and pearls. It all started with a late night conversation in the bar, when Rodney and Josh asked if I wanted to go there with them.

The fang-shaped island – which was briefly captured by the Khmer Rouge during the Vietnam-Cambodia war in the 70s - is only a short boat ride from Sihanoukville, or at least it should be. But because it’s owned by Vietnam (an issue still hotly contested by Cambodians, who call the island Ko Tral), you have to travel for hours overland to the border crossing at Ha Tien, and then get a ferry from there, meaning the journey takes about seven hours instead of two.


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They are talking about opening up a ferry route direct from Sihanoukville soon, but anything involving the foot-dragging Cambodian government often takes years to arrange. For instance, there’s an international airport already built in Sihanoukville, but due to squabbling between foreign investors and Khmer officials, it’s been standing there empty for years. It’s incredible when you think that the only plane in the city sits under a hangar in the middle of a Russian-owned nightclub, called imaginatively enough Airport.

Josh said he was hoping to persuade his wife Loung to go with us. But he’d been warned that Khmers aren’t good travellers. The vast majority of the population have never been abroad – and are deeply distrustful of foreign food. Tom told him when he took his Cambodian girlfriend to Vietnam, she’d hardly eaten anything in eight days.

You wouldn’t think the Khmers would be so picky when you see them tucking so readily into raw duck foetus, fried tarantulas, boiled snakes, and frogs stuffed with oranges. But it’s not that Vietnamese food is so different, it’s just that the Cambodians view their sworn enemy as a marauding demon race who eat pickled babies and other unspeakable meats, a view shared almost as enthusiastically by the Thais, and find absolutely everything to do with them hard to stomach.

Josh and Rodney said we’d be leaving on the Thursday, and over the next two nights I taught Akara how to make the kebabs, and the night before I left I made a new batch of chicken for her. Then we headed off on a white knuckle taxi ride to the border. I was the only one with a Vietnamese visa. The others said you didn’t need one as long as you told the immigration officers you were only going to Ha Tien. They said no-one ever checked your visa on the boat to Phu Quoc.

On the way, we almost hit a cow and two cyclists as the driver overtook on blind bends and threw his Toyota over the red dust roads with one thumb permanently fastened to the horn. We stopped in Kep-sur-Mer, a former colonial retreat for the French elite later obliterated by the Khmer Rouge, and had breakfast at the crab market.

Wooden, ramshackle restaurants were perched on the narrow beach (above). They were so near, they often flooded at high tide. Nothing had been built in Kep for years - it was definitely the water getting closer. Families were dragging crab pots like sledges over the coarse sand to position them 100 yards out for the tide change. Boys were spear fishing near the rocks as long-tailed fishing boats waited for dusk. A woman knelt over a bucket as she picked through hundreds of small crabs.

It was only 10am but the restaurant barbecues were already lit, grilling sumptuous seafood as fresh as your hat. A group of Cambodian fishermen were sharing a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label and singing in one corner. They’d probably just got back from a night on the waves.

I ordered a plate of grilled prawns. They came with a side dish of sea salt and lime juice mixed with the local Kampot pepper, an incredibly aromatic spice long prized by chefs in Europe. Two years ago, it became Cambodia’s first product to be awarded Geographical Indicator (GI) status like champagne and Melton Mowbray pork pies. But just 30 years before that, the country’s pepper farms were all but destroyed by Pol Pot, who ordered his black-clad automatons to turn the palm-shaded vineyards into rice fields.

As we left town, we saw more bombed out villas and I imagined what the place must have looked like before the war. It took at least an hour going through customs. A sour-faced official kept grilling me about why I had a visa for Vietnam and my travelling companions didn’t. He clearly knew they were heading to Phu Quoc. Eventually his tone changed and he pulled out a wad of notes from his pocket and asked if I wanted to change some money.

We descended from the ferry into chaos on a long narrow pier crammed with motorbike taxis. We rented three beachside bungalows, surrounded by cashew nut, water apple and star fruit trees. It was incredible waking up and picking a mango for breakfast.

It soon turned out Josh had the whole trip planned out in irritating detail. He said that night we’d head down the coast to a pearl farm owned by a few antipodean friends of his.

“They’re big drinkers” he kept saying. “They’re definitely big drinkers.”

He said expats often converged there on Friday nights and it was traditional for everyone to bring something to barbecue. I knew what was coming next.

The market was a seething, fishy circus, and mopeds battled with pedestrians and stall holders along the narrow street. I bought 2kg of pork shoulder, tomatoes, onions, garlic, chilli, coriander and limes to make kebabs. Then Josh remembered something.

“We need a banana for the monkey,” he said. “We can’t turn up without a banana for the monkey.”

The pearl farm was a stunning place, overlooking a deserted beach. The pearl boys were as tough as Josh had described. They were enormous men with huge, barnacled hands. But then they had to be. They had hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of pearls growing in the sea, and had an armoury of shotguns and high-powered spear guns to ward off pirates.

The monkey devoured the banana in seconds, but I didn’t get too close. It looked friendly enough, but they kept it on a leash because the last one had bitten someone’s ear off. It was best friends with a small ginger cat. One of the pearl boys picked up the cat and put it next to the monkey. It immediately began cuddling the cat, and they sat there quite happily for a few minutes. The monkey had brought it up as a kitten and would carry it up trees until it got too big to lug around.



We all gathered near the oyster beds to watch the sunset (below), and then there was a power cut and I had to prep the pork kebabs under torch light. It was an almost impossible task, and it was only the bluntness of the machete that stopped me losing a finger.

They told me they had a different method for producing pearls. Normally farmers nucleate the oysters by cutting opening the hinge and inserting a piece of grit, but they inserted a small pearl to speed up the harvesting process, which can take up to five years. Some of the necklaces they had on display in the museum were priced at $15,000 (£10,000).

We dug into the kebabs, and shared a huge red snapper between us, but there were no oysters to be had. We drank from pint glasses as rum bottles were passed around the table, and soon I was sitting in a brain-fogged haze, looking out at the dark sea and wondering at the undiscovered, man-eating leviathans it contained, while being mauled to death by worryingly-large mosquitoes. Scores of squid boats were anchored in a long northerly line. There were so many out there, their lights looked like a distant motorway at night – a memory far removed from the tranquility of that mosquito-filled, island paradise.