Cooking up a storm

Before we left Australia some friends recommended a Cambodian cooking class to us. As i'm taking my domestic responsibilities seriously I decided to do it yesterday. The main draw was actually a guided tour around one of the local food markets, with the guide pointing out and explaining all the local fruit, vegetables, herbs, spices and fish. The tour was great for me as at first glance the local markets are pretty inaccessible to a barang, and i'm keen not to be just another expat shopping at the well over-priced supermarket, where all the fruit, vege's, meat & fish come shrink wrapped in plastic and don't look very good quality at all. I also found out what I should be paying for some of the key ingredients which will be very useful in future for bargaining purposes. The markets are crazy, a real assault on the senses - colourful, noisy, smelly, crowded, hot - but great fun.

The guide shared a few interesting tidbits of information about food production and markets generally. The meat stalls are probably the least hygienic looking to a westerner, but apparently all the cuts are fresh each day (the animals are slaughtered just on the other side of the Tonle Sap river at a slaughteryard area each morning). We were shown how to spot a fresh (and not so fresh cut), although the way the meat was handled by everyone from stall holders to customers made me nervous about buying any of this due to hygiene.

Chicken and fish were quite different though, although there are some stalls with dead fish covered in flies and smelling rotten, with only a little bit of searching you can find one with live chickens and fish which are slaughered in front of you. We saw a chicken having it's neck cut and bled to death and a tiger-fish getting the pointy end of a cleaver. Also, crabs with their pincers tied up and live squid in large buckets. If you're going to buy this stuff at least you know it's fresh. I think i'll definitely buy both fish and chicken from the markets as soon as I can speak enough khmer to bargain. The fish is mostly fresh-water from both the Mekong / Tonle Sap rivers and increasingly fish farms.

As I mentioned before, there are a lot of familiar fruit and vege's here (potatoes, carrots, peppers etc), and a lot of not so familiar ones. Generally the fruit and veg all looks great, very fresh and colourful. However, the guide told us that until recently farmers used large quantities of pesticides / preservatives which over time made a lot of people sick. He didn't specify exactly how but I don't think it can be good. Supposedly, the government has regulated this recently though, and it's a bit safer now. You definitely have to cook, peel and wash everything though, again for hygiene purposes. Khmer people typically don't have refrigerators so they shop at the local market everyday.

After the market, it was back to a nice rooftop terrace to make some tasty Khmer cuisine. Cooking was very relaxed and great fun, there were around 10 of us in the group, mostly tourists but some expats too. We made (from left to right) Banana flower salad with Chicken, Fish Amok in Banana leaf cup, and Sticky Rice and Mango for dessert. Typically Khmer food isn't very hot, because most of the recipes have their roots in the Ankgor Empire (~800AD - ~1400AD) and the chilli wasn't introduced to Asia until the Portugese arrived in the 16th century. No-one seems to know why the Thai's adopted the chilli so widely but the Cambodian's didn't. As I like hot food though, I added large amounts of small hot chilli's to my dishes. It was all delicious, partly I think because we hand-ground all the herbs & spices in a mortar & pestle.



Overall, i'm not sure how much i'll cook khmer style food at home. The dishes require a large number of ingredients and it's actually way cheaper to buy this out at a nice restaurant than to make it yourself. For example, the Tiger Fish for fish amok alone would cost $7 US / kilogram at the market and you could buy 2 plates of amok at a nice restaurant for $3 US each. I guess, we could do this for guests / dinner parties occasionally though.

If anyone is interested in the recipes for any of the above (i'm looking at you Nerida!), let me know in the comments or by email and i'll send them through. I'd also recommend the cooking class to anyone visiting Phnom Penh - check out http://www.cambodia-cooking-class.com for details.