Cambodian Cuisine

Cambodian cuisine uses similar ingredients to Thai food, however the main difference is that they go a lot lighter on the chilli, but heavier on the pepper!

There are two main dishes that Cambodia is particularly famous for, fish amok and beef lok lak.

Fish amok is a fish curry steamed in a banana leaf. As James found out at our cooking class, the curry paste requires a lot of elbow grease with a pestle and mortar but it’s definitely worth it. The main ingredients are lemongrass, galangal and turmeric, with some kaffir lime leaves, shallots and garlic thrown in for good measure. The banana leaf boats are pretty fiddly to make (I couldn’t get the hang of it!) so when we make it at home, we’ll probably just make it all in a saucepan and serve in bowls!

Lok lak is essentially a marinated beef salad. It uses soy sauce, fish sauce, tomato ketchup, pepper and garlic and is served with tomatoes, onions and lettuce.

One of the most tasty meals I had in Cambodia was in Siem Reap on our first night. It was a chicken curry, but the depth of flavour they got into the sauce was amazing. So good in fact, we went back for dinner on our last night in Siem Reap, the first time we’ve eaten anywhere twice for dinner.

Another tasty dish was a starter we had at Mok Mony, which was beef wrapped in betel leaves, served on a skewer. The beef was very tender and the tamarind sauce was a great accompaniment.

Now we drank quite a bit of beer in Cambodia! But the nice thing is, every bar you go to, they give you complimentary nuts, covered in salt with roasted kaffir lime leaves, chillis and lemongrass. Seriously tasty!

The south of the country is still heavily influenced by the French and we had a couple of welcome and extremely delicious French meals while in Kampot. It was so nice to have a proper baguette again, and potatoes made a very welcome change from rice and noodles.

The other thing you find a lot of on the south coast, unsurprisingly, is fish and crab. Kep in particular is well known for its crab, and while tasty, it does take a lot of effort to eat! We also had a very tasty deep fried fish while on Rabbit Island. The chips could have been cooked a bit more though as they were pretty solid in places!

We also had a lot of fruit drinks here, in particular passionfruit soda and coconut water. It’s incredible to watch these women deftly cracking open a coconut with an axe to get to the water inside. Even James had a go at cracking one open, successfully I should add!

Finally, I couldn’t finish a post about food without mentioning Kampot pepper. It’s served in everything in Kampot, even the ice cream! And while it’s nice, it does get a bit much by the end - something even James agreed with!