Daring dining in Cambodia

October 18, 2011
Neeti Mehra
Hindustan Times

After three glorious days spent hoofing through northwestern Cambodia’s Siem Reap’s stunning temple complex, the Angkor Wat, there’s not much left to do in the quaint, touristy town. Except for sampling a tarantula. Bros, the guide, curls up his nose at the thought. “Ah, you can get bad tummy,” he says. That’s hardly reason to discard the urge to gorge on a hairy arachnid. It helps not to know what a tarantula looks like. But it doesn’t help if the introduction isn’t exactly ideal.

The vendor of choice is tucked in a sleepy curbside in Siem Reap, which transforms into a groaning board of critters once dusk falls. Crickets, frogs, water bugs, roaches and the crispiest of them all, deadly tarantulas, are stacked up on steel plates like Mount Meru, the mythical perch so gloriously depicted in the Angkor Wat. A feast is already on, courtesy common house flies. The tarantulas, palm-sized, hairy and black, with their legs awry under the lamp light hardly look worthy of gourmet pickings. Chastising Bros for this unfortunate selection of fly-ridden area, the old market and its rambling food section is the next stop to try our luck.

Mu Sochua Shares Cambodia’s Food Culture with Anthony Bourdain

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWACYZG4CQk

April 21, 2011
By Mu Sochua
Originally posted at: http://sochua.wordpress.com/

American celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain traveled to Cambodia last May to sample its seafood and learn about the deep historic and cultural underpinnings of Cambodian cuisine. He met with Mu Sochua in Kampot to discuss her story and what Cambodia means to her.

Reflecting on her lunch with Bourdain, Sochua said, “My daughters thought I was joking when I told them about the filming of this show. I had no idea who Anthony was. Tears strolled down my cheeks when watching these images of yester years. Madam Kech talked about her youth in the most elegant and eloquent way. We are many years apart but my youth is also revealed through her description of the past.”

“Anthony Bourdain brought the past life of Cambodians as well as the present fight for justice. He gives us a chance to speak the same language: food and justice and democracy,” she added.

Bringing the tastes of Cambodia to Fairfax

Click here for the book link at Amazon.com

Annandale resident and author of the book "A Taste of Cambodian Cuisine," Demaz Baker is teaching cooking classes each month on how to prepare traditional Cambodian meals. (Shamus Ian Fatzinger/Fairfax County Times)

Cooking teacher, author shares her passion for exotic cuisine

Wednesday June 23, 2010
by Alexandra Greeley | Special to the Times
Fairfax County Times (Virginia, USA)

Perhaps the least known of Asian cuisines, Cambodian food has been a rarity in the Washington, D.C., metro area. But cooking teacher Demaz Baker of Annandale hopes to change that.

According to Baker, no Cambodian restaurants exist in the District or its surrounding suburbs, making it a challenge for interested foodies to go out and taste the culture's traditional flavors. That doesn't make it impossible, though, says Baker, who is also an amateur chef and author of two Cambodian cookbooks -- such as "A Taste of Cambodian Cuisine," which is available on Amazon.com. With monthly classes at the Arlington County Adult Education Center and a little patience, anyone can learn how to master the culture's sweet and savory flavors.

Although it shares many similarities with Thai cuisine, Baker says Cambodian cooking is "lighter and less spicy in taste," with less reliance on coconut milk and chilis.

A U.S. resident since the mid-1970s, Baker has held daytime jobs with the Department of Defense. But in her spare time, she has indulged her passion for Cambodian food by learning the traditional recipes from her homeland and then cataloging them in her two self-published cookbooks. This has certainly been a labor of love, for Baker admits she never learned how to cook as a child in her parents' home.

"I have always liked cooking, but I never learned it in Cambodia," she said. "My aunts are really the experts in Cambodian food. I even registered in cooking school when I was a student in Australia, but I only studied there for two months."

As a newcomer to the area, Baker longed for the sweet and savory delicacies from her native country. Finding no restaurant that offered the food she craved, Baker set about learning the basics of the cuisine by calling friends and relatives all over the world.

"I gathered recipes from whomever had the expertise," she said.

Top on her phone list were two friends in Los Angeles and others in France and Canada, but because Cambodians usually never write down measurements, reconstructing the recipes required experimentation and tasting.

After gathering stacks of recipes, Baker turned to trying them all, tasting what worked and discarding the rejects.

"This was a labor of several years," she said. "But now I know how to cook properly."

As a result, Baker wrote her first cookbook, "Cambodian Cuisine," in 1999 and issued her second, "A Taste of Cambodian Cuisine," in 2009. A full-color volume, the book is available online at Amazon.com and also at Barnes & Noble.

As a complement to her culinary hobby, Baker started teaching Cambodian cooking at the Arlington County Adult Education Center, offering a month's worth of classes each semester.

"I would teach once a week for the month," she said. After eight years of offering adult education classes, Baker decided to simply teach cooking in her own home. This switch has worked out well, she says, noting that many of her former students signed up and have now formed an informal cooking club, though all newcomers are welcome to join in.

Held one night each month, the classes require student participation supervised by Baker. Afterward, all sit down to a feast.

"A typical menu includes a main-course soup and two side dishes, one with vegetables and often one with fish," she said, adding that the usual Cambodian meal includes fish, since the Mekong River running through the country is a rich source of freshwater fish. There may also be a chicken or beef curry, which is a norm here in the U.S. but is a luxurious meal back home in Cambodia, where chicken and beef are expensive for the average household.

Participants learn three dishes per class, and classes cost $55 each.

Her students are so enthusiastic about Baker's food that they have been urging her to open a restaurant. After all, she notes, all her siblings own a restaurant in Quebec. But Baker's response is simple: No way, she says.

"In my opinion, for a small restaurant to be successful, it has to be run by family members," she says. "Besides, you have no other life if you own one."

For more information, contact Demaz Baker at www.CambodianCooking.webng.com.

Recipe: Saraman Chicken

Serves four

Demaz Baker explains that Cambodian cooking is very similar to Thai cooking, which is evident in this rich chicken curry. To simplify the long and arduous process of pounding ingredients for a curry paste, the basis of all Thai and Cambodian curries, Baker uses commercial curry paste, making the preparation of such dishes relatively fast. All ingredients are available in Asian markets.

• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 3 tablespoons Masaman curry paste
• one (13.5- ounce) can coconut milk
• 2 pounds boneless chicken thighs, cut into bite-sized pieces
• 3 tablespoons fish sauce
• 2 tablespoons sugar or palm sugar
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 2 cups pearl onions, peeled
• 4 to 5 medium-sized potatoes, peeled and quartered

Heat the oil in a deep saucepan over medium heat. Add the curry paste and blend well until it becomes oily. Scoop out the creamy part of the coconut milk (about ¼ cup), and stir into the curry. Add the chicken, and sear for about five minutes. Add ¾ cup water and the remaining coconut milk, fish sauce, sugar, salt and pearl onions. Reduce the heat to medium-low, and cook 15 to 20 minutes more, or until the chicken is tender. Add the potatoes, cover and continue cooking until the potatoes are cooked.

PIG STORIES: The Last Squeal

June 1, 2010
By Karen Coates
The Faster Times

This is the third story in a three-part series examining the lives and deaths of Asian pigs.

The squeal of a soon-dead pig is hard to stomach. It’s high and loud and long. The animal knows.

I hear the telltale shriek one evening in Phnom Dek, in the rural Cambodian province of Preah Vihear. We’re gathered at the front of a highway restaurant, sipping cold beer with a thick layer of sweat and dust caked atop our skin. It’s just before Chinese New Year, and a family has chosen its holiday pig. It’s a happy, gamboling little creature one minute; frightened and bound the next. Just a juvenile, about 2 ½ feet long.

I know what’s coming, just as the pig seems to sense it, too. But I want to see because I eat pig and I want to know, precisely, the origins of what I eat and the steps between animal and plate.

It takes two men and a boy to complete the job. They tie the legs and lay the pig on a bench, back side down. One man holds the tied legs in the air and the other grabs the snout while the boy dumps water across the wide open neck. One bucket, two buckets—it seems like forever he’s cleaning that neck as the pig continues to squeal. But really, it’s only seconds. And after just a few seconds, the pig quiets in a surreal calm. Its body releases, it excretes its last.

The older man holding the snout drives a kitchen knife into the throat and makes a deep lengthwise cut. Blood spurts, then streams into a bowl on the ground beneath the pig. The man’s hand and forearm are bathed in red.

It takes a few moments for the animal to still; less than a minute for the twitching to stop, the involuntary spasms to end. Eventually the body goes limp and the boy helps the men lift the animal into a metal basin, the sort used for laundry. The wooden bench is stained with a thin streak of blood; the knife and blood bowl are set to the side.

“Tomorrow, for the new year,” the older man says. They will roast it in an above-ground oven, the entire pig.

Jerry takes pictures, I take notes. And even as I’m scrawling in my notebook, I know there will be inevitable questions, someday, when I publish a piece about this incident. Why? Readers will ask. Why recount the gore? Yet I also realize the Cambodians here think nothing of killing a pig (nothing, perhaps, except the price of that pig and its taste on their tongues). Killing a pig is routine. It’s life (and death). It is what’s done. Therefore, I am sure the Cambodians here think my interest is in the New Year—a special day that warrants a feast—rather than the mundane slaughter itself.

I grew up in a Midwest household with a freezer full of neatly packaged meat. I recall a kindergarten (or was it preschool, even?) field trip one year to the local supermarket, where we met the butcher and inspected his display of prime cuts. He took us to the back room, where thick slabs of beef dangled from hooks or chains. This is what I remember. As a child, it was the closest I got to visualizing the link between cow in the field and steak on the plate.

After decades of detached eating, some Americans are choosing to butcher their own—rabbits, even—as many, of course, always have. But the hobby that’s sweeping parts of the West today is unremarkable for most of the world.

In the end, the Cambodian pig slaughter wasn’t horrible. It was normal. It was as humane as possible for the technology at hand, when it comes to killing a pig in a village in Cambodia. That family had plans for every porcine bit of its being—the skin, the head, the feet, the blood (Asians have always eaten snout to tail.) That animal had a happy life, scrounging for scraps and wiggling its little legs in any direction. Just a few minutes passed between the time that pig was caught and the moment its body went still.

I think of industrial farms, the stench of a thousand animals crammed together, wallowing in waste. Eaters are far from the source when food reaches plate. Yet even the so-called “good” bacon I buy—nitrate/nitrite-free from the best farms I can find—reflects little of the meat’s origins. It’s sanitized, on a whitewashed supermarket shelf that meets government code. Still, somewhere back in time, that bacon had a squeal too.

Photo by Jerry Redfern. See a gallery of pictures from this pig slaughter on Rambling Spoon.

Earthy and aromatic Cambodian flavors top their Thai counterparts

Fried tilapia (All photos: Hugo Kugiya)
Num banh chuk

Tola Kruy behind the counter at Queen's Deli

May 20, 2010
By Hugo Kugiya
Crosscut.com

Eating on the Edge: At the family-owned Queen's Deli in White Center, let trust and curiosity be your guides.

The day I ate Cambodian food for the first time also happened to be the day of White Center Spring Clean 2010. Volunteers wearing purple T-shirts spent a Saturday in May cleaning and beautifying the streets and public spaces in the transforming, unincorporated neighborhood on a hilltop south of downtown Seattle.

Part of neither Seattle nor Burien, the two cities that border it, White Center is the petri dish of our civic aspirations, a somewhat isolated, urban community plotted with the best intentions, the kind of place many who live in Seattle probably wish the city was like: still small enough to allow for the effort of the individual, but big enough to stand for something.

King County spent $15 million here over the last five years to repair storefronts, restore a park, install wireless Internet, build new sidewalks and a community center, and finance the construction of the Greenbridge project, a mixed-income housing complex that replaced distressed and dangerous public housing originally built to temporarily shelter Boeing workers.

Beset by poverty for decades, White Center was that invisible, avoided place, of interest to few with political or cultural power. As it often happens in places like White Center, immigrants to the city settled here: Somalis, Ethiopians, Mexicans, El Salvadorans, Vietnamese, Russians, and Cambodians. Block for block, it is undoubtedly one of the most diverse places in King County, and a great bet for eating.

The spiritual and cultural heart of the Seattle area’s Cambodian community is in White Center, one of many places across the country where Cambodian immigrants have landed since 1979, when the Khmer Rouge regime fell from power, the country’s genocide ended, and its refugees started settling in the U.S.

According to U.S. Census data, most Cambodian Americans live in California and Massachusetts, followed by Washington state. One of the few museums in the world devoted to the history of Cambodia’s “killing fields,” (referring to the genocide of 1 million to 2 million Cambodians following the end of the Vietnam War) started in White Center, although it has been temporarily relocated to the Wing Luke museum in Seattle's Chinatown.

None of this was on my mind the weekend afternoon I visited the Queen’s Deli, one of the few Cambodian restaurants in the Seattle area. I was preoccupied with the dearth of Cambodian dining options (despite the number of immigrants in the area), a curious circumstance given the number of Vietnamese and Thai restaurants in the city — Cambodia shares borders as well as plenty of cultural DNA with Thailand and Vietnam. Thai food in particular is so ubiquitous, it is nearly as emblematic of Seattle as salmon and teriyaki.

The Kirirom Restaurant & Bakery in Lynnwood recently closed, and a pho restaurant replaced it. That leaves the Phnom Penh Noodle House in Chinatown as the only other option around here, although Phnom Penh is more of a hybrid of Cambodian, Thai and Chinese.

Queen’s Deli has the distinction of being surrounded by other Cambodian businesses and being patronized mostly by Cambodian immigrants. A few blocks away, the largest grocery in the neighborhood, the Samway market, is owned by the Yim family, from Cambodia by way of Louisiana. The Queen’s Deli is owned by the Kruy family — husband Chengtay, wife Chamtong and their adult son Tola, 23, who grew up near Phnom Penh but attended high school in Kent and is now a student at Highline Community College. The Kruys opened Queen’s Deli less than two years ago.

Tola said the restaurant's name refers to his mom, who does all the cooking and runs the kitchen. "My parents wanted to give the restaurant a Cambodian name, but I didn't want to do that," he said. "I didn't want people to think the food was just for Cambodian people."

While tables are abundant, the restaurant is more of a takeout joint. Women come to buy bags of sweet rolls and other baked goods. Families order ahead for trays of fried noodles for birthday parties. Men grab sandwiches made with grilled pork and baguettes — Cambodia or Kampuchea (an older, more faithful English transliteration) was formerly a French protectorate — wrapped in butcher paper. The restaurant has plenty of pre-made food to go: hot-out-of-the-oil rice-flour donuts; colorful, gelatinous sweets; a Cambodian version of a hambao, stuffed with mushrooms, onions, and pork; and various noodles and sautéed dishes kept in hot trays behind the counter.

But for those with a little time, the most rewarding dishes are those made to order. Dishes are constructed from scratch and take some time in the small kitchen. The best among them are soups and stews that share hints of similarity with Thai, Chinese, Vietnamese and Indian food. Bright aromatics like ginger and lemongrass are part of the cuisine as are peppery herbs, rice noodles and curries. Cambodian food is less spicy and sweet than Thai food. But if the difference between Cambodian food and other Asian food can be reduced to one ingredient, it would be prahok.

Prahok is to Khmer cooking — Khmer also refers to the language of Cambodia and to its people — what fish sauce is to Thai cooking. It is fish paste, made from the gutted, scaled, salted, fermented remains of various freshwater fish. It is a pale, pinkish grey in color and possesses a pungent aroma that gives Khmer food a deep, earthy flavor. The flavors of the Thai food we consume locally seem elementary by comparison. Prahok is used in most Khmer dishes, as a base of flavor to build on.

The dishes at Queen’s Deli cost $7 or less. The menu contains some photographs that are of some help to those new to Cambodian food. Otherwise, a certain trust and sense of curiosity are the best guides. Friendly and helpful, Tola is also happy to explain the menu and inform your choices.

He is likely to suggest num banh chuk ($6), ribbons of thin rice noodles served in a pale-colored sauce, made with prahok, ground lemongrass and spices that impart a subtle, curry-like flavor. The sauce is soupy in consistency but dense with flavor. Mixed into the sauce is ground pork, chopped long beans, cucumbers, mint leaves, and bean sprouts.

Another idiosyncratic dish is samloh kako ($7), referred to on the menu as Cambodian ratatouille. The designation is a bit misleading, as the dish is more of a savory stew. It too possesses a pale, somewhat unappetizing, green-gray color thanks to the prahok. The flavor, however, does not disappoint. The dish is traditionally made with fish, but on Tola’s suggestion, I ordered it with pork rib on the bone. The stew contains bits of pumpkin, eggplant, and leafy herbs. Like the num banh chuk, it is not spicy, allowing you to take in and appreciate the depth of its flavors.

To oversimplify, Cambodian food is rustic compared to Thai food. The preparation is elegant but basic. Take the fried tilapia ($6), skin-on, deep-fried cross sections of fish tossed with onions sliced longitudinally with small slabs of ginger and whole, fermented beans. Served with plain rice, the dish is slightly sweet, mostly salty, and funky in the best possible way. You can imagine it cooked at home. That is the overall effect of the Queen’s Deli. It feels like a home kitchen, somewhere far away.

So much of White Center feels that way, a world apart from the city most of us know. With the streets now shiny and less threatening, the mainstream is finding its way here too. The Dubsea coffee shop in the Greenbridge development is a bright, airy hangout as sleek and cool as any in Capitol Hill. It serves Stumptown coffee beans, and baked goods from Macrina and Le Fournil. Full Tilt serves its gourmet ice cream here — it operates two other stores in Columbia City and the University District.

The beauty of White Center is that it contains, in equal parts, the familiar and the unfamiliar. Starting in June, the Kruys are proud to report, the Queen’s Deli will start serving Cambodian hot pot, which the owners found difficult to describe, saying only that it is not like any other kind of hot pot you have eaten, a claim I would bet on with confidence.

If you go: Queen’s Deli, 9808 14th Ave. S.W., Seattle, 206-767-8363. Open daily from 8:30 a.m. to 8 p.m.

A former national reporter for Newsday and The Associated Press, journalist and author Hugo Kugiya writes about the Northwest for several publications, including his former employer, The Seattle Times. He has covered sports, crime, transportation, legal affairs, and music. His book 58 Degrees North was a finalist for the 2006 Washington State Book Award. You can reach him at hkugiya@yahoo.com.

Short biography of the world cookbook winner

Mrs. Long Sorey (L) winner of the World Gourmand cookbook (Photo supplied)

21 April 2010
By Mao Sotheany
Radio Free Asia
Translated from Khmer by Heng Soy and Socheata
Click here to read the article in Khmer

Under this week’s Khmer Women’s Progam, Mrs. Mao Sotheany is reporting about a short biography and the volunteer work by the winner of the World Gourmand cookbook author.

The Cambodian cookbook penned by a Cambodian woman and her daughter was selected to receive the World Gourmand prize in France. The cookbook was considered as the most talented cookbook in the world for 2009 among a selection of 6,000 other entries.

The French-language cookbook includes about 139 recipes and it also includes photographs. It was authored by Mrs. Long Sorey who is currently retired and living in Cambodia.

The 69-year-old lady was a former teacher during the Lon Nol Khmer Republic regime and she is currently retired. She is very happy after learning that the cookbook she co-authored with her daughter was recognized as a special cookbook in the world, both in terms of quality, printing, cover illustration, as well as photo illustrations of the completed dishes and the ease to prepare more than 130 Cambodian dishes.

Mrs. Long Sorey said: “I am very pleased, extremely pleased! Two Cambodian women wrote the number 1 cookbook in the world. This prize is beyond my imagination, it means more than money to me. I remembered about Cambodia, nobody knew about me, I had a Cambodian flag and they did not know about Cambodia. I showed them where Cambodia is! I showed them…”

Mrs. Long Sorey, the winner of the World Gourmand cookbook, said that the recognition of the talent in this Cambodian cookbook is an important factor to let countries in the world know about the civilization, the culture and the customs of Cambodia, and Cambodian food in particular.

In addition to her cooking skills, she is also very skilled in sewing and knitting, as well as being an expert in wedding marriage clothing. She said that after coming to live in Virginia, USA, in 1975, she was actively involved in Cambodian communities, especially during the celebration of the Cambodian New Year.

Mrs. Long Sorey said: “I dress up in Cambodian clothes to show how Cambodian women dress up, how they carry a food container to take to the pagoda, how we dress up for weddings, and during the Cambodian New Year, I have to do it to show others. People like to cook, they asked me to help so I can earn some extra income on top of my factory salary because I only know how to cook, to work in the household, so in order to survive, I did everything…”

In 1977, Mrs. Long Sorey and her husband, Mr. Long Bota, a former professor under the Lon Nol regime, along with their two children, decided to move to live in France. There, she and her husband were actively involved in the Cambodian community: “… Me and my teacher, we formed the women association to help in the translation work, to help find jobs, to teach cooking, tailoring, dressing up in Khmer. In Cambodia, I used to teach tailoring. People wanted to know, wanted to learn, so on Sundays, my family went to teach others because it’s something we like…”

Mrs. Long Sorey added that, in addition to being a teacher for household work during vacation period and weekends, she also used to volunteer her work in France and in refugee camps along the Khmer-Thai border.

Mrs. Long Sorey said: “When I arrived in France, I continued my study until I became a chef teacher for more than 20 years, up until my retirement in 2001. Prior to 2001, I returned back to Cambodia once a year. After 1980, I volunteered to work at refugee camps along the border because I have 2 months of vacation each year, I went to teach cooking and tailoring to Cambodian women in refugee camps so that when they return back to Cambodia, they have some skill to survive on…”

Mrs. Long Sorey and her husband, Mr. Long Bota, retired in 2001. They currently returned back to live in Cambodia and to offer volunteer work for the Children’s Smile NGO.

Mrs. Long Sorey claimed: “I volunteered to teach at a school where they gather children who scavenge garbage and bring them in to study at the center. I teach them, the younger teachers do not know how to cook Khmer food.”

The two children of Mrs. Long Sorey and her husband are both married now. Her son now lives and works in Switzerland, and her daughter went to live and work in England after her wedding.

She added that as long as she lives, she will continue to share all her professional knowledge to all Cambodian girls and younger generation of Cambodian women who want to learn about savoir-vivre (life), morale and household work such as cooking, dressing up for wedding, tailoring, knitting, etc…

Mrs. Long Sorey claimed that her cookbook is currently being translated into English and in the future, it will also be published in Khmer as well.

Succulent souvenir of Cambodia

9/5/2009
By Julie A. Warner
Post-Bulletin (Rochester, Minnesota, USA)

Loc lac or Marinated Beef Strips with Lime Sauce

• 7 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 T. soy sauce
• 1 T. sugar
• 1 tsp. black pepper
• #2 beef sirloin, cut into narrow 2-inch long strips
• 2 T. oil
• 1 T. lime juice
• 1 tsp. water
• 1/2 tsp. black pepper

Place cubed sirloin in mixture of the minced garlic cloves, soy sauce, sugar and 1 tsp. black pepper. Marinade for 30 minutes. Heat 2 T. oil in skillet, remove meat from marinade and place it in skillet. Saute until browned, approximately 8-10 minutes. Mix together lime juice, water and black pepper, and add to beef. For an authentic presentation, serve over lettuce with tomato, wedge fried potatoes, and top with fried egg. For the less adventurous, it is also excellent served over steamed white rice. Serves 4-6.

Our community has been enriched by recent immigrants from many countries, including Cambodia. Being a foodie, my conversations with my Cambodian friends often turn to their cuisine.

So I was excited recently to have the opportunity visit Cambodia with my daughter to experience the food, an important part of their culture.

During the course of this backpacking adventure, we traveled with an experienced guide who knew where and what to eat, be it roadside rest stops or fine dining. The colors, textures, aromas, and fellow diners were most unlike Rochester, but because of my contacts with our local community, strangely familiar as well.

One memorable stop on our journey was near Siem Reap, where we explored the ancient temples of Angkor Wat. After a morning of prowling these fascinating ruins we found ourselves at a very basic, outdoor roadside restaurant.

We dined under the shade of a canopy that provided welcome relief from the broiling sun, at red vinyl-covered tables fashioned from rough wood. The kitchen was also outdoors, without the benefit of shade, hidden behind a rather flimsy temporary wall. We wondered what was going on behind that wall!

Wanting to sample a traditional regional dish, I asked our guide for a suggestion, and he suggested loc lac or marinated beef strips with lime sauce. Our pretty young waitress took my order and I anxiously awaited my lunch.

I was not disappointed -- when the dish arrived, I found lime-marinated beef strips placed delicately upon a bed of green lettuces, red tomatoes, and golden fried potato wedges with a lightly fried egg placed on top.

To accompany my dish there was the common condiment of cracked black pepper, salt and lime wedges, the ingredients to make a dipping sauce by squeezing the lime wedges and mixing the juice with the salt and pepper.

I eagerly tasted the beef, and found it to be tender to the bite, sweet yet tangy to the taste and balanced by the richness of the fried egg. I savored each bit and was amazed that one could find such cuisine in such a humble roadside restaurant.

When I came home, I wanted to recreate this lime-marinated beef in my own kitchen.

This is the recipe I modified and shared with my family with great success.

Even though I do not have Angkor Wat in sight as I relish my loc lac I can still smell, see and savor a traditional Cambodian meal in my own home. Enjoy, enjoy!

Julie A. Warner is a chef at the Mayo Clinic Foundation House in Rochester.

Getting A Taste For Cambodian Food

By VOA Khmer, Yann Ker
Video Editor: Manilene Ek
06 May 2009

Cambodian cuisine may not have the global profile of Thai or Vietnamese food, but it's certainly not from lack of flavour, sophistication or influence. Most visitors to Cambodia discover local food on the street, prepared and sold from the numerous outdoor restaurants and food stalls. And compared to its neighbours, many tourists say that Cambodian street food is quite bland. That's because it contains few of the herbs and spices commonly found on the streets of both Thailand and Vietnam

But don't be fooled, says ex-pat restaurant owner and food critic, Frits Mulder, great Cambodian cooking does exist, but to experience it you have to visit a real Cambodian restaurant. The best way to learn about Cambodian cuisine is in a hands-on cooking class like this one, offered to tourists by Frizz restaurant in Phnom Penh.

Frits Mulder: "In Thailand tourists eat the food on the streets where it's quite good, but in Cambodia, street food is basic and not really very tasty. That's why Cambodian food has a bad reputation. But when they come to a proper Cambodian restaurant many of them discover that they prefer Cambodian food to Thai food. It's less spicy so the flavours come through better."

The class begins at the local food market where participants select the raw ingredients they will need to prepare a three course meal.

Hun Li Heng: "Ok this one everyone, they call it 'saw-mint' because you can see this, outside here, it's like a saw when your cutting, so we call it 'saw-mint'.

All of the ingredients must be fresh, says cooking instructor Hun Li Heng, a former street child, who trained as a chef and discovered a knack for passing on what he had learned to others.

Hun Li Heng: "Khmer people like to eat fresh so it's good for your health. Because Cambodian people don't have a fridge at home, everyday they buy fresh ingredients and they eat them straigt away."

A popular dish across Asia and the world, spring-rolls are prepared as an appetiser. They are served with a sweet dipping sauce made from sugar cane paste, garlic and mild chili.

All of the ingredients are crushed together using a pestle and mortar which helps to bring out the flavours, explains Hun Li Heng. Although the class lasts just one day, participants quickly begin to understand the effects of each ingredient, figuring out what substitutes could be made back in their respective countries, if they can't find taro root or galangal in their local supermarket.

Hun Li Heng: "In Cambodia we use all our ingredients and we making paste. So everything mostly- or the garlic we normally- we grind it up because it produces flavours. It gives nice textures and nice flavours when we pound it."

Kathy Sattler, one of the students, says that fresh herbs are essential in Cambodian cooking.

Kathy Sattler: "Cambodian food has many different spices and flavours that makes it very exciting. And the texture of it is very interesting and because it's all powedered and really made from the real ingredients makes it very good, very good, and very tasty and colorful, yeah."

Khmer recipes go back centuries - long before chili peppers were introduced in the region by the Portuguese. Consequently, Khmer food tends to be less spicy than Thai food

But the mildness of Cambodian food allows the full flavour of the ingredients to shine through.

Scott Sattler: "We have powdered spices and we don't see the real fresh roots. And to grind them in a mortard pestle and to smell the flavours released are just wonderful. And at the same time to have an opportunity in a class like this to get to know the cook and to get know this Cambodian background and other peopel who are in the class make it a great adventure."

After preparing the appetiser, work begins on the main course - fish amok, a Cambodian curry combining fresh water fish, peanuts and coconut milk. Banana leaves are softened over an open flame and to be used as serving bowls. The dish is topped off with a garnish of fresh herbs.

After every dish, there's plenty of time to relax and talk with the other participants as they eat their own culinary creations. It's an intimate and laid-back class where students have plenty of time ask questions and get to know their fellow classmates. Each says that they enjoyed the class and would be bringing at least some of the secrets of Khmer cooking back to their home countries.

Information for this report was provided by APTN.