For Cambodia I decided to cook a dish that's popular all over the country, but which varies from region to region, city to city. It's called num banh chok, which is so popular in Cambodia that it's also simply referred to as "khmer noodles." The name refers to both the rice noodles and full dish, which is often eaten for breakfast in Cambodia.
The dish starts with a lemongrass paste ubiquitous in Khmer cuisine called kroeung. It's basically what curry past is to Thai cooking or sambal to Indonesian dishes. It's made from lemongrass, onion or shallot, garlic, ginger or galangal, turmeric and chili. I used some dried spices but generally the ginger, turmeric and chili should be fresh. Everything is ground up with a mortar and pestle (or a food processor in my case).
The result is a paste very similar to yellow curry paste. The recipe also called for kaffir lime leaves which I didn't have so I added some lime juice along with some basil.
Next, I processed the kroeung with some peanuts, which gave it a much less watery texture. The traditional recipe always uses fish, so the next step would have been to make a broth using a whole fish. I just used vegetable broth, so I skipped this step. After the fish finishes boiling, you then pound it into the kroeung with the peanuts.
To make up for the lack of fish, I used tofu. Since tofu has a much softer texture, I was able to just mush and combine everything together with my hand. The resulting mixture has kind of a fluffy texture.
Next, I boiled vegetable broth with coconut milk, a lemongrass stalk, and a bit of ponzu and soy sauce. This is not traditional, but usually you would use fish sauce. I used the ponzu and soy sauce as stand in for the salty and savory flavor it would lack. Once that came to a boil I added my kroeung-tofu mixture and let that simmer for a few minutes.
While that cooked, I prepared all the cool, fresh veggies for the bowl. Cucumbers, basil, sprouts, and radish. The sprouts were supposed to be those crunchy bean sprouts you get on pad thai but I ended up with alfalfa sprouts, which was totally fine too. You can also use mint, cabbage, or any other raw veggies or herbs you want. I also added some chili (jalapeno since that's what I had, but birds-eye chili would be most traditional).
I put some cooked rice noodles into bowls with the veggies, then ladled the curry over the top. The soup part itself is known as somlar praheur/samloh prahal. Mine doesn't look quite so appetizing due to the textures of the peanuts and tofu. There are various ways to prepare it. Some pictures I've found are mostly coconut milk or cream with the slightest yellow tinge, some are more chunky like mine but more vibrant so it doesn't look as...sickly. That's why I didn't use that last picture as the cover photo for this entry. I promise it tasted good though!
So much of the Khmer diet relies on fish--apparently it's eaten for breakfast almost every day by most Cambodians! I feel like this dish can't be properly represented without it, but I did my best to make a vegetarian version. It was still a great yellow curry with rice noodles, but it probably doesn't come close to the flavors of real num banh chok eaten regularly in Cambodia.
Recipes Used: Num Banh Chok // Num Banh Chok adapted from a Cambodian cookbook
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