Wow this is such an unusual set up!
today we're in Battambang northwestern Cambodia and we're here to get to the
heart of the food culture we have got a ton of delicious food lined up to share
with you Cambodia is a country with a rich food
culture where influences from India China and its Southeast Asian neighbors
can be found in a cuisine which is unique and exciting to discover this is
our second video from Cambodia and we're in Battambang
a province famous for its delicious food and produce we eat a quintessential
Cambodian breakfast from an out-of-bounds street stall where your
food has to be passed over a fence and take you into the heart of a traditional
wet market where we snack on Cambodia's tasty street food we eat coconut rice
flour pancakes which are deep fried to perfection and one of the nation's
favorite snacks of sour fruits in this Cambodia series we'll take you into the
heart of the country's cuisine from off the beaten path street food to
traditional Cambodian recipes you don't want to miss this series get ready for
some mouth-watering food I'm Thomas and I'm Sheena and we're Chasing a Plate we
hope you're hungry let's eat
Battambang is famous for its food culture as well as being the heart of
Cambodia's art and cultural scene this region is really rich in agriculture and
so there are a number of really special dishes and unique foods to find here in
the research leading up to this series and particularly with filming in Battambang
I got so excited because there are a ton of markets to discover here
there's loads of street food we can't wait to show you what we find
our first
street food is a quintessential Cambodian breakfast pork on rice so it
sounds very simple but this is very classic here and a delicious dish but
what's not simple is where we're going to eat it so check this out you can see all
the tables lined up these are all for different stands but as you might notice
there's a fence between the tables and where the food's being cooked that's
because in this big building here is a school so actually all the cooking happens
in the school grounds and they pass all the food through the fence to their
diners which I reckon is a really cool setup so let's go get some pork and rice
for breakfast
bai sach chrouk, okay muoi, arkoun
chhnganh arkoun
Wow this is such an unusual setup so as Thomas was mentioning before the vendors
are all inside the school the kids have actually gone back to class now but
before we started filming this piece all the kids were actually eating on that
side of the of the fence so inside school
you can't like the public can't get into the school obviously so they have to sit
on public property on the street outside and the vendors pass the food through
the fence it's such a neat setup
this looks like my kind of dish it's called in
Khmer bai sach chrouk so grilled sticky pork so there's the pork on top served
with rice and it comes with a ton of different ingredients so we've got the
rice we've got the pork and then we've got this fried egg check out that yolk there
it's pretty much the perfect fried egg we've got some cucumber and I think there
on the side is pickled mustard greens she also drizzled a sauce over the top
I'm not really sure what it was but there's also a ton of customisation
options on the table so there's dried chilli there's fresh pounded chilli
there's some chilli sauce there's I think a fish sauce chilli mixture and then
a garlic sauce here so you can customise your bowl or plate of food as to how you
want it to taste this is, the atmosphere is just top-notch so we're sitting right
outside the school I can see the kids in the classroom the vendors are yelling
out to passing scooters and motorists and they're whipping in and getting takeaway
and we're right opposite the wats or the Buddhist pagodas
this just looks like the best way to start your day so I think what I'm going
to do is just not customize but just get into the original dish first and see
how we go so I've got tons of that yolky rice there and then some of the
pork a few spring onions on the top as well
that is amazing I can see why
people like to start their day with this dish so the pork is really thinly sliced
it's very sticky and what they've done is cooked it over the grill and basted it
with a marinade so it's very sticky it's sort of a little bit chewy but also tender
that egg the yolk oh my gosh it just burst with gooeyness in my mouth
all right I want to get another mouthful with these pickled mustard greens
because I think they'll really cut through the richness of the pork
they do they're perfect they're very tangy very crispy and the sauce that she
drizzled over the top of the rice is quite sweet this is such an amazing dish
and again just the environment it's not something that we've ever come across
before in our travels there's something like ten vendors lined up all along the
side of the school I suppose at lunchtime the kids will come out and
get a feed of pork on rice
I might slosh some of this garlic and I think it
might be yeah fish sauce mixture over the top and I might add a bit of chili
too so I'm gonna go for this fresh pounded chilli give it a bit of a
kick all right let's go for another mouthful that egg again some of
the the pickled mustard greens rice and pork oh yeah
mmm adding that chilli was fantastic it's a little bit spicy it's not too
crazy doesn't burn your mouth off and that garlicky fish sauce adds
just another level of flavor there's just so much to take in here Thomas just
pointed out the spiky fence what they've done is actually just put a
wooden pole across the spike so that when they're passing the food over the
fence they're not spiking themselves and when they need to clean these tables
what they do is is that they push a pole through the gap in the fence and clean
it with a a rag stuck on the end of the pole and clean it that way that's just
such a great atmosphere
we've come to one of the many local markets here in Battambang and this is
really to the heart of the street food there is a ton of street food here in
amongst all the actual the fruit and veg and the meat and the fish it's a crazy
market with so much going on and there's definitely a bunch of things here that
we want to show you so let's go get these street foods
the markets in
Cambodia are so colorful and such a hive of activity we're just wandering through
all the different stalls now there's fresh fruit and veg there's fresh meat it all
just smells really beautiful and right up ahead is our first food that we want
to show you from this market it's called num chak chol which is a a coconut rice
flour and tapioca flour pancake it looks really good
suostei, neak sok sabai dte
num chak chol? num chak chol I think I pronounced it correctly num chak chol, bpee
arkoun her set up is pretty
basic so she's just crouching down in the corner she's got her bucket of
batter which is quite a runny batter and then she's got her wok which is filled
with hot oil and she pours a cupful of the batter into the hot oil and it
bubbles away crisps up it's in there for a couple of minutes and then she whisks it
out
we've grabbed our num chak chol from that amazing stand there and look at it
like right amongst all the action of the market got a bunch of pork being sold
here some chickens over there fruit and vegetables and she's just sitting she's
sitting on a tiny little stool about that high off the ground cooking these
up and she's doing a roaring trade people are just constantly going in and
grabbing these and that's because they look like a fantastic snack so very
basic you saw that very thin batter that was being poured in there when Sheena was
at the stand and it's just made this sort of little pancake-y thing look
how crisp it is on the end so the batter is very very basic rice flour tapioca
flour and then coconut milk as the as the liquid so super simple let's rip on
in should be and you can see here actually the big fluffy bit in the
middle so it should be super crispy on the
outside but I'm gonna rip right through to the middle oh look at that
ohhh nicely aerated in the middle there rip it in two ohhhh
it's really sticky which I
like so that outside where it's super golden it has got a great crunch but
it's actually turned sticky very quickly so it's got a beautiful texture as you
eat it the coconut milk flavor is very strong so lovely burst of coconut milk
and so this is a sweet treat but it's not very sweet at all it's just got a
very little underlying hint of sweetness oh actually that's coming on a little
bit more now so as I've swallowed it the sweetness is sort of coming out of it so
it is quite sweet actually I can feel it in my throat but it's not
crazy you don't bite into it and feel that sweetness so it took a while
for that to come about it's a really good snack and just the environment I
mean it's crazy look down here these chickens just hanging out here we've got
some cut up looks like probably catfish there everything about this market is
great and we've got a bunch more to eat here so let's make our way through the
market and find you some more food
the outside of the market's pretty frenetic but the inside is actually
quite peaceful and it's quite a big area and there's some really neat stuff in
here so fermented sausages so lots of sausages hanging up it's mainly meat
inside it looks like this is a great market to explore so we're just cutting
through the market to go to our next street food but oh there's so much to
look at in here all the fruit on the ground I love this sort of place in
Southeast Asia
Cambodians love bitter pungent and sour
flavors and our next street food is all about sourness so mouth puckeringly
sour flavors and its this which is right behind me so sour fruits
Cambodians love sour fruits and this lady suostei this lady has got
an array of sour fruits lined up so they're in big metal pans and they're
just resting on a few plastic buckets I can see guava there's mango there's tamarind
all sorts so let's order some umm neak sok sabai dte? Sok sabai
can I have mango guava
tamarind maybe some june plums arkoun
mmmm arkoun
so she's chucking on a bit of oooh yes please arkoun
got some chilli that's going to go over the fruit perfect arkoun chraen
whoa so got a huge bag so a dollars worth of sour
fruits these are gonna be great
her stall is just insanely colorful greens and reds
and browns and yellows it just makes you want to suostei it just makes you want to
eat everything and this whole market is just awash with color there's a
colorful fruit stalll there's a beautiful flower shop here it's
it's just a real feast for the senses this place is so invigorating please walk through it's so
invigorating to explore now I've got to get into this bag of sour fruit so
what's in here there's green mango
there's tamarind there's guava there's I think baby June plums and then she's given me
a little bag of dipping chilli and salt in there so green chillies and red
chilli so what you do is oh nearly lost my fruits so you grab a fruit and then you
just dip it in in the chilli salt mixture now this one this mango has
already got a ton of that on there so I might just pop it straight in my gob
whoa okay sour spicy salty it's intense so that was the green mango it's
picked very young and so it's very sour almost has a chalky flavor oh that's
really good okay what else can I find I want to give
this tamarind a go because I've never eaten it whole before alright
quite chalky and it's relatively soft so the inside is soft there's a tiny bit
of crunch on the outside spicy from the chilli on top there and mmm quite bitter once
you start biting into it mmm bitter chalky sour spicy
it's midday but the market is already starting to pack up and I can just see
up ahead a snack we really want to eat so let's see if we can still
grab it in time
suostei wow beautiful arkoun chraen
we made it just in time to catch this lady who's
selling jackfruit amok which is jackfruit
steamed arkoun chraen jackfruit steamed in coconut milk I'm so glad we
get to sample this let's go and eat
I've whipped this jackfruit amok out of the
bag and I'm a little bit concerned that we don't actually have jackfruit amok
here there's a few giveaway signs I don't think it is what we ordered so I think a
language barrier issue has happened here so you can see that it looks sort of
cake-like I'll just peel into it and see what's actually going on here so it's
got a sort of a coconut milk batter on top yeah this is not what we expected oh
so it's like a cake I think it might be a jackfruit product I'll eat it and see
what it is
it's jackfruit in a type of sort of a muffin batter with a lovely
sort of sticky coconut milk icing it's nice it's not amazing it's a little bit
dry it's definitely not entirely what we wanted to show you this sometimes
happens language barrier means you don't quite get you what you want sometimes so
this this topping this coconut milk topping so steamed milk topping on top
that is essentially what we expected we expected almost a batter of that with
pieces of jackfruit in it so jackfruit is a really lovely fruit that you find
here in Southeast Asia big green fruit they cut it open and there's these nice
yellow pieces inside but obviously that's not what we've ended up with but
amok is arguably well is really the national dish of Cambodia normally served
with fish so the jackfruit version was gonna be very interesting so we're gonna have to
get back to this market and try and have it while we're here in Battambang but so
it's sort of is that says what we should have had but it should have been
all of that white stuff on top with big pieces of
jackfruit in it and steamed in banana leaf just like this little muffin has
been so a nice little snack but definitely not quite what we were after