Eating Cambodia: Prahok, Kroeung and Phnom Pleung

Prahok and Kroeung: the Two Foundations

Prahok, a fermented fish paste made mainly from small freshwater fish salted and left to cure for months, is the ingredient Khmer cooking is genuinely built on, even though it rarely appears by name on a menu — it goes into sauces, dips and simmered dishes as a background savoury note the way fish sauce underlies Vietnamese cooking or shrimp paste underlies parts of Thai cooking. Its smell is strong and sometimes off-putting to first encounters; its flavour, diluted into a finished dish, is what gives Khmer food a depth that a straightforward dish description tends to miss entirely.

Kroeung is the other foundation: a pounded paste of lemongrass, galangal, turmeric, garlic, shallot and kaffir lime leaf, made fresh rather than bought pre-made in most households and restaurants that take the cooking seriously. It is the base for curries like amok and countless stir-fries, and its exact balance — more turmeric here, more galangal there — is one of the genuine points of variation between cooks and regions.

Rice, Noodles and the Cambodian Morning

Rice is the true staple, eaten at nearly every meal including breakfast, and Cambodia's own jasmine rice varieties are genuinely well regarded regionally, though rarely marketed abroad the way Thai jasmine rice is. Breakfast itself runs on noodles more often than rice: bowls of soup or gravy-topped noodles are bought from street carts on the way to work rather than cooked at home, a pattern closer to Vietnam's morning noodle culture than to a Western sit-down breakfast.

Beyond the two best-known breakfast dishes, look for bai sach chrouk — grilled pork over rice with a light pickle and a bowl of clear broth — sold from carts recognisable by the smoke of the grill itself, a genuinely everyday dish most visitors never learn the name of despite eating it.

Phnom Pleung: Cambodia's Tabletop Grill

Phnom Pleung, literally "mountain of fire", is Cambodia's own take on tabletop barbecue: a small domed grill set into the middle of the table, meat and vegetables cooked directly by diners themselves, with the dome's shape letting fat run down into a moat of broth around its base that becomes a soup by the meal's end. It is a genuinely social way to eat, built around a table of people rather than an individual plate, and restaurants built entirely around the format are common in Phnom Penh and other larger towns.

Skuon's Insect Market

Skuon, a town on the road between Phnom Penh and Kampong Cham, is known nationally for one thing: a market built substantially around fried insects, most famously the deep-fried tarantulas that have made the town a minor food-tourism stop in their own right. Crickets, silkworms and water beetles are sold alongside them, seasoned and fried whole, a genuine local food tradition rather than a novelty staged for visitors — it developed from famine-era foraging decades ago and has stayed as an ordinary snack food since.

Buses running the Phnom Penh-Kampong Cham road typically stop in Skuon long enough for passengers to buy from the market stalls directly at the roadside, which remains the most common way most visitors encounter it.