Home Cookin'

I don't know what it is about me and farms when I travel but I seem to end up on these things way more frequently than I would ever imagine. Maple syrup farm in Vermont. Cork farm in Portugal. Truffle hunting on a farm in Tuscany. Spice farm in Zanzibar. Wineries in the Napa Valley. Although I'm not sure how much wineries count as farms. They probably don't at all. 

I can't remember the last time I went to a farm anywhere around my home unless it was a sunflower farm. And I'm not sure sunflower farms count as farms any more than wineries do. In fact, they probably count less. But suggest to me that I should go to a farm when I'm traveling and somehow I'm all in. Including in Cambodia. I mean, why not? We are supposed to do different things on vacation that we do at home, right? Even if that means visiting farms, I guess.

Now in my defense on this one on this trip, I was sort of tricked into going to a Cambodian farm. At least that's my story and I'm sticking to it. And if you don't believe that flimsy excuse or explanation, you'll probably believe it even less when I tell you I went to the same farm on two different days. I did say flimsy, right?

An astonishing array of dried fish, Siem Reap market.

Here's the thing: I am generally fascinated with where our food comes from so when I saw that the hotel we picked in Siem Reap offered food tours as part of their amenities or features or whatever, I couldn't resist. I mean we were only in Cambodia for three nights (meaning just two full days) so if there was any way to jump start getting involved in that country's cuisine (which I was completely ignorant about) then I was all for whatever I could do. Taking a couple of food tours through the hotel seemed like a great way to do that. 

So we did. 

The premise of both of these tours was pretty much the same: hop in a tuk-tuk; travel 45 minutes or so to a local village; watch and learn how some traditional Cambodian food or meal is harvested or prepared; then come back to the hotel (again, by tuk-tuk) and have the hotel's kitchen cook a specially prepared meal drawing on our farm experience for dinner. Night one featured a traditional Cambodian rice noodle dish that I had never really heard of called num bahn chok; night two highlighted the use of palm sugar, something I'd either never really heard of or never really thought about that much. It's good to explore and taste things you've never heard of sometimes. Another awesome benefit of travel.

But before we talk about what we found at the farm (and it was the same farm both nights), let's talk tuk-tuks, shall we?

We have seen tuk-tuks before in our travels. Kenya. Peru. Zanzibar. Maybe one or two other places. They are three-wheeled semi-enclosed vehicles typically without doors that are driven like a motorcycle of sorts, meaning the accelerator and the brakes are on the handles of the steering column. Usually the tops of these funny little vehicles are some sort of canvas or other flexible covering and you thank God they don't go at much of a top speed because if you ever got in an accident in one of these things...well, good luck I guess. I was thrilled by my first ride in one of these things in Zanzibar last March.

Tuk-tuk. At least anywhere but Cambodia it's a tuk-tuk.

In Cambodia, that is NOT a tuk-tuk. It's a PassApp, so named because there's a phone app out there called PassApp that you use to hail these types of vehicles. It's sort of like Uber or Lyft, right? Just for that type of transport (which is decidedly not a tuk-tuk in Cambodia).

The Cambodian tuk-tuks we took to the farm both nights were full sized motorcycles towing a two-wheeled cart. Maybe a little sturdier and safer but still with no doors but with decidedly more space. Like way more space. I feel like I'm crammed into a regular tuk-tuk (excuse me...PassApp) with just the two of us in the back seat. The Cambodian tuk-tuk is relatively palatial, sitting the two of us in the back of the carriage while our guide both nights sat facing backwards in the second seat opposite us. I'm sure we would have felt the limitations in comfort on a 40 minute PassApp rider; not so on the Cambodian tuk-tuk. Smooth sailing past all the rice paddies and villages and night markets. 

I did ask one of our tuk-tuk drivers what PassApps were called before the PassApp app existed. I mean they had to be called something right? And they didn't just pop up en masse when someone invented an app, right?  He didn't know. This isn't going to keep me up at night but I'm still curious.

Cambodian tuk-tuk.

So...palm sugar and num bahn chok, although the farm visit part of the num bahn chok tour was really about making rice noodles and not necessarily the whole dish. 

It is amazing to me how people make food. Like why would you ever think about making noodles out of rice? What's wrong with actual rice? It has to be way less complicated and labor intensive to eat rice as it is rather than trying to make it into noodles. Don't know how they make rice into rice noodles? Neither did I, but I'll explain in a few paragraphs. Most of this is just discovery or accident, right? I'm sure that one day someone accidentally cut a palm tree and tasted the sap and found it sticky and bit sweet and decided to harvest it deliberately. But rice noodles? Too many steps it seems to be for this to be an accident. 

The family that owns and runs the farm we visited is clearly adept at both harvesting palm sugar and at making noodles from rice. From what we could tell, it's a husband and wife plus the wife's sister and their kids (and at least one grandkid) who are still at home. Both of these visits were a team effort between all members of the family. I have to say I was actually a little nervous about the rice noodles thing. I've had rice noodles in a few spots around my home in Northern Virginia and I have never liked what I've tasted. But maybe this dish in Cambodia is different than in the United States.

Spoiler alert: it was!

Num bahn chok, anyone?

On the basis of the description of the two tours on the hotel's website (the Park Hyatt Siem Reap, if you must know...), I would have thought I'd have found the num bahn chok tour way more interesting. I was wrong here. They both were super interesting. But on the premise of my original thought, let's talk palm sugar first shall we?

I would liken the harvesting of palm sugar to maple syrup tapping. I remember our tour around Baird Farm in Vermont in 2020. Stick a tap into a maple tree at the right time of the year and the sap runs out of the tree with no added effort. Refine it the right way by reducing it in an evaporator and maybe a couple of other steps and you are good to go with those pancakes or waffles or French toast or whatever else you want to pour the stuff over.

Harvesting palm sugar follows a similar process but with a little more athleticism involved. 

Maple syrup tapping takes place maybe four feet off the surface of the Earth. You or I or anyone else can do it easily as long as we have a tap and a hammer and can apply enough force to pound the tap into the trunk and hang a bucket or attach a hose to the tap. Palm sugar tapping takes place at the top of the tree. How do you get up there? You climb.

Have you ever seen a palm tree? There are no branches on any palm tree I've seen. It's a very tall, sometimes gently curved trunk topped by some leaves. Climbing it isn't easy, especially when you are taking up containers to tap the sap of the palm. No hoses here. Homemade bamboo containers need to be carried up by hand (although they admittedly are lowered down by rope).

Sounds difficult, right? It is. The dude (who was the husband / father / grandfather of the family we visited) we watched climb the tree was up in less than 30 seconds. Sure he had a rope ladder of sorts attached to the tree but it was very impressive. He does this twice per day. It took him all of ten minutes to get up there, remove and lower the filled bamboo containers, re-tap the tree and place new bamboo containers and then descend. OK, so 15 minutes max. Probably somewhere in between.

Climbing, tapping and the product. The wood chip apparently prevents bitterness.

This whole process was pretty darned impressive. And I have to tell you that this dude that climbed this tree was cut. I mean there's not an ounce of fat on this guy's body and he's older than me by like eight or ten years. My first comment when he came down from the tree was something to the effect of "I hope I look that good when I'm his age." Who am I kidding? I don't look that good now. I didn't look that good ten years ago. I was impressed. What can I say? Maybe I'm jealous a little. Or a lot. I mean I have like no useful life skills and am out of shape from sitting at desk 40 hours or so a week at work. This guy is climbing a palm tree twice a day. And not just one palm tree. Eleven!!!! And hauling in like 10 kilograms of this sap per day. Crazy!!!!!

It is just in the dry season which is about three months long, but still...eleven palm trees twice a day.

So what now? We down the sweet sap as a shot or pour it over some ice cream or something? Umm...no. While it can be drunk unrefined (and apparently gives a monster hangover after about two shots) it will turn sour pretty quickly and needs reducing and refining right away. And by right away, I mean like right after it's brought down from the tree. 

We were, by the way, offered some shots of the unrefined sap. We passed. I've never been one to shy away from any sort of alcoholic beverage but the hangover you get from this stuff isn't from alcohol. Maybe that will end up on the very short list of travel regrets but I doubt it. 

When we were in Vermont in 2020, we were talked through the process of refining the maple sap. The majority of the work took place in a large heated and temperature-controlled trough to reduce the water content to make the sap into syrup. The process in rural Cambodia is basically the same, although it takes place in a shallow metal bowl over an open flame with lots of vigorous stirring by hand. And it's quick.

45 minutes after this process started, we were eating refined palm sugar. 

I am sure we are missing something about the pain caused to countless lives on sugar cane plantations over the centuries and I'm pretty sure it's related to the scale of production. But if you can get sugar by climbing a palm tree and not enslaving people or engaging in backbreaking (literally) work every day of the week, why wouldn't you do that? I know, I make it sound easy and it's not and I'm sure the yield from eleven palm trees twice a day isn't going to supply enough sugar for the world but this stuff is delicious. I've never had palm sugar before in my life but I'm all in on this stuff. 

Refining and putting into molds and cooling down.

Now about those noodles. This is too long to explain. So let me sum up. And again...I'm not sure why rice isn't good enough but here's what happens to get rice made into rice noodles. And I'll use pictures. 

Step one: Grind the rice. There's a pretty large, human-powered machine here that involves wood and stone parts. And yes, the tourists can work this.

Step two: Dry the ground rice into something pretty solid and like bowling ball sized or maybe a bit smaller.

Step three: Boil the bowling ball sized lump of dried ground rice. At this point it's like a smooth solid white ball. 

Step four: Pound the boiled, dried ground rice into a dough using a pretty large, human-powered, wooden machine. Tourists can participate here too. This really does transform the dried rice into a kneadable dough. It's pretty incredible to see. It's also pretty incredible to see a woman repeatedly moving the dough around while someone else works a very large wooden pounding thing right over her hands moving the dough.

Step five: Knead the dough by hand, adding water to make it more pliable (or actually extrudable). 

Step six: Load the kneaded dough into a mold with a sieve on the bottom of it and load the mold (in cylindrical form) into a pretty large wooden machine with a large lever on one end. 

Step seven: Boil some water below the mold and find the heaviest possible person to sit on the end of the lever. On the day we were out there, that would be me. Our guide took a guess at 70 kilograms. I countered with 90. She told me I didn't look that...(she wanted to say heavy? or fat?). I took her comment as a compliment. But that dough did get extruded pretty fast. I need to lose weight.

Step eight: Remove the cooked noodles from the water and bundle them ready to serve.

I still believe that a lot of food innovations happen by accident. Something gets left out and transforms or someone tries some mistake of cooking and it works out better than what was originally intended. But I can't see how making noodles from rice fits into this category. 

When we were done with the watching part of each of our visits, we were supposed to head back to the hotel and have the chef make us a meal featuring the ingredients we had just watched harvested or manufactured. It totally worked out that way with the palm sugar. But not the num bahn chok. For that meal, we took our shoes off, climbed onto a wooden platform and were served the meal right there and then.

I'm not sure that I have ever eaten a meal in quite this environment before, meaning on a dusty farm in the middle of nowhere halfway around the world using ingredients that have just been made fresh and in part due to my own weight. The noodles were delicious. They didn't taste like other rice noodles I've eaten. They mostly tasted like rice, not that rice has a super strong flavor or anything. They came served in a cool broth of coconut milk, finger tamarinds, lemongrass and turmeric with optional chiles, lime and salt and accompanied with pieces of longbean. 

Believe it or not, this dish is most popular at breakfast. I can't imagine eating it that way, but I know that's my western bias coming out and it's not like I've never eaten noodles for breakfast before (I can recall at least one meal of spaghetti for breakfast in my life...). 

I am really pretty confident that left to my own devices in Cambodia, I would never had ventured out of our hotel and eaten num bahn chok or any meal focused around palm sugar. If I could even have found these kinds of dishes, I'm pretty sure I would have opted for something less edgy and more familiar. And with only two full days in Cambodia, I really feel like I would have missed something amazing here in both the food and the experience we had by joining these two tours. 

These are two experiences that will live with me forever. And if I ever get back to Cambodia, I'll know at least a little something to look for. In the meantime, I will pledge to continue to visit farms while traveling if they can get me a little or a lot closer to the places I'm visiting.

Dinner is served.