Samlor korko

Ingredients

• Pork — diced500 g
• Rice — to toast and grind60 g
• Lemongrass3
• Galangal30 g
• Fresh turmeric20 g
• Garlic5 clove
• Prahok2 tbsp
• Pumpkin300 g
• Green papaya300 g
• Aubergines200 g
• Yard-long beans150 g
• Moringa leaves or spinach150 g
• Fish sauce2 tbsp
• Palm sugar1 tbsp
• Vegetable oil60 ml
• Saltto taste

Salt and spices grow more slowly than the rest: doubling a dish does not double the pepper.

Weight converts to ounces and volume to cups. Grams of flour are not turned into cups, because that depends on how tightly it is packed.

Method

1. 1

   Toast the rice in a dry pan to a deep gold and grind it to a fine powder.

   15 min

2. 2

   Pound the lemongrass, galangal, turmeric and garlic into a kroeung paste.

   15 min

3. 3

   Fry the paste in oil for five minutes, add the prahok and cook two minutes more.

   8 min

4. 4

   Add the pork and brown it, then pour in a litre and a half of water.

   15 min

5. 5

   Cook twenty minutes, then add the pumpkin, papaya and aubergine.

   25 min

6. 6

   Add the rice powder, first stirred into a ladle of the broth, and cook ten minutes.

   12 min

7. 7

   Add the beans and moringa leaves for the last five minutes and adjust with fish sauce and palm sugar.

   8 min

About the dish

The soup is thickened with toasted ground rice rather than flour. The rice gives both the body and a nutty note, and it is the oldest Khmer thickening method.

A dozen different vegetables go in: pumpkin, green papaya, aubergine, long beans, moringa leaves. Samlor korko is a soup of abundance, and three vegetables in it reads as poverty.

The prahok goes in at the start, with the kroeung. Its pungency cooks off, leaving a depth fish sauce does not provide.

Worth knowing

• — Slake the rice powder in broth before it goes in. Dry, it seizes into lumps that never disperse.
• — Add the vegetables by cooking time. All at once gives collapsed pumpkin and raw beans in the same pot.
• — Prahok can be replaced with fish sauce, but the flavour comes out noticeably plainer. That is worth calling a substitution rather than a version.

Nutrition

Per serving at the base yield, calculated from the ingredients rather than measured in a lab.

Calories

480 kcal

Protein

28 g

Fat

22 g

Carbs

42 g

More from Cambodia

• Fish amok — Fish in a coconut curry, steamed in a cup folded from banana leaf.
• Lok lak — Cubes of beef seared over high heat, on salad, with a dip of lime and black pepper.
• Num banh chok — Cold rice noodles under a fish and coconut curry with a mountain of raw vegetables and herbs.