Whole Baby Cow Roast, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

I can't believe I am sitting here typing this nearly two years after spending a summer working in Phnom Penh. Time flies. I've been sitting on these pictures waiting for god knows what, and today, on this beautiful, sunny morning I finally felt compelled to post them.

Cambodia is one of the greatest places I have ever visited, and I still long to go back. The food was spectacular: consistently fresh; popping with colors, herbs, spices and textures; and more often than not intriguingly unfamiliar. I ate a lot of soup that hot hot hot summer (and those months aren't even the hottest in Cambodia) and I remembered the appreciation for hot liquids in hot temperatures I gained while traveling to the Middle East to visit family (a lot of tea and coffee in plus 30 Celsius temps).

The photographs below were taken in the courtyard in front of my employer's office in Phnom Penh. They are located right near the independence monument on Sihanouk Blvd, in what you could awkwardly refer to as Phnom Penh's "downtown." On this particular we hosted a group of representatives from the Cham Muslim community and accompanied them to a day of proceedings at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (the "ECCC"), an ad-hoc quasi-international tribunal with jurisdiction to try major crimes perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia (if you are confused, just Wiki "Khmer Rouge") that we worked in conjunction with. Like many minority groups in Cambodia the Cham were particularly ravaged by the Khmer Rouge. Obviously it was an honor to host them and the director of the organization decided that a celebratory feast was in order (being the generous guy he was, our employer often took occasion to declare that celebratory proceedings were in order - why am I not in Cambodia right now?)

So it came to be that a cow was roasted. Normally it would be pig - this being Cambodia, where even cold snout slices are revered (that's another story), but because we were hosting Muslims we needed something halal, or at least not pig. I'm not sure what kind of cow this was, but it wasn't huge the way you normally think of cows. Maybe it was a baby cow? Cambodian cows, like other Asian cows I've seen, don't look like the American and European moo-cows. They are much leaner and wilder looking, usually colored tan or brown. Whatever we ate, it was delicious.

Imagine my surprise when we arrived back to the office after spending hours listening to live translations of pre-trial genocide and war-crimes proceedings to find this sucker spinning around in front of my office. Cambodia, fu@k yeah!


While the cow was finishing over the coals, these guys were sharpening knives and preparing sides.


No point in wasting good entrails.


Accoutrement


Something salty and crunchy and limes.


Slice and dice them entrails!


Godamn I said slice and dice!


A picture...


...is worth a thousand words.


The tail, said to give men "strength." I ate some and noticed a significant surge in my libido. Someone call Pasticerria Natalina.


The crackling, golden skin was the first thing to come off and was the best part.




Plate one of many. The skin!




Yes! Awesome!


Driving my motorbike home later that evening, full of baby cow and with a powerful libido, I nonetheless chose to skip the "karaoke" bar, anchor of my seedy neighborhood. And no LTH, I've never paid for karaoke.





OK, time to go outside!

Habibi

GREAT photos...cool roasting pit to! The meat and the plate of food look sweet.
Man I would love a plate of all that stuff now.

How did I miss this post? Just awesome! What were the accoutrements? And how do I get a summer job in Cambodia?

Me, too! Thank goodness you all bumped!

Wow - shoe leather never looked so good, right? That is one delicious-looking beastie. Do you know what the floss-like things on the vegetables are?

I missed this too . . . beautiful pics and write-up. That cow looks amazing. I'll be in Siem Reap early next year (no time for Phnom Penh) and I'm so looking forward to it.

Thanks for the enthusiastic responses. I really appreciate it. For a while I was beginning to think LTH was over whole roasted young animals!

thaiobsessed wrote:How did I miss this post? Just awesome! What were the accoutrements?

Regarding the accoutrement - the best part were the limes and the toasted grain mixture that we dipped the meat in. It reminded me of Brazilian farofa, but a bit saltier. Same idea however, spritz the meat with lime, and then dip in the crunchy stuff. Other stuff included culantro, fresh cucumbers and raw Thai eggplant. And offal, there was plenty of offal!

Mhays wrote:That is one delicious-looking beastie. Do you know what the floss-like things on the vegetables are?

The shredded vegetables were a bit of a mystery to me. I had the same veggies served numerous times with soups and grilled meats in Phnom Penh, but never figured out what they looked like whole.

Luckily MHays, my google-fu is strong today, and I now believe that they are shredded banana blossoms. I believe I've also eaten them in Chicago as a side to Vietnamese Hue-style beef soup (bun bo hue).

thaiobsessed wrote: And how do I get a summer job in Cambodia?

Summer jobs are actually quite abundant in Cambodia, which thanks to an autocratic regime that has great ties to the west has the second-highest rate of NGOs per capita in the world after Rwanda.

I've been meaning to get a Cambodian cookbook so I can recreate some of the great meals I had there. No joke, I had some of the best meals of my life in Cambodia.

P.S. If anyone is in Phnom Penh and wants to hook up a cow roast for a group (or for themselves if they are really hungry), I would be happy to get in touch with some people and help set it up.

H

I'm looking at this on an iPhone so I can't see the pictures in total detail, but I'm headed to my computer as soon as possible. That and the job listings for Cambodia

Hi,

We may be jaded to whole pigs, though show me the last whole baby cow on this website? I don't recall seeing one. I'm glad you found the time to share this with us.

Two years to post? You are a speed demon. I have one set of pictures and information from a trip seven years ago that has yet to be posted.

Thank you!

Regards,