Samlor Kako (Stirring Soup with Toasted Rice)

Variations

• With fish: catfish or snakehead is the older form. The flesh breaks up, so it goes in for the last five minutes, after the vegetables are done.
• Whatever vegetables there are: the name means to stir, and there is no fixed list. Jackfruit, banana flower, gourd and sweet potato leaves all turn up. Only the order matters — hardest first.
• Without prahok: anchovy sauce or fish sauce stands in. Amok suggests a teaspoon of miso for the same slot; what you are replacing is fermented depth, not salt.
• With coconut milk: going without is the standard form. Added, it softens everything, but it sits on the same register as the toasted rice and blurs them both.

Tips

• The same paste as amok, used the opposite way. That page says "The kroeung is the whole dish. Under-ground lemongrass leaves fibers in every bite." and then seals that kroeung, with coconut cream and egg, into a banana-leaf cup and steams it. Nothing escapes and nothing is watered down — "That custard set is exactly what separates amok from any other coconut curry." Samlor kako lets the same paste out into 1.2 litres. One difference separates the two faces of Cambodian cooking, and most of what this soup does is paying back what the dilution took.**
• The first payment is the toasted rice. Thickening a sauce describes a roux with the rule that "The longer you cook it, the deeper the colour and aroma and the weaker its thickening power — the starch is breaking down.", and of a dark one it says flatly that it is "there for aroma; expect almost no thickening." Toasted rice powder is that same trade made with no fat in it.** Instead of cooking flour in butter, the whole grain is toasted dry and ground afterwards, so nothing has to protect it from the pan. The result sits at the same end: weak thickening, strong aroma. That is why three tablespoons is not a lot, and why the broth ends up very slightly grainy rather than smooth.
• Which is why it goes in late, and slaked first. Toasted rice is starch that has already met heat, so it does not behave like a cold slurry brought to the boil. Scattered in dry it lumps, and those lumps do not stir out.
• The second payment is the prahok. A parcel steamed in a leaf needs very little; a paste dispersed through more than a litre has to be given salt and savour separately. Slake it in water and strain it, the way fermented pastes handles a ferment with solids in it — there are bones and scales in there, and unstrained it clouds the broth.
• Fry the kroeung before any liquid goes near it. This is the order blooming spices sets out: the aromatic compounds in turmeric and lemongrass dissolve in fat and not in water, so a paste stirred straight into broth gives up only part of what it has. The more liquid a dish is heading for, the more those five minutes matter.
• Pound the lemongrass, do not slice it. Amok warns that under-grinding "leaves fibers in every bite", and in a soup it is worse: not a big piece you can fish out but a thread you chew. With no mortar, blend it with a splash of water.
• Do not memorise the vegetables. What is fixed here is the kroeung, the toasted rice and the prahok. The rest is what the day supplied, and any combination works so long as the hard things go in before the soft ones.