Kampot Pepper

Now, there are roughly as many “world’s finest peppercorns” in Asia as there are “world’s best mangos”– think chillis in Texas or cheeses in Europe. You don’t have to go far in any Western foodie store to find a dazzling range of peppercorns with literature as flowery as the back of a wine bottle.

But Kampot pepper is pretty special. From the flatlands around the lovely riverside town of Kampot, it may not have featured on the Spice Route, but is undergoing a well-merited revival.

European expats have developed cooperatives of small farmers, invested in marketing, and are putting the product forward for Cambodia’s first appellation d’origine controlée.

A favoured choice in Parisian restaurants during the heyday of IndoChina, Kampot pepper also forms the heart of probably Khmer cuisine’s crowning achievement: a sauce made of, simply, pepper, salt and lime juice, and known, so far as I can tell, as Lok Lak sauce.

The Kampot pepper farms are located appealingly close to the salt flats, to the east of Kampot town, where water from the Kampot River (or estuary) evaporates in open pans. In Bokor National Park, a few miles away, you can find vines from farms abandoned in the path of the Khmer Rouge, growing wild, their tiny white flowers hanging in tendrils as they return to the jungle plants they were.

But back to the sauce. The art of the sauce is not just in the raw ingredients — Kampot pepper is fresh and pungent, with tingly notes of camphor and eucalyptus overlaying its essential, well, pepperiness — but in the treatment of them.

Salt and peppercorns are ground to just the right consistency, so that only a little dilutes into the lime juice, leaving tiny crystals of salt and richly textured fragments of pepper that sparkle on the tongue and crunch a little in the mouth. You can, effectively, choose how much salt and pepper to add to each mouthful.

As an accompaniment to beef, whether cooked Ratanakiri-style on a table-top burner, or barbecued on long skewers at the roadside, or in the form of Lok Lak (literally, chop-chop), diced with rice and special sauce, this takes some beating.

The green peppercorns, too, are also stunning, fresh on the vine, with a texture that pops in your mouth, a fresh chlorophyll burst, gentle bitterness, and a long, slow peppery tingle.

Served with crab or crayfish cooked Chinese-style in butter, soy sauce, ginger and spring onions, their bright, fresh colour, and the delicate bunches they form, look every bit as good as they taste.

Crab with green peppercorns at Ta Euv, a Khmer place which stands on stilts over the Kampot River — a beautiful place to watch the sunset, once you get past the burning rubbish in the drive — is probably the standout meal of our trip so far.

Crayfish with green peppercorns and Ratanakiri beef with Lok Lak sauce at Gecko House, Ban Lung, was pretty good too. Though the fact that our hosts were wellying through litres of Red Label and coke so either passing out or leaving to vomit before returning for seconds or thirds makes the crab a little more special, in my view.

A mixture of the green and black also makes for a steack au poivre to die for, particularly when accompanied (blasphemously) by Lok Lak sauce. Or should do.

So far, I’ve found that places with sufficient Khmer attitude to make the sauce and apply appropriate amounts of pepper to the steak choose beef which has worked hard for its living, then cook it to the consistency of tyres.

Places that pride themselves on their French cuisine, on the other hand, source fantastic fillet and cook it to perfection, yet drown the pepper flavours in cream and demi-glace.

I am waiting for the perfect steak, served blue and bleeding, with a thick jacket of black and green peppercorns, and either the Lok Lak sauce or the type of pepper sauce the chefs of old IndoChina would have made, with Kampot pepper in all its many hues.

Oh yes, and, as I finish off this post, we are sitting in Siem Reap, delaying our bicycle trip to the temples in favour of staying close to a bathroom until our tummies settle down. And I didn’t even try the turtle at the roadside cafe yesterday…