Salaw Machu Kroeung - a Cambodian national favorite!featured

Salaw machu kroeung is a staple in Cambodian cooking. It literally translates to “sour soup ingredient”. This is my favourite salaw (soup) because of its mixture of salty, sour and spicy with a distinctly Cambodian taste due to the lemongrass, galangal, kaffir lime leaves and turmeric. There are many food in our culture that is similar to Thai and Vietnamese cooking, but this soup along with our other food that uses kreung really differentiate our cooking from theirs. The taste is uniquely Cambodian.

This version of salaw machu kreung is for the more adventurous foodie. I’ve included in it beef tripe and lung, because to me it is the authentic version. When I went to Cambodia a couple of years ago, this was the version I had at every family house that I went to visit while I was in the countryside. Now, if I only make it with beef, it just wouldn’t taste the same as the one in my memory. Although if you’re not that adventurous with your meat, you can always leave out the tripe and lung. It’ll still be delicious!

Cambodian Hot, Sour and Spicy Beef Soup (Salaw Machu Kroeung)

½ lb of beef, thinly sliced
¼ lb of beef tripe, soak in vinegar, scrub with salt, rinse
¼ lb of beef lung
½ lb water spinach (ta-kuon), separate leave and stalk, cut stalk into 2″ pieces
4 stalks of celery, cut into small pieces
5 cups of water
5 tablespoon of kroeung
1 tablespoon of salt
1 tablespoon of tamarind powder
1 tablespoon of chicken stock powder
1 tablespoon of fermented mud fish (prohok) or fish sauce if you don’t use prohok
¼ cup basil leaves

Make kroeung and set it aside for now.

Place tripe and beef lung in soup pot, cover with water and cook 20 minutes. Drain and rinse, cut into bite size pieces. Cut beef into thin slices. Combine the beef lung, tripe and beef into a large mixing bowl. Add krueng, salt, tamarind powder, and chicken stock powder to the meat mixture. Mix well.

In a large soup pot, add a tiny bit of oil. Set the heat to medium high. Once the oil is hot enough, add in the meat mixture. Let it cook for 5 minutes, stirring often. Add water. When the meat is tender, add water spinach stalk and celery. Adjust the taste to suit your palate – add sugar if you want a bit of sweetness ( I don’t use sugar in mine), more prohok or fish sauce for a saltier taste, more tamarind powder for tartness. Once everything is cooked, add the water spinach leaves and basil leaves. Turn off the heat right away as you don’t want to overcook the leaves. Most families don’t add in the water spinach leaves, but we do, since I like the taste of it, and its wasteful to not use everything.

Note: When I decided to blog this recipe, I couldn’t find tripe anywhere. Just my luck. I had to go without it for once.