Travelling around Cambodia for three weeks and staying gluten free was actually much easier than I thought, despite all my worries. Since I couldn’t find a Khmer gluten free card at the time, we took lots of English copies which turned out to be useless – restaurant staff simply didn’t speak enough English.
I’d done lots of reading about food beforehand, and was delighted to find that the national dish is amok, which is a coconut based curry. And simply delicious, with vegetables, fish, prawns or chicken – I tried lots of different variations all round Cambodia, and stayed very well. And it’s served with rice.
Many dishes on offer in Cambodia are Chinese-influenced, with soy sauce and wheat noodles, so obviously out. But many more are influenced by Thai or Vietnamese food, and were fine – coconut-based Thai green curries were wonderful as was tom yam soup.
So were Vietnamese style spring rolls (often called fresh rolls), made with translucent rice noodles and bursting with flavour: many places have photographs of the food on the menu, which helps. However in one place the spring rolls turned out to be Chinese style, wrapped in what was obviously a wheat flour pancake and with a soy sauce dip and which I clearly couldn’t eat.
Beer was out, but there are lovely soft and fruit drinks too, and often wine and spirits.
The biggest problem was breakfasts. They were often a standard hotel cooked breakfast, with eggs, sometimes bacon and tomatoes, fruit and a piece of bread. Saying “no bread” worked, though many places then offered toast instead which had to be declined too: I had a loaf of my own GF bread in my bag.
But one breakfast arrived with a crusty, crumbly baguette carefully laid over the bacon – I said I couldn’t eat it and asked for a fresh one. The waitress took it away, left it on the counter for five minutes, simply emoved the baguette and brought the same dish back. I couldn’t make a fuss: this is a poor country – dietary choice, even intolerance, is a luxury and nothing goes to waste. I simply ate the egg on the other side of the plate, and had a long hungry bus journey that day.
I’d been concerned too about snacks on all day bus journeys. But at every stop, there were lovely GF foods to buy – sliced pineapple, small sweet bananas and hardboiled eggs.
After far too many gluten mishaps, I rely on GF menus and good communication with restaurant staff. Both were out in Cambodia, but by using a little common sense and selectivity I managed to stay gloriously well while travelling around the country for three weeks.
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Wherever you’re going, remember to take a free gluten free restaurant card with you.
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