Cambodian chicken & pomelo salad

Cambodian chicken & pomelo salad

A stolen recipe? Let’s say “adapted” from a wonderful book you should try and get your hands on, “The Best of Friends Restaurant”. Here is my version of their recipe of Cambodian chicken & pomelo salad. It’s a cracker folks.

Friends is a charity & restaurant in Cambodia taking kids off the streets, housing them and training them in all things to do with food and restaurants from cooking to waiting to cocktail shaking. The kids are then a much more valuable resource to the restaurant and hospitality industry in Cambodia. Hopefully this, in turn, means gainful employment.

This recipe is absolutely gorgeous, sour, sweet, salty, spicy and to be honest bloody simple. Get the freshest ingredients you can for this as this will make a difference. Make the salad on the day, but the dressing the day before if you can.

You’ll need for the salad element;

• 2 pomelos, peeled and broken in to small pieces;
• 4 boneless chicken breasts that I simply grilled with a little olive oil, salt & pepper – then thinly slice when cool; and
• A large handful of chopped mint.

Dressing for the salad;

• 4 tablespoons fish sauce;
• 4 tablespoons brown (or white) sugar;
• 2 tablespoons lime juice;
• 1 tablespoon rice vinegar (or white wine vinegar);
• 4 garlic cloves finely chopped;
• 2 chili padi finely chopped; and
• 1/3 of a cup of hot water.

Mix all this together until the sugar had dissolved, and then let it cool down in the fridge. When you are ready to eat, mix all the pomelo, chicken and mint in a bowl and then drizzle that special dressing all over. Give a little toss and serve away perhaps with a little garnish of mint and some quartered limes if you want more zing.

Cambodian chicken & pomelo salad.

OMG – this is a WINNER. A good friend of mine’s helper made this for him one day. He commented how she is not normally that creative a cook, and when he tried what she made and the flavour explosion happened he couldn’t quite believe it. He had to rush to the kitchen to ask where on earth she got the recipe. It was mine as above folks. Cambodian chicken & pomelo salad. ENJOY!!!

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Brian Kennett

Father of 3. All my kids are mixed, with English-Japanese, and English-Filipino - a recipe in the making there. I have been cooking since a small lad, as guided by my Nan and my Mum - gradually that morphed through exposure to Thai cooking from a lovely lady called Da in Margate. I used to hang out in her restaurant and watch the techniques. So the 1+1= greater than 2 occurred - Mum/Nan/Da - off I went in to the world of Asian cuisine. Moving to Asia in early 2000's clearly has brought that on somewhat - we travel continually, and eat locally and therefore have exposure to more and more new things. I have lived my dream and written a cook book whilst here, an amazing experience and all for a good cause too as I raised a lot of money for charity. My blog is now hopefully turning in to book number 2. Watch this space. I hope you enjoy my passion.