5 Crazy Foods we ate in Cambodia!

Travelling around Cambodia on a motorbike for three weeks was an adventure in itself… eating some seriously crazy food added yet another dimension to our adventure! We love to travel, we love to eat, and we love to try different foods! We didn’t get to try all the different foods that we wanted to while in Cambodia, but the following five, I think, are the craziest we did eat. I’ll start with my favourite!

Barbecue rat

Towards the end of our ride from Siem Reap to Battambang. Dwayne saw someone cooking barbecue by the side of the road. That was all it took for Dwayne to get the munchies… for something barbecued. “Keep an eye out for someone barbecuing chicken or something”, he said. Not long after that, we pulled up to a roadside barbecue… but it wasn’t chicken, it was a rat! We bought one to try. It was cheap, so we thought it didn’t matter if we didn’t like it… we will just have a bite to say we have at least tried it. Well, it was delicious, and we devoured the entire rat! It was served with a little bowl of a pepper and salt mixture and some lime quarters.

We enjoyed the BBQ rat so much that the vendors, who were obviously impressed with our adventurous appetites, packed us another rat in a ‘doggy bag’ to take away with us.

Creepy Crawlies

The next foods on the list are all creepy crawly critters! It is not easy to get a name for the bugs you are eating, but I thought they might have been cricket, grasshopper, cockroach and a worm or maggot of some kind. This morning, in Vietnam, I was able to show a Vietnamese cook (Luke Nguyen’s father, Lap Nguyen) a photo and ask him if he knew what they were. Lap said he believed the worm was some sort of tree worm (silkworm), and what I thought was a cockroach was, in fact, a beetle.

Deep-fried Crickets

What is the etiquette when eating bugs? It was perplexing to know where to start. Do we eat the head? Or rip it off?  I decided to rip the head off and discard it, but Dwayne decided to eat the head first. He then concluded that he didn’t much enjoy the head and certainly wouldn’t eat it for pleasure again.

Deep-fried Grasshopper

This was bigger than the cricket. The deep-fried grasshoppers are crunchy and surprisingly tasty… and yes, the crispy little legs do get stuck between the teeth!

Beetles

I thought these were some kind of local cockroach, but Lap Nguyen said that the Cambodians don’t eat cockroaches, and he believed they were a type of beetle, perhaps a water beetle. Eating beetles sounds a heck of a lot better than eating cockroaches!

Again we had to wonder, do we eat the whole thing? If not, what part should we eat? We removed the wings and the head, and then only a tiny part of the body was left. We chewed on that, and it had an unexpectedly nice flavour. It was mostly just shell, so after chewing it for a while, we spat the shell out.

Silk Worms

This one grossed me out the most! I told myself to think of it as a witchetty grub… but I was not too fond of witchetty grubs when I tried them, so thinking of it didn’t help me swallow the worm. In fact, after chewing it for a while, I did spit it out! This one did not have a nice flavour… yuk, yuk, yuk! I can’t say anything nice about it!

The Verdict

Although some of the bugs did have a nice flavour, we did not enjoy eating creepy crawly bugs and will not do it again unless they are a different bug, one we haven’t tried yet!  For example, we are still looking for deep-fried tarantulas!

Dwayne did eat a water snake on a skewer when he was in Siem Reap one night, but we didn’t get a photo. And we also ate a lot of frogs in Cambodia (but we don’t really think of frog as a crazy weird food). It is one of our favourites and is very tasty. However, I can do without seeing the skinned frogs at the markets!

Check out the video of us eating the bugs at Eating Creepy Crawlies in Cambodia!