It was 1998 when Jerry first visited the 7 January Bread Co., named for the day the Vietnamese invaded Phnom Penh and ousted the Khmer Rouge. The factory is tucked in a big building, blackened with the soot of continuous fire. Young men hustled through the blazing heat of the giant ovens that cooked the capital’s popular sandwich bread and breakfast baguettes. I wasn’t along on that story, at that time, but I remember Jerry telling me about the light. And I remember the photo above, which stuck in my mind for years, pulling me back to Cambodia long after we had moved on.
7 January Bread Co., 2010
Move ahead a dozen years. It’s a muggy morning at the sort of hour when slanted orange sunlight beams on the brink of hot months to come. We ride up to the factory entrance and peek inside. It’s still here. Most everything looks the same, Jerry says, as though no time passed in a span of 12 years. The young men, of course, are different, but the conditions haven’t changed—except the light, if anything, has diminished. And the ovens have nearly doubled in size.
We chat a bit with 12-year-old Mouy Sang, the owner’s daughter, who says they use a simple recipe of flour, salt, yeast, egg and water, just as her grandfather did when he started the business in 1984.
“When my father retired, I started to be the boss,” says her father, Tang Pao Sreng. Business has grown through the years, though “the profit is not good.” His baguettes sell for 400 riel (10 cents) apiece, but sidewalk vendors up the price to $1 or more per sandwich. His bread goes all over town, and he bakes as many loaves as needed. “If someone orders a lot, we make more than 10,000 pieces of bread a day,” he says. “If someone orders 5,000 pieces, we make 5,000 pieces.”
The factory is divided in half—one room dark and oppressive, with four giant ovens, each nearly the size of a single-car garage; the other room lighter and airier, with a two-story ceiling and a stainless steel MacAdams Baking Systems industrial oven. Ancient cobwebs are dipped in dust and dripping from the rafters. Three fire extinguishers hang on the wall, almost unrecognizable beneath a blanket of soot.
This place smells human, of yeast and sweat and young men at work. It’s the scent of necessity. Most of the 20 to 30 employees come from other provinces where the only job is farming for an income that falls short of need. Here, they live on site and earn $2 a day, seven days a week. The bulk of their money goes back home.
A thin man sits beside the doorway, weighing packages of yeast and salt. Around the corner, workers stack long, rectangular trays of uncooked loaves while a colleague sprays a fine film of water across the dough.
In the corner, by the door, sunlight streams through a storm of flour as two boys twirl a giant tub beneath a rotating mixer. Little dough dollops fly from the tub, splattering across the room.An orange cat snoozes beside a pink Buddhist shrine; it lifts its head in a look of utter contentment. Jerry asks Tang Pao Sreng about the feline’s proficiency in catching mice. He laughs. “Oooh, no! That’s a lazy cat.”
A couple of boxes hold the morning’s mistakes. “These are burnt so we keep for pig or chicken feed,” Tang Pao Sreng says. He delivers the crusty loaves to his relatives around Phnom Penh.
Each tray requires 30 minutes in the oven. Every few minutes, workers in mitts twirl the trays in a graceful maneuver that assures even baking. Meanwhile, two clean, woven mats are spread across the floor near the doorway, and a basket the size of a bathtub is placed on its side. When the bread is done, the trays are dumped, and hundreds of loaves cascade across the mats. The bread crackles in fresh heat, popping like Rice Krispies in milk. Five trays, six trays, seven, eight nine are emptied before the little shrine, as though each and every loaf is presented as a gift to the gods.
Workers squat on the edge of the mat, arranging loaves into symmetrical piles, then filling the giant basket for delivery across town. I chat with Hong Heng, 23, as he counts and moves the loaves. He arrived five years ago from Prey Veng province. “I came here to make a living. I was jobless there.” Every month, he sends money back to his parents. He works two shifts a day—3 a.m. to 7 a.m. and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The job is OK, he says, but he tires of bread. “I work with bread every day. I don’t want to eat it.”
Jerry and I stay a few hours that morning, then return two days later, as workers unload a truck full of flour. Each man carries two sacks in the crook of his neck. Sweat follows a path down a tattooed arm. Meanwhile, another employee heaves an axe, breaking one log at a time into useful segments of wood to feed the belching fires.
I talk with a young man named Kum Orn, who comes from the nearby province of Takeo. He used to make palm juice, not a lucrative living. So he moved to Phnom Penh “to have the city life,” meaning a steady job. He tells me his story while spinning dough in the dark corner of this photogenic room. I look around and think this place has charisma, with shafts of light that scream through holes in the roof. Smoke billows through narrow openings between two walls. It’s hard to imagine a setting with more picturesque light.
But I realize my perception of beauty is that of an observer, not a worker. I don’t shape wads of dough into little loaves, day after day, in a monotonous cycle. It’s hot, it’s stifling and repetitious. I wonder what Kum Orn thinks of the light in this room.
“If we had more light, it would be too hot,” he says.
But is it pretty?
“I don’t know, I never think about that.”
I wonder what he thinks of my questions, or the fact that I’m here, looking around. I wonder what he sees in this place, which I find intriguing. Does Kum Orn think this factory is interesting?
“Yes, he says. “It’s interesting to me because I have a job here.”
I’m getting a head start, but I fear I made these pecans a bit too early. They won’t last until Thursday. I do believe these are the liveliest pecans I’ve ever tasted, and I can’t keep them out of my mouth or my husband’s claws.
I came across the recipe for Candied Chile Pecans a week or so ago while paging through cookbooks in search of Thanksgiving inspiration. Somehow, the holiday seems a perfect fit for Utah’s little Buddhist restaurant, known as Hell’s Backbone Grill, and the resultant cookbook, With a Measure of Grace. The publisher sent me a review copy last year, but I hadn’t cooked much from it during the summer months we’ve spent at home. For some reason, with winter on the horizon, I feel more inclined toward Western mountain fare (which is getting a good share of attention these days). Plus, I’m endlessly intrigued by this speck on the (mostly) Mormon map that welcomes each summer a contingent of Tibetan monks from the Drepung Loseling Monastery.
But let’s get back to this issue of pecans, before they’re gone. The recipe is ridiculously simple, requiring only six ingredients: 1/4 cup vegetable oil, 3 tablespoons Kahlua or espresso, 1 tablespoon Chimayo chile powder (I didn’t have any on hand, so I used powdered Assam chile), 2 tablespoons sugar, 1/4 teaspoon salt and 2 cups pecan halves. Mix the ingredients and spread the pecans on a greased baking sheet. Bake 10 minutes at 400 degrees, stir, then bake a bit longer.
The combination of chile and coffee gives these nuts an incredibly rich, smoky, blackened flavor that pairs perfectly with the caramelized sugar. I dare you make these now—and keep them until the guests arrive on Thursday.
Just a few samples of the myriad chiles we keep around. Looks like I was remiss in securing the cap on the Spanish paprika jar. I hate that when Jerry takes a beautiful photo but I’m fixated on the little flaws in my kitchen!
We seem to be hitting more holidays than usual this year. Happy Easter to those of the Christian persuasion! And Happy New Year to those suffering with us in the unstoppable April heat. Now then, would you like a piece of chocolate-orange cake for the holidays?
I never expected to find it on the bumpy, dusty highway between Kampot and Kep, along Cambodia’s coast, where fish and salt dominate the day. But there it is, the Salt + Pepper, offering freshly baked goods along with coffee, tea and juice (and little gift packages of locally harvested salt and pepper). Jerry took one taste of the indulgent slice above and declared it a revelation he hadn’t had in, oh, about six months now. I couldn’t resist a bite–the sort of gooey goodness that smothers the tongue, topped with a refreshing tone of orange. If it weren’t for the wheat thing….
But then came my plate of coconut-marzipan cookies, entirely wheat-free. The woman in the kitchen is German and her daughter is gluten-intolerant, so she knows the deal. She assured me I could eat every last crumb of those cookies without worry (and I did).
If ever you pass through the neighborhood: Salt + Pepper Bakery at the White Horse statue, between Kampot and Kep.
I write from Milwaukee amid a quick weekend visit with this half of the family and a few old friends, following a quick communion with the other half of the family in New Mexico in honor of one particular sister-in-law’s successful defense of a PhD dissertation on the evolutionary history of ocotillo plants and their relatives. All of this, while trying to pack and seal up the house for a very long time. In less than a week we have seen more friends and family than we can count on all of our fingers and toes. Pretty good.
Tonight, with a little luck, we shall board a plane to Paris as the start to our round-about route to Bangkok, where I will teach another journalism course with this remarkable guy, through this remarkable group.
Meanwhile, let me tell you about the cake above. I think a certain woman named Cathy must like me a rather lot because she made this incredible, rich, dense, not-too-sweet, bitter-chocolate-coffee gluten-free flourless cake. Again! For me! I have to thank Gluten-Free Goddess for this as well, as it is Karina’s amazing recipe. Try it. Even if you can eat wheat.
The old man of decades past left us with a luscious grape vine that creeps across the yard, a little more every day. The first tiny bundles of grapes appeared a couple of weeks ago. They’re no bigger than pinheads now, but if last year gives us any indication, those grapes will ooze with sweet juice in another six weeks or so.
I love grape leaves. I got all excited by the prospects of cooking with these leaves, which grow of their own accord with little help from us. So I started poking around for grape leaf recipes and came across Leila Abu-Saba of Dove’s Eye View. I couldn’t resist her baked mushrooms in grape leaves. I lodged the recipe in the back of my brain and knew I had to try this when I had enough young leaves to gather. I played around with the recipe a little (I always feel compelled to do so), and here’s the result:
Baked Grape Leaves with Mushrooms and Rosemary (inspired by Elizabeth David’s recipe, via Leila Abu-Saba)
Ingredients:
Young grape leaves, enough to make two layers in a casserole dish*
Mushrooms, your choice, sliced
2 strips bacon
2 sprigs fresh rosemary, dipped in boiling water to release their oils
Lots of garlic, minced
Olive oil
Drizzle of balsamic vinegar (white or red)
Salt and pepper to taste
Grated Pecorino or similar cheese
*Use young, tender leaves and remove their stems. Older leaves become too tough.
Method:
Blanch the leaves for 2 minutes, then drain and set aside. Fry the bacon, let cool, then crumble and set aside.
Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees. Line your baking pan or casserole dish with a layer of leaves (choose your dish size depending on how many leaves you have). The leaves will hold their strength in cooking; you might want to chop them for easier eating.
Place a layer of sliced mushrooms atop grape leaves. Add garlic, rosemary and bacon crumbles, salt and pepper, then drizzle with olive oil and a touch of vinegar. Top with another layer of grape leaves.
Cover the dish with foil and bake until mushrooms are tender. Remove foil, top with grated cheese and return to oven until cheese is melted and crispy.
My husband must like me because he makes me a lot of cornbread. Since moving Southwest, we’ve exchanged a fair bit of rice for a tidy sum of corn (that will change soon, as we depart again for Asia). Since I don’t eat wheat, and Jerry has determined he feels better without it as well, breakfast is always a question. On the road in Asia, it’s easy: give us a bowl of noodle soup or sticky rice with grilled chicken, and we’re sated. At home in Chiang Mai, fruit and yogurt frequently did the trick. That works here, too. But during our house renovation phase, on days of breaking tile, tearing up carpeting, hauling drywall, pounding nails and lifting excruciating loads, a little fruit and yogurt didn’t cut it. We needed more. We needed corn.
I think Jerry rather enjoys the experimentation. He has fiddled with a number of recipes, making sweet bread and savory bread; cornbread topped with blackberry syrup, cornbread with butter and honey. By far the winner is his jalapeno-cheese cornbread, pictured above: crispy cheese on top, moist swirls of cheese within and just the right amount of heat from the chopped jalapenos (which, my brother from Wisconsin informed us, are much hotter than the bland, dumbed-down jalapenos sold these days in markets up north).
So I give you Jerry’s jalapeno cornbread recipe:
Seven Twos Cornbread
(So-named because everything is done in handy twos)
2 eggs
2 cups corn meal
2 tablespoons butter
2 small pinches of salt
2 or more jalapeno peppers
2 small white onions
1 1/2 to 2 cups of yogurt, soy milk, milk or any combination thereof
cheese! to taste (we prefer any Mexican variety for this recipe; try Chihuahua cheese!)
Pre-heat oven to 400 degrees. Chop small and fry together the jalapenos and onions in some of the butter. Cook until the onions soften and just start to turn translucent (NOT carmelized – they will cook more in the baking). Melt the rest of the butter in the heated pan when done.
Lightly mix that together with corn meal, eggs, salt and yogurt/milk/soy in an appropriately sized mixing bowl (thorough mixing is not required, and in some quarters is highly discouraged).
Grease a 9-inch baking tin (most recipes call for square, ours is round and works fine) and pour in the mixed ingredients.
Sprinkle crumbled or small-chopped bits of cheese across the top (some will sink to the middle of the mixture) and pop the pan in the oven.
Cook for 30-45 minutes. The cooking time varies based on the yogurt/soy/milk combination used and your baking elevation (we’re at 5,000 feet, so we use a little more liquid and our cooking times are longer than those usually recommended in cookbooks).
Generally speaking, baked goods are done when a toothpick poked in the center pulls out clean. But you can also judge this cornbread by how golden-brown the cheese bits become on top. Yum.
Serve straight out of the oven with any combination of butter, honey, salsa and/or hot sauce you like.
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Welcome to my ramblings on food, drink, travel, politics, history and all the other avenues that converge in life. I’m a journalist, author and media trainer; and for five years I was Gourmet's Asia correspondent until the magazine's recent closure. I’m a bit obsessive in the kitchen. Much like my mother, I start thinking about dinner well before breakfast….
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