Cambodian Cha Mi Sou Recipe for Stir Fried Vermicelli Noodles – Beragampengetahuan

This Cambodian cha mi sou recipe for stir-fried vermicelli noodles with pork and mushrooms and a savoury sauce makes my take on a popular celebratory dish cooked for Khmer New Year and other special occasions in Cambodia. A dish of Cambodian-Chinese heritage, cha mi sou is thought to have originated in China’s Fujian province, with cousins right across Southeast Asia.

My Cambodian cha mi sou recipe will make you a delicious dish of vermicelli noodles stir-fried with pork and mushrooms in a savoury sauce comprised of fish sauce, dark soy sauce and oyster sauce, the latter giving away its Chinese-Cambodian provenance.

Along with a classic Cambodian chicken curry and braised pork with palm sugar, cha mi sou is one of the most popular Cambodian dishes shared by families during Khmer New Year and yet it’s perhaps one of the easiest celebratory dishes to cook.

I need to clarify that this recipe for Cambodia’s cha mi sou – also spelt chha mi sour, chha mee sour, char mee suor, chaa mi sur, cha mee sou, and various other combinations of those transliterations – makes my take on one of Cambodia’s most popular Khmer New Year specialties.

My recipe draws from a handful of Cambodian cha mi sou recipes, because my research revealed that there is no single codified recipe for this Khmer New Year holiday favourite. Every Cambodian family appears to make cha mi sou a little differently to the next, so I will definitely be trying more and sharing another cha mi sou recipe.

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Cambodian Cha Mi Sou Recipe for Stir Fried Vermicelli Noodles for Khmer New Year

This Cambodian cha mi sou recipe for stir-fried vermicelli noodles with pork and mushrooms and a savoury sauce comprised of fish sauce, soy sauce and oyster sauce makes a popular celebratory dish cooked for Khmer New Year and other special occasions in Cambodia.

Khmer New Year begins tomorrow and like most long-term Siem Reap residents we’ve been almost as busy as Cambodians in recent days. Okay, nowhere near as busy; the preparations Cambodians undertake are full-on. But I’ve been busy cleaning the apartment, shopping the markets, and buying Khmer New Year stars to hang from our balcony.

As you’d imagine from a country that loves its food, Khmer New Year preparations include food preparations. Cambodians will be busy cooking their favourite dishes tomorrow, when Khmer New Year begins, and over the next few days as they gather with family and friends to enjoy shared meals over Cambodia’s most important annual holiday. One of those dishes will most likely include cha mi sou.

When I realised on the eve of Khmer New Year that I hadn’t yet shared a Cambodian cha mi sou recipe here, I consulted a handful of Cambodian food-loving friends, in addition to my usual recipe research, to find out how they and their families cooked their cha mi sou.

My friends included professional Cambodian chefs and a culinary tour guide, and their responses were fascinating. There seem to be more variations of cha mi sou than any other Cambodian dish of the hundreds of Cambodian recipes we’ve been researching over the last 13 years that we’ve been writing our Cambodian cookbook and culinary history.

What I discovered was that Cambodia’s cha mi sou differs not only from region to region, city to city, town to town, and village to village, but from home to home. Which is how I’ve ended up creating my own cha mi sou recipe this time around. But I will share another Cambodian cha mi sou recipe when I can pin a friend down after the holiday to get some precise ingredient measures.

My dear friend Sokin, an archaeology and culinary tour guide born in Battambang, told me her mother uses dried wood ear mushrooms and pieces of pork as the key ingredients in her cha mi sou recipe. Another friend, chef Mengly of Pou restaurant in Siem Reap, uses chopped liver and minced pork instead of pork pieces. No mushrooms; Mengly opts for bean sprouts and chives.

While chef Mengly only uses fish sauce and soy sauce (and sugar), Sokin’s mother uses fish sauce, soy sauce and oyster sauce, the oyster sauce pointing to the Chinese origins of the dish. Cambodians don’t use oyster sauce nearly as much as they use fish sauce and soy sauce.

My friend Linda Tha, whose family are from Pursat, said her dad, the main cook in the household, uses a combination of minced pork, pork slices and liver, along with black mushrooms, onions and spring onions. Linda’s dad’s cha mi sou looked incredibly delish in the pic she shared.

Sokin’s family are Khmer on one side and Chinese-Cambodian on the other side. Like many Cambodians with Chinese heritage, the family celebrates both Chinese New Year or the Lunar New Year, and Khmer New Year.

“My maternal side (of the family), they must have ccha mi sou every year for every occasion,” Sokin tells me. “My mum and aunt told me it was our ancestors’ favourite dish!”

A dish of Cambodian-Chinese provenance, cha mi sou probably originated in China’s Fujian province, where wheat vermicelli is called ‘misua’, also spelt miswa or mi sua. Wheat vermicelli is different to rice vermicelli (or ‘mifen’ in China) and cellophane noodles (‘fensi’ in China), also known as glass noodles or bean thread noodles.

Chinese-Cambodians, also called Sino-Khmers, include Cambodians with Chinese ancestry or mixed Chinese-Khmer ancestry, the Khmers being the original and a largest ethnic group of Cambodia – and along with the Mons, the oldest peoples of mainland Southeast Asia.

While ethnic Chinese first visited Cambodia during the pre-Angkorian kingdoms of Funan and Chenla, the first evidence of a Chinese community in Cambodia is until the 13th century, documented in The Customs of Cambodia, the journal of Chinese emissary Zhou Daguan, who spent a year at Angkor in 1296AD.

Of the many Chinese language sub-groups that have arrived in Cambodia, the Hokkien are thought to be the earliest arrivals. Most hailed from China’s southern Fujian province, from Xiamen and Quanzhou, and settled mainly in Phnom Penh and Battambang.

Cambodia’s cha mi sou has cousins right across Southeast Asia, wherever Chinese communities were established, so as you’d expect there are also regional differences between mee sua recipes.

In Thailand, for instance, pad mee sua recipes typically include varying combinations of minced pork, pork pieces, prawns, fish cakes, tofu, bok choy or similar leafy greens, cabbage, julienned carrots, onion slices, some kind of mushrooms, and scallions or chives, stir-fried in a sauce of soy sauce, oyster sauce, sesame oil, sugar, and pepper.

Tips to Making this Cambodian Cha Mi Sou Recipe for Stir Fried Vermicelli Noodles

While I said that the Cambodian cha mi sou recipe for stir-fried vermicelli noodles differs from family to family, most recipes contain some kind of pork and some sort of mushrooms, and a savoury sauce that’s typically comprised of fish sauce, soy sauce and oyster sauce (optional), along with sugar, salt and black pepper.

I’ve gone with pieces of pork shoulder, which we love, as it’s a delicious cut of pork and doesn’t take long to cook; a couple of minutes of stir-frying and it’s ready and remains tender, juicy and full of flavour. Don’t cook it any longer that two minutes or it will become hard and chewy.

If you’re unsure, use a digital thermometer to check the temperature, by poking it it in the widest part of a pork piece. It will be ready at 63°C/145°F, which is when you want to transfer the pork pieces to a plate and set them aside to rest for a few minutes, leaving some pork juices in the wok to fry the mushrooms in.

So what about that wok? An Asian kitchen essential, if you don’t have a wok, we suggest buying one. We recommend a cast iron wok with a long handle, but for effective stir-frying you really need high heat. A compromise is a round flat-bottomed non-stick wok.

Of course, feel free to use ground pork instead of pork pieces. Or another cut of pork, but in that case you might want to marinate the pork or use a tenderiser such as corn starch, but keep in mind that will change the flavour and texture.

Dried wood ear mushrooms are a popular choice, but we love fresh mushrooms and can source excellent shiitake mushrooms, which are flavoursome and wonderful when stir-fried in pork fat with plenty of garlic. I suggest stir-frying the pork and mushrooms separately so you don’t over-cook either, then bring them together with the noodles.

As for those noodles, in Cambodia anything goes it seems when it comes to the type of vermicelli used in cha mi sou. That’s why I haven’t specified a particular type of vermicelli in the recipe. Each of my friends used a different kind of vermicelli, including white rice vermicelli and clear glass noodles, also called cellophane noodles and bean thread noodles, as they’re made from mung beans or potato starch or some kind of tuber starch.

On this occasion, I opted for brown rice vermicelli, rather than wheat vermicelli. The brown rice vermicelli is made from natural wholegrain brown rice and as only the inedible hull is removed, leaving the bran and germ, it has more nutrients and is healthier. But use whatever vermicelli you can source or already have in the pantry.

To cut or not to cut the vermicelli? A couple of cha mi sou recipes online (one of which featured wood ear mushrooms and tofu skin, so there’s another idea for you), called for cutting the vermicelli. I have not recommended cutting the noodles. Firstly, because the noodles will break up a little when stir-frying anyway.

Secondly, because long noodles are lucky noodles according to Chinese culinary traditions, such as longevity noodles or long life noodles made during Chinese New Year or Lunar New Year. Longevity noodles bring luck, prosperity, and longevity – as long as you don’t cut the noodles!

Now having said that, if you’re a believer in such things, best not use my brown rice noodles, which I’ve found have a tendency to break apart more when stir-frying. For the best chance of good fortune, you better use glass noodles, which are more elastic and stay intact better.

As for the sauce, I did things a little differently to my friends, first combining the fish sauce, soy sauce and oyster sauce with the sugar, salt and black pepper, so the flavours meld together. I used half the sauce to stir-fry the pork and half to stir-fry the mushrooms. After adding the noodles, I added more sauce, and stir-fried for a minute until everything combined well.

So where did that third portion of sauce come from when the recipe divides it in two? I have to confess that I made double the amount of sauce in the recipe, as we love intense flavours. You could also make double and what you don’t use in the wok you could serve at the table, which brings me to the garnishes.

Because this is a dish of Cambodian-Chinese heritage, there’s not a lot of Southeast Asian heat in this dish, but we love our spicy food so I garnished it with sliced de-seeded birds-eye-chillies, which I stir in just before serving.

Milder red chillies, chilli flakes or a chilli sauce, such as our homemade Sriracha sauce, would also work. I went for scallions instead of chives, as there’s enough garlicky flavour from the garlic, but do as you prefer. Enjoy!

Cambodian Cha Mi Sou Recipe for Stir Fried Vermicelli Noodles

Cambodian Cha Mi Sou Recipe for Stir Fried Vermicelli Noodles for Khmer New Year

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This Cambodian cha mi sou recipe for stir-fried vermicelli noodles with pork and mushrooms and a savoury peppery sauce makes a popular celebratory dish cooked for Khmer New Year and other special occasions in Cambodia. A dish of Cambodian-Chinese heritage, cha mi sou is thought to have originated in China’s Fujian province, with cousins across Southeast Asia.

Prep Time: 15 minutes

Cook Time: 10 minutes

Course: Main Course

Cuisine: Cambodian

Servings: 4

Calories: 265kcal

Author: Lara Dunston

• 200 g vermicelli noodles
• 1 tbsp fish sauce
• 1 tbsp dark soy sauce
• 1 tbsp oyster sauce
• 1 tsp sugar
• 1 tsp salt
• 1 tsp ground black pepper
• 4 tbsp soybean oil
• 4 cloves garlic , minced
• 200 g pork shoulder , sliced evenly into 3cm x 1cm pieces
• 100 g shiitake mushrooms , sliced
• 8 scallions , sliced

• In a large bowl of water, soak the vermicelli noodles as per the instructions on the packet; they will vary depending on the type of vermicelli. When al dente, drain in a fine meshed sieve.

• Prepare the sauce in a small dish: pour in the fish sauce, dark soy sauce, oyster sauce, salt, black pepper, and sugar, and stir vigorously to combine well. Taste and adjust to suit your palate, then set aside.

• In a large wok over high heat, heat 2 tablespoons soybean oil then fry half the garlic for a minute until fragrant, stirring constantly so it doesn’t brown. Add the pork and half the sauce and stir-fry for a couple of minutes or so; poke a digital kitchen thermometer into the largest piece; it will be ready at 63°C (145°F). Transfer the pork to a plate and set aside.

• To the same wok over high heat, add the remaining 2 tablespoons soybean oil and fry the other half of the garlic for a minute until fragrant, stirring constantly, then add the mushrooms, and remaining sauce and stir-fry for a few minutes until the mushrooms begin to brown.

• Add the drained noodles, return the pork to the wok, add half the sliced scallions, and stir-fry for a couple of minutes or so until any water has evaporated and everything is well combined. Taste, adjust the seasoning to suit your palate, transfer to a serving plate, and garnish with the remaining sliced scallions.

Calories: 265kcal | Carbohydrates: 19g | Protein: 8g | Fat: 17g | Saturated Fat: 3g | Polyunsaturated Fat: 9g | Monounsaturated Fat: 4g | Trans Fat: 0.1g | Cholesterol: 20mg | Sodium: 1367mg | Potassium: 292mg | Fiber: 2g | Sugar: 2g | Vitamin A: 245IU | Vitamin C: 6mg | Calcium: 36mg | Iron: 1mg

Please do let us know if you make our Cambodian cha mi sou recipe for stir-fried vermicelli noodles with pork and mushrooms in a savoury peppery sauce as we’d love to hear how it turns out for you.

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