Khmer BBQ Coconut-Pork Skewers Recipe

This is a popular and traditional style of barbeque marinade that can go on all manner of meat and vegetables for your traditional cook-out. Usually, meats and vegetables are grilled separately, with the unique exception being skewered. They are served as-is, with rice at a cook-out, or with chili-garlic sauce and a fresh green papaya salad inside toasted baguettes. Street grills usually serve very thin slices of meat to keep costs down, so you’re getting a higher marinade-to-meat ratio for your baguette sandwiches. 

Try it this way first, but you can also barbecue chicken or anything else you’d like in this style. We also make grilled “meatballs” with this recipe, where ground beef or pork is mixed with the marinade and then squeezed around a skewer into little “sausages” (if you try this, let it rest in the fridge after forming for at least half an hour so it doesn’t fall apart on the grill.) This dish is frequently paired with beer and eaten for major holidays, family events, or karaoke nights. You’ll even find chicken-wing bbq versions of this in night clubs to go alongside 4-liter beer towers.

The local technique heavily favors grilling over charcoal for this recipe- fats and juices will drip down into the charcoal and rise as smoke to season the skewers in their own vaporized juices. 

Not all curry pastes are the same. We selected this particular “curry” paste because it doesn’t have shrimp paste (or any animal products) and is the most authentic kreung available outside the Kingdom of Wonder. The included ingredients are primarily lemongrass, kaffir lime leaf, and galangal- the holy trinity of Cambodian aromatics. It also has staples like turmeric root, garlic, and shallot, which are mainstays in homemade kreung. In the box recipes included, you will be using this as a base kreung with modifications made specific to each recipe. 

Galangal and lemongrass are already in your kreung, or “yellow curry paste,” but we’ve included extra to add even more complexity to the veritable nose-bouquet that makes up all these recipes. You’re welcome.  

As lemongrass, galangal, and coconut varieties are found all over the world, it was important to select a powder (made correctly, too) from the region to capture regional flavors.