Aurélie’s Signature – 60 or 90 mn
Very holistic experience, comprising of a tailor-made massage for a body-mind-soul balance, using her intuition to follow the guest’s body, emotional and energetic needs. The body can tell you a lot if you listen to it. With a very sensitive touch, Aurélie can read the body and adapt the massage to what the guest need at a subtle level.

Cranio Spiritual – 60 mn
Get reconnected to your higher self. In this treatment Aurelie works on a very subtle level with technics such as pressure points, neck-shoulder sand scalp massage and energy healing. The treatment is like a meditation reaching a higher level of vibration bringing the guest centered and confident.

Chakras and Energy Balancing – 60 mn
The treatment starts with a chakras diagnostic to find out how the energy is going through the body. Then Aurélie works on an energetic level to bring back harmony and balance into the body, the mind and the spirit. Different technics are used as Essential oils, Bach Flower remedies, Nasoha, crystals and ReiKi.

Color therapy massage
Each color is like wavelength of electro-magnetic energy with its own vibration and meaning. The session starts with the guest picking a colored clay bead and Aurélie explains the deeper meaning of the chosen color and why and how the body and mind could need that color at that particular time. The entire session is according to the chosen color (oil, techniques, pressure …)

Hot Stone Massage
Full body massage with oils and natural stones from Song Saa island. This massage is really soft and nurturing. Ideal for those with insomnia or anxiety. The heated stones bring a deep relaxation, sense of comfort and care.

Most visitors to Cambodia will know of the ancient ruins of Angkor, where the famous Angkor Wat is located.

But few will know how this incredible civilisation, once the biggest city in the world and the seat of the great Khmer Empire, met its demise.

Guests at Song Saa Private Island will have a unique opportunity to learn all about this ancient wonder from one of the world’s leading experts.

Archaeologists and Director of the Greater Angkor Project Professor Roland Fletcher will visit Song Saa Private Island in December to deliver three fascinating talks on the great city of Angkor.

What was it that made Angkor so great? Why did this vast metropolis collapse? Are there lessons in this for our own civilisations?

Learn all about this ancient mystery while sipping your favourite drop in our beach-side Driftwood Bar.

Dates :14 , 16 and 17 December 2012
Venue : Driftwood bar
Time : 19.00 hrs

For more information:

• Phone +855.77.777 439
• Email: info@songsaa.com
• Resort website: www.songsaa.com

Over the next couple of months, while construction of the resort is being finalized, I’ll be
spending my time setting up kitchen operations and discovering how to incorporate as much of Cambodia’s rich food tradition as I can into the menus of Song Saa.

I’ll provide regular updates – starting with the exploration of Cambodian ingredients so
you can see how we choose what goes into our dishes, and then on to the refinement of our modern take on traditional recipes.

I’ll be travelling to different parts of the country in pursuit of the best suppliers and influences, tasting dishes as I go and incorporating the best of these into our own creations.

And if, like me, you’re passionate about food, there may even be some recipes and tips you can take away and use in your own discovery of Khmer cuisine.

Cambodian cuisine is blessed with many spices and fragrances that help to awaken this important element. One of the most exciting of these is cardamom, grown on the slopes of the Cardamom Mountains in the southwest of the country.

The Cardamom Mountains is one of the last true wilderness areas remaining in mainland Southeast Asia, and also one of the least explored. Ignored for decades due to war, this remote region has an exceptional degree of biological diversity and is home to the Asian elephant and Indochinese tiger.

Those facts alone made it an attractive destination for us, and its association with the famous spice was the only excuse we needed to head off on another quest to source ingredients for our restaurant.

We set off from Phnom Penh east to the small village of Srea Ambel on the gulf of Kampong Som, where we then made our way north along the coast towards the famed mountains.

At Srea Ambel we came across the most beautiful but slightly bizarre old pagoda. It was clear it been added to over the years by the people of the area, whose varied interpretations of faith had created an almost surreal menagerie of buildings and sculptures.

From Srea Ambel we made our way north to Trapueng Rung, where the local village committee has established an ecotourism project that’s helping them move away from their usual subsistence fishing industry into something more sustainable. It was here we spent our first night.

After meeting with the village committee and seeing their commitment not only to the improvement of their own people but also to the protection and promotion of their land, we decided to take part in some of the activities going on.

These included learning to make traditional rice noodles – which we will cover in more depth in a later blog – hunting for lobsters on the banks of the Arang River in the dead of the night, and sitting around a traditional coal pot barbequing our catch with the villagers sharing stories over a few drinks until the early hours of the morning.

The next morning we made our way north again, and soon found ourselves in the foothills of the Southern Cardomoms. As we turned off the tarred road and made our way past a checkpoint heading deeper into the jungle and mountains, we realized how fortunate the decision was to get a 4×4.

The track here was so eroded and rough it was almost impossible to navigate at times. With the going very slow we eventually found our way to Thma Bang, an isolated little village tucked into the heart of the mountains, where we’d been told we had the best chance of finding cardamom.

Thankfully Saran, a Khmer man involved in our community development team, was there to translate. Without him making inquiries for us, we would have had a very difficult time in this remote area where most people have had little or no contact with foreigners.

With one of the villagers offering his services as a guide, we headed on foot into the jungle. Walking past small plantations of peanuts and bananas hewed out of the forest, we found out how the people of the area managed to sustain their small community. After passing these small fields, the sun slowly started to fade away under a massive canopy of trees. With the vegetation getting more and more dense we pressed forward until our guide stopped and pointed.

In front of us was the tall thin green stalks of cardamom. We had arrived.

Our guide explained that it wasn’t the time of year to find pods on the plant. All the harvesting had been done two months prior. Sensing, I think, our disappointment he calmly walked over to one of the plants and with one big wrench uprooted it. He broke off the root and handed it to us.

Knowing that cardamom is a member of the ginger family and seeing a root so closely resembling the ginger we’re so familiar with came as a shock.

“Good for soups,” said Saran, translating our guide’s words. We all laughed as we smelled the intensity of the root.

I noticed then that our guide was furiously stripping the green stalk. I asked what he was doing and he pulled away the last of the hardy green outer layers to reveal a delicate white centre. Tasting that pale tender white flesh was an experience I won’t forget for a long time. An intense fresh menthol filled my mouth. It had a scent so big and yet so delicate at the same time, and filled my mouth and my nose. It made me feel alive!

As we made our way back to the village, the guide told us about a local lady who harvested and distributed all of the cardamom from the area. We made our way to her premises and were greeted by the strong aroma of drying cardamom.

On long platforms were mountains of cardamom with small fires under each to help the drying process. After introductions were made we got down to business. We not only wanted the pods now but we also couldn’t ignore the epiphany of the stalk.

The ‘cardomom lady’, as I call her, was more than happy to supply us with pods, stalks and roots. The drive back was mostly spent in silence with all of us drifting off into dreams of how and what to do with the treasure we’d found. Orange, pistachio, tomato, vanilla, shellfish, oysters, eggs.. the possible combinations went on, all thanks to a little piece of jungle on the edge of Cambodia.

We are lucky to have such a prestigious ingredient right here on our doorstop. This important spice has been renowned for decades as one of the best peppers in the world and comes exclusively from the southern Cambodian province of Kampot and the neighbouring province of Kep, where we also sourced the sea salt detailed in the last blog.

It develops an enthralling aroma that is both strong and delicate and really jumps out at you when it is cracked. For this reason the spice has become known as the King of Peppers and has been highly sought after by chefs all over the world since the mid 20^th century.

The flavour of these black and red peppercorns is truly unique and quite unlike other kinds of pepper – except perhaps the Tellicherry pepper from the Malabar Coast in India. It is hot with a slight eucalyptus quality.

While most Asian countries use chili as their source of their heat, in Cambodia this quality traditionally comes from the peppercorns themselves.

It was very fortunate that on our second day in Kampot, where we’d gone to search for the famous pepper, we also found our sources of salt – sea salt, fish sauce and soy sauce. Kampot is a culinary gold mine, full of artisan producers whose products can be found all over the world. We met with one of the bigger growers of Kampot pepper in the area to discuss the produce and he kindly invited us to see his farm.

The plantation was deep in the hills, and it was hot and humid as we walked through the pepper vines. Pepper has been grown here since at least the 13th century. It was the French who drew international attention to it, and at one time the spice was an essential component of every top European kitchen.

Cambodia used to export around 17.6 million pounds of Kampot pepper a year back at the start of the 20^th century. But now that number is down to around 6,500 pounds. This massive decline in production was due to the Khmer Rouge, who all but destroyed the industry. Even on the day we were there, we saw only one guy tending to the vines.

The pepper plant is a perennial woody vine that grows up to four metres tall on trellises. The fruit of the vine is the peppercorn, which grows from the tiniest white flowers that appear on the spine of the plant.

I picked some berries straight off the vine to taste them. What struck me was the difference in flavours according to the size of the berries. The tiniest fruits were full of citrus notes and a flavour that just burst into your mouth, and I immediately decided we should feature these small green berries in our restaurant.

In 2010, the Cambodian government approved ‘geographical indication’ (G.I.) status for Kampot ground pepper. This provides a guarantee of quality and the assurance that a product comes from a particular region, similar to that in France with Champagne.

The poster below shows the production process in its various stages. Sometimes you never think of how ingredients get to your table and this was certainly an eye opener.

We spoke to another supplier there, Jerome Benezech, who is the director of Farmlink, a Cambodian-registered co-operative that brings together independent farmers and helps develop regional agro-busineses. He has been one of the driving forces in the rebirth of Kampot pepper, and says G.I. status will help stop traders selling pepper from other regions under the Kampot brand.

As you can see from these pictures the process is taken very seriously with painstaking care and attention to selecting only the best peppercorns. These peppercorns are all individually hand selected by local ladies who spend the day bent over dishes of peppercorns picking out the most desirable corns with tweezers.

Before the hand selection process, they are dried in the sun for a couple of days in individual trays placed on mesh platforms.

We will soon be looking at a selection of different peppers that we’ll be using at Song Saa Private Island. But as mentioned earlier, one idea that came from our trip to the beautiful Kampot province was to showcase the freshest green on-the-vine berries, along with the traditional red and black peppercorns.

I was also inspired by the traditional packaging – pictured below – which I believe could be beautifully incorporated into the restaurant. These would fit nicely with the sugar palm boxes we featured in a previous blog.

These five qualities will define our menus and shape the food experiences we will offer our guests.

They also reflect what is available to us here in Cambodia – the seafood, spices, sweeteners and delicacies that make up Cambodian cuisine.

And they will inform the modern and innovative twists we intend to develop ourselves as we create unique and contemporary interpretations of this colourful food tradition.

Over the next few blogs I want to show you how we intend to achieve a balance of these five elements, and I will take you with me as we discover how these ingredients are produced, who makes them, and where the finest quality can be found in this remarkable country.

It was during a recent trip to the home of the famous Kampot Pepper – which we will look at in the next blog – that we also discovered a fantastic source of sea salt.

It was in a coastal area of the beautiful southern province of Kampot that we came across some striking fields that were used for drying sea salt.

This is a dry and windswept place, and very dramatic, which during the season is full of strong workers who can produce over a tonne of salt from a 10-metre square field every two or three days.

Unfortunately for us we’d arrived in the off-season and the fields were mostly empty. But the company was very accommodating, showing us the different grades of salt they produced and allowing us to tour the expansive salt fields. This really gave us a sense of the scale of production in this area.

The majority of farmers have between 20 and 30 salt fields, which yield between 800 and 1000 tonnes of sea salt for each farmer. There must be over 100 farmers here so you can see how much is being produced in this area on a yearly basis.

We were very fortunate during our tour to come across a local farmer and his crew loading some of the previous season’s salt on to the back of a truck to supply the numerous outlets in Cambodia.

The farmer explained to us that during these non-producing times they still have to maintain the fields, keeping them packed hard and ready for when they can start the whole production process again.

They wait until the dry season and then let sea water flood into the fields through a series of small canals, containing the water there until it reaches a temperature of 21 degrees.

When the sea water has reached the correct temperature, they open the gulleys and flood the hard surfaced fields to a depth of only 6cm and then let the sun do its work.

As the water warms in the sun the temperature can reach up to 30 degrees. As the water evaporates the first natural diamond shaped salt crystals start to appear. This first harvest is the most superior grade 1 salt. It is then stored in the big sheds where the final drying process takes place.

Looking at the storage sheds it became obvious these guys are producing a huge amount of sea salt not only for markets in South East Asia but all over the globe. The packaging here is exactly the same as the salt we used in the Seychelles when I was working there. I have also seen it in the Caribbean many years ago.

The natural salt has a distinctive grey colour, which I’ve seen when we’ve produced our own sea salt in the past. It is still slightly sweet even at this initial stage and can be used for numerous purposes. It’s exciting to think about how we can use this quality of salt, and makes me think of how different the flavour of this will be to our own product when we start producing salt on the island.

We intend to have a selection of salts and peppers available at Song Saa Private Island to showcase the different flavours and uses of these versatile ingredients.

Cambodia’s recent history is still very visual here, from a time when these areas were under a different regime. Now though it is truly peaceful in every way. Standing talking to the farmer as the wind whipped across the fields, it was hard to imagine that such terror and atrocities could have occurred.

The picture here doesn’t do the size of this salt production justice. This was a huge shed, probably over 30 metres in length, and you can see just how full it was, right to the door. Here they pack the salt into 50kg sacks and transport it away for use.

An amazing bi-product growing here (which nobody is using) is the humble saltplant. This sturdy specimen grows naturally all around the area, presenting another exciting opportunity to incorporate a unique ingredient into our cooking.

The taste of the saltplant is a little harsher than the sweeter sea salt but very similar to samphire, which is also known as sea asparagus. When poached, lightly grilled or even raw it is a beautiful accompaniment to the delicate flavour of fresh fish. It will definitely feature on our menu.

Of course sea salt and saltplant are not the only opportunities we have to bring this flavour into our menus. Other sources of this important element include fish sauce, which we were also lucky enough to source on this same trip, and soy sauce. In fact we’re busy all the time finding new ways to highlight this important food element.

In Khmer it is known as “thnoat”, its scientific name is “Borassus flabellifer”, while in English its common name is “sugar palm”.

The national tree of Cambodia is a constant presence in the Kingdom, defining the tropical skyline with its distinctive trunk and leaves, and we wanted to reflect this in the materials used at the resort.

It is used to create palm sugar, which is present in most Cambodian cooking, but also has a range of other uses from marking the boundaries of a farmer’s rice paddy to providing building materials for houses and common household items such as plates, bowls and spoons.

We’ll be looking at the role of palm sugar in our cooking over the next couple of blogs but for now I wanted to show you how we’re going to use the wood to create appealing objects that will enhance the island hideaway feel of our resort.

This will include a range of boxes that we’ll use to deliver our afternoon tea, fresh bread and cheeses to our guests.

The wood from the sugar palm is rough and dark in color, which comes up beautifully when cut and polished. The quality of the wood varies though, depending on the soils, and so we had to search for some time before we found the right product.

We finally found it in the rice paddies outside of the ancient city of Siem Reap, where a small wood working business was busily producing decorative plates and other items.

As you can see the methods used here for working the wood are simple but they are also very effective. They were churning out wood products on a daily basis with a casual style – and little regard for safety precautions – that made it all seem so easy.

The workers were very helpful and friendly and also very precise in helping us get the exact thickness we were after for our boxes.

They were quite surprised that I was looking for such a thin cut of wood but after using the chainsaw and band saw, we finally managed to get the result I was after.

They then used a hand sander to give the wood a nice finish. Sugar palm is really not the easiest wood to work with, as I found out later when I tried to handsaw it myself – with terrible results!

As we waited I struck up a conversation with one of the workers there, who took great pride in telling me all about the sugar palm. He explained how it was used for traditional medicine to cure malaria, and he also explained the process of producing palm sugar from the tree.

Palm sugar is made the same way that maple syrup is produced, by collecting and boiling the sap. A bamboo container is placed below cuts in the palm flower and left overnight. The sap flows into the container and is then collected before noon the next day. It must be collected quickly or the sap will turn into alcohol. Then the sap is boiled down to make the sugar. I’ll detail the process of making palm sugar in a later blog.

With the wood in hand I traveled back to Phnom Penh. And after a series of badly glued attempts at the boxes, and finally with the help of a very good carpenter, we had our first mock up.

We have since been through the process several times and we’re now closer to the end result I’m looking for. You can see here the first sample of what should be an exciting piece for the restaurant.

Using this local material is fantastic and brings a real sense of Cambodia to the restaurant. Needless to say, it’s also sparked a renewed enthusiasm to see what else we can find locally to bring to the island.

My second excursion took me out on the water in search of fresh fish – a huge contrast from my first trip north to find ibis rice.

Since returning from the north, I’ve been spending time in Sihanoukville looking for the best produce local fishermen can offer. This is easier said than done though, as there are lots of boats chasing the same delicious haul.

After a couple of trips to various markets, my guide, Sitha, introduced me to a few old contacts – everything in Cambodia is about networking. It’s by far the best way to get to know people and you meet some really exciting characters along the way, all ready to share their knowledge and help wherever they can.

We followed one of Sitha’s contacts around Sihanoukville’s fishing port, where we met a range of potential suppliers. The first seller we met specialised in supplying large quantities of fish to the markets around Phnom Penh and Siem Reap – unfortunately dealing in quantities of that size was not what we were looking for. This scale of trade is great for the economy but not so great for what we are trying to achieve in and around our island.

The waters of the Gulf of Thailand are being stripped of marine life through overfishing. This was one of the inspirations for our decision to follow a more sustainable path. Sustainable seafood has also been a big personal interest of mine, and one of the reasons I’ve been so thrilled to be part of the Song Saa team.

The success of our plan to source fish sustainably wherever we can depends on building a close relationship with the guys who are out there on the water everyday. They have a hard job to earn a living out on these boats and we need to support them as they try to operate in ways that reduce the impact on Cambodia’s amazing marine environment.

After several visits to individual fishermen, we found our preferred supplier and sat down to discuss our plan. It was great to have Seth there who is fluent in Khmer and was able to translate everything we needed. He was also able to discuss with the fishermen the types and varieties of fish that are found in the surrounding waters as well as those that are most plentiful.

The storage facilities these suppliers have are great. The tanks in which they store the fish are filled with aerated filtered water, keeping the fish fresh and healthy and ready to send to markets and restaurants live – you can’t get fresher than that.

One of the best local fish from around here is the ‘tray khmau’, which is a black grouper and has a beautiful light texture. When getting to know a new type of fish, it’s always a good idea to simply pan fry them and check the textures and flavours. There are various types of grouper and they are all deliciously light and textured. The abundance of ‘tray khmau’ in our area makes it a good first choice for us to use.

Look out for a dish on our menu called Song Saa Amok, which we’ll make from ‘tray khmau’.

There is also an abundance of ‘slipper lobsters’ in the waters around Sihanoukville, which is known locally as ‘bonkong phak’. I’m really looking forward to seeing what we can do with these.

The tanks are a great way to keep fish fresh and the more I look into them the more sense it makes for us to use them on our island, so we can always offer great fresh produce to our guests.

Song Saa’s Conservation Director Dr Wayne had put me in contact with Karen Nielsen from the Wildlife Conservation Society, who told me about an exciting project near Siem Reap where famers are producing jasmine rice in a way that also helps protect Cambodia’s national bird the ibis.

This wildlife friendly ibis rice sounded like a good fit for our conservation-minded restaurant and so Panha Mao, our Logistics Manager, and I set off to investigate.