Our authentic Cambodian lort cha recipe makes a popular market meal of rice pin noodles – also called silver pin noodles, silver needles and rat’s tail noodles – stir-fried in fish sauce, soy sauce and palm sugar, with garlic, bean sprouts and scallions or chives. Of Cambodian-Chinese origin, this street food favourite is typically served with a messy fried egg and generous squirt of chilli sauce.
This authentic Cambodian recipe for lort cha (លតឆា in Khmer) makes the Cambodian street food dish of stir-fried (cha or ឆា in Khmer) lort (លត in Khmer), the short rice pin noodles that are also called rat’s tail noodles for their shape, and silver pin noodles or silver needles for their shiny white exterior and shape. Lort cha is one of our favourite noodle dishes.
Sold at local markets at lort cha stalls and specialist lort cha eateries here in Cambodia, lort cha is cooked to order on an enormous flat blackened grill plate, which we call a barbecue in Australia, the Japanese call a teppan, and Americans a griddle. Lort cha is never made in a wok outside the home, as it’s cooked in big batches, generally in the late afternoon-early evening.
The short fat rat’s tail noodles are stir-fried with garlic, bean sprouts and scallions or chives in a sauce of palm sugar, fish sauce and dark soy sauce. Lort cha is nearly always eaten with a chive cake or two and soft fried egg, cooked quickly beside the noodles on the same grill plate, and plopped on top of the stubby noodles with a liberal squirt of Cambodian chilli sauce.
‘Authentic’ is such a loaded term, I know, but I’m using it here to describe the way lort cha is cooked and served at markets here in Siem Reap and all over Cambodia – not the ‘lort cha’ I’ve spotted on a few food sites that have a mile-long list of ingredients and even use long noodles at times. Sorry, but that’s not lort cha.
If you enjoy our lort cha recipe, do browse our many scores of Cambodian recipes and archive of thousands of recipes from around the world. If you’ve enjoyed our recipes, please consider supporting Grantourismo by browsing our Grantourismo online shop for gifts for food lovers designed with Terence’s images, or shopping Amazon for classic cookbooks for serious cooks, cookbooks for culinary travellers or gifts for Asian food lovers. Now let me tell you about lort cha.
Cambodian Lort Cha Recipe for Market Style Stir Fried Rice Pin Noodles
‘Lort’, also written as ‘lot’ in the Khmer language of Cambodia, are the short rice-flour noodles, and ‘cha’, also written as ‘chha’ and ‘char’, means to stir-fry in Khmer, the language of Cambodia. Lort cha is a Cambodian-Chinese dish cooked in Cambodia’s Sino-Khmer communities, and my research suggests it’s of Cantonese origin.
Its Chinese provenance explains why you’ll see dishes similar to lort cha right across Southeast Asia using these short, stubby rice noodles – also called rice pin noodles, silver pin noodles, silver needle noodles, rat’s tail noodles, and rat noodles. One of the typical dishes made with these stir-fried noodles that you’ll see on your travels in Malaysia is loh see fun with minced pork and salted radish.
If you follow our Cambodian lort cha recipe to the letter it will make you the kind of lort cha you’ll buy at a Cambodian market or street food stall, which is vegetarian, aside from the fish sauce, of course. However, you could also add Chinese greens or cabbage, beef, chicken or pork.
While the main ingredient of lort in Cambodia is rice flour, there’s some tapioca starch in the dough, and some recipes for the noodles include wheat starch. The ratios vary depending on where the noodles are made.
In Cambodia, where most noodles are rice noodles, there’s little wheat starch used, however, in Hong Kong about the same amount of wheat starch as rice flour is used. Worth noting if you’re gluten intolerant and thought you could eat these in Hong Kong.
Lort noodles are also used in desserts in Cambodia called nom lort or nom lot. The noodles are often green, as they’re flavoured with pandan, and are swimming in coconut milk. They might come on their own or with pandan jelly, pomegranate seeds, sago or yellow beans – or all of the above! So good if you’re a lover of Southeast Asian sweets. I’ll share a recipe soon.
Tips to Making this Cambodian Lort Cha Recipe
Here in Siem Reap, we can buy the fresh short lort cha rice noodles used at our local markets and supermarkets. If you live outside Cambodia, make a beeline for your nearest Chinatown, Asian supermarket, Asian grocery store, or wet market. You can also have a go at making your own rice pin noodles. We’ll provide a recipe soon.
The fat little white noodles will be firm when bought fresh, and often stuck together. But there’s no need to boil them or steam them with a lid on a pan as some lort cha recipes suggest. The noodles will soon soften up after you start stir-frying them with the sauce.
While lort cha is made on a big flat grill plate at local markets and eateries, and at some Cambodian markets we’ve even see lort cha being stir-fried on a huge flat pan that resembles an enormous paella pan, in Cambodian homes lort cha is made in a wok, and we like to use a wok to stir-fry lort cha.
If you don’t yet have a carbon steel wok, it should be your next investment if you love to cook Southeast Asian food.
You should have no problems finding a good Chinese dark soy sauce – you can also use a light soy sauce if you prefer.
When it comes to fish sauce, we use Cambodian fish sauce for our Cambodian recipes, however, it’s not so easy to come by outside Cambodia, when we recommend Thailand’s Megachef, a premium quality fish sauce that is consistent and widely available. American recipes often include oyster sauce (among myriad other ingredients) which is rarely used in lort char in Cambodia.
We buy palm sugar either direct from our palm sugar making family out in the village of Preah Dak on the edge of Angkor Archaeological Park or one of our local markets where we can buy palm sugar in a form that’s similar to creamed honey. If you buy palm sugar grains, dissolve them in a tea spoon of hot water first. If you can’t find palm sugar, use brown sugar.
Always blanch your bean sprouts first, whether serving them cold or hot in a stir-fry. Use chives or scallions (green spring onions), not both. Some cooks like to add cabbage or Asian greens such as Chinese broccoli.
While our Cambodian lort cha recipe is vegetarian (fish sauce aside), as this is how it typically comes at a Cambodian market, in restaurants and hotels you may spot lort cha with chicken, pork, beef or tofu on menus.
The lort cha noodles are generally pushed to the side and the eggs are cracked and fried in the same pan or on the same grill plate. You can try that too. Fried eggs are usually well-done in Cambodia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia to the point where the yolks are hard and edges of the whites are brown and crispy.
However, lort cha is often the exception, when cooks will frequently serve the yolks soft and the eggs messy, generally because they’re making so much and they’re in a hurry, with lots of hungry dinners waiting patiently on foot and bike.
Street food cooks will usually ask if you want a squirt of chilli sauce and usually offer you a local orange-red Cambodian chilli sauce similar to Sriracha sauce. (We prefer the original Thai Si Racha Phanich).
If you’re serving lort cha at home, I recommend providing a condiment caddy on the table that includes bottles of chilli sauce, soy sauce and fish sauce, along with dishes of chopped chillies and extra scallions or chives, blanched bean sprouts.
Cambodian Lort Cha Recipe
Ingredients
- 350 g fresh lort cha - rice pin noodles
- 1 tbsp fish sauce
- 1 tbsp dark soy sauce
- 2 tsp palm sugar
- 2 tbsp neutral oil - vegetable, soybean
- 2 cloves garlic - finely chopped
- 100 g fresh bean sprouts - blanched
- 50 g scallions or chives - sliced at 4cm lengths
- 2 eggs
- 1 tbsp chilli sauce - to taste
Instructions
- Stir fish sauce, dark soy sauce and palm sugar in a small bowl until well combined and set the mixture of sauces aside.
- Blanch the bean sprouts, finely chop the garlic, and slice the scallions or chives in 4cm lengths.
- Heat two tablespoons of a neutral oil such as vegetable oil or soy bean oil in a wok, skillet or frying pan.
- Fry garlic until it begins to brown, then add the fresh lort cha (rice pin) noodles and the mixture of sauces, and stir-fry the noodles for a few minutes until the sauce covers every noodle and the noodles become soft.
- Add the bean sprouts and scallions or chives and stir-fry for another couple of minutes.
- Push the noodles to the side and fried the eggs or fry them in a separate pan until the whites are done but yolk remains soft.
- Serve the noodles with a fried egg on top. If feeding guests, I serve the noodles with additional dishes of finely-sliced chillies, scallions or chives, blanched bean sprouts, and bottles of chilli sauce, soy and fish sauce.
Nutrition
Do let us know if you make our Cambodian lort cha recipe as we’d love to know how it turns out for you.
This is a great and easy recipe!
Thank you so much, Christine! And thank you for taking the time to drop by and let us know :)
Hi Lara & Terrence, thank you so much for this! Definitely the most authentic lort cha recipe out there! My hubby and I worked for an NGO in PP for years and this is exactly like the lort cha we ate at Psar Kandal. Tried a few other recipes before finding yours and they’re nothing like lort cha!! Have you seen the Gourmet Traveller recipe?! (Fellow Aussies here!) What a joke. It’s not even lort cha! They don’t use lort cha noodles. Very strange. Relieved to have found your recipe and will work our way through your other Cambodian recipes. Back in Perth now but eager to return to Cambo. Keep up the great work!
Hi Annie, this is what we love to hear, thank you so much! And, yes, I saw that Gourmet Traveller lort cha recipe and was absolutely astonished. We used to work for Gourmet Traveller years ago and did a lot of Southeast Asian stories for them and love the magazine. I’ll have to go back and see who was responsible for that recipe. As you say, it was very strange to see a lort char recipe made with noodles. So bizarre. I’m sure there are a lot of recipes on the net by food writers/bloggers who haven’t even been to Cambodia as some are very odd and nothing like the lort cha we eat in Cambodia. My sister is in Perth actually. Love the city! A lot warmer there than here in Victoria! Thanks for the kind words and for taking the time to drop by and leave a comment. Appreciated :)