, respectively. But I'm going to go out on a limb and wager that for most well-versed cooks, the wordstill doesn't mean all that much. So what is it? Kroueng is the name of a wide variety of aromatic flavor bases used in Khmer cooking, which I'm familiar with through my mother-in-law, who is Chinese-Cambodian., which simply means"beef stick." But oh, it is way more than just a beef stick, and what makes it so special is the kroueng she makes to flavor it.
Replacing one ingredient with another can be tricky: Substituting dried herbs for fresh ones doesn't always work, for example. Often, the trick to capturing the flavor of one ingredient involves combining several others. Of course a perfect facsimile is next to impossible, but I'm pretty happy with what I've come up with here. More importantly, my mother-in-law is too.