Cambodian Spicy Roasted Peanuts Recipe (2024)

This Cambodian spicy roasted peanuts recipe is a perfect snack for casual gatherings or holiday season tables, and a great accompaniment to a cold beer or a potent spiced Negroni. While I’ve been making Vietnamese roasted peanuts since we lived in Hanoi years ago, I found the local Khmer peanuts in Cambodia have a few subtle and not-so subtle differences.

When you go out to a good bar in Cambodia, especially in Siem Reap, you’ll probably be served two or three small dishes of nibbles with your drinks – typically, crispy purple taro and orange sweet potato chips, maybe crunchy banana chips, perhaps some mini crispy rice cakes.

If you’re lucky, you’ll also get a bowl of these Cambodian spicy roasted peanuts with chillies, kaffir lime leaves, lemongrass, and garlic. This recipe makes those deliciously-addictive roasted peanuts, which are aromatic, spicy, salty, and sweet – Cambodia in a nutshell, so to speak – and it’s one of our best recipes with nuts.

Lara had been begging me to make these at home for years, so when I finally got around to it, we sampled a handful of packets of the Cambodian spicy roasted peanuts sold at Siem Reap’s local markets.

If you’re looking for them, they’re generally at the stalls where they sell Kampot pepper and salt, dried spices, including the ‘amok spice mix’, dried fruit, dried teas, and Cambodian coffee from Mondulkiri and Ratanakiri.

The peanuts at these stalls are made with way too much garlic for our liking, plus they contain long dry pieces of lemongrass, which are sharp enough to be a choking hazard. In some cases, the ratio of peanuts to the dustheap of detritus from the garlic and lemongrass made it almost impossible to selectively eat more than one peanut at a time. To attempt more would be to tempt fate.

Nibbling nuts isn’t much fun when you feel like you might either have a cheek impaled by a lemongrass slither or ingest enough undercooked garlic to make you brave enough to attempt impaling a vampire. After the second negroni this could be a thing. So it was time to develop our own Cambodian spicy roasted peanuts recipe at home.

Published 23 December 2018; Updated 23 October 2023

Cambodian Spicy Roasted Peanuts Recipe with Chilli, Kaffir Lime Leaves and Lemongrass

Lara had been begging me to make these at home for years, and share a Cambodian spicy roasted peanuts recipe here, so when I finally got around to it, we sampled a handful of packets of the Cambodian spicy roasted peanuts sold at Siem Reap’s local markets.

If you’re looking for them, they’re generally at the stalls where they sell Kampot pepper and salt, dried spices, including the ‘amok spice mix’, dried fruit, dried teas, and Cambodian coffee from Mondulkiri and Ratanakiri.

The peanuts at these stalls are made with way too much garlic for our liking, plus they contain long dry pieces of lemongrass, which are sharp enough to be a choking hazard. In some cases, the ratio of peanuts to the dustheap of detritus from the garlic and lemongrass made it almost impossible to selectively eat more than one peanut at a time. To attempt more would be to tempt fate.

Nibbling nuts isn’t much fun when you feel like you might either have a cheek impaled by a lemongrass slither or ingest enough undercooked garlic to make you brave enough to attempt impaling a vampire. After the second negroni this could be a thing. So it was time to develop our own Cambodian spicy roasted peanuts recipe at home.

Tips to Making this Cambodian Spicy Roasted Peanuts Recipe with Chilli, Kaffir Lime Leaves and Lemongrass

Just a few tips to making this Cambodian spicy roasted peanuts recipe. I find stirring the peanuts in a huge wok with a silicone spatula quite soothing. I hope you do, too, because continual stirring is essential for even cooking.

Don’t be tempted to leave the peanuts to their own devices for more than 10 seconds. They will scorch. Just put some music on and enjoy a beverage while you watch the peanuts transform. I now compare it to making a great risotto.

Sure, you can leave the stove for a minute, but never to answer a phone call, just to change the music or top up your glass.

For this recipe for Cambodian spicy roasted peanuts we skip the five-spice mix used in myVietnamese roasted spicy peanuts recipe and add more dried bird’s eye chillies and roughly torn kaffir lime leaves, as well as a little sliced garlic, and finely sliced lemongrass. We add the salt and sugar later, before we start the cooling-off period.

If you think you’ll struggle to find kaffir lime leaves (check here), dried kaffir lime leaves are fine. And, of course, the bird’s eye chillies are dried – just make sure they are whole dried chillies, not crushed.

While some similar recipes call for the raw peanuts to be roasted on an oven tray, this version is made in a wok. While shaking the oven tray while making roasted peanuts can work, you have far more nuanced control over the process in a wok.

Many cooks in Cambodian will use a lot of vegetable oil to make these peanuts, with some cooks even putting the oil in with the peanuts when the wok is cold, perhaps to speed up the process of browning the peanuts. This is not a good thing to do for either the peanuts or your health.

The peanuts themselves will release oil as they brown and the modest addition of oil after around five minutes in the wok just helps the salt and sugar adhere to the nuts.

Looking for something to wash down with our Cambodian spicy roasted peanuts? Check out our co*cktail recipes, including a classic negroni with spices, a michelada from Mexico, an authentic Cuban mojito (based on those we sipped on our first Cuba trip in the mid Nineties), classic pina colada, a classic Champagne co*cktail with a tropical (red dragonfruit) twist,and a frappe-style White Peach Bellini recipe, courtesy of Chef Peter Gilmore of Quay restaurant, Sydney.

Cambodian Spicy Roasted Peanuts Recipe

Please do let us know if you make this Cambodian spicy roasted peanuts recipe with chilli, kaffir lime leaves and lemongrass in the comments below as we’d love to know how they turn out for you.