The Gulf and Arabia · Volume 06, The Khaleeji Pearling and Bedouin Coast
Luqaimat
The UAE
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 1 hour 10
- Researched
- 3 sources cited
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Small, deep-fried dough balls, deeply associated in the UAE with National Day and childhood memory, served hot with date syrup.
As tradition built it
Serves 10. Around 70 minutes.
Ingredients
- 500 g plain flour
- 200 g cornflour
- 10 g baking powder, around 2 teaspoons (this chapter's own correction of an implausible 100g figure in the source, see note)
- 2 tsp instant yeast
- 4 tbsp sugar
- enough for deep frying oil, for frying
- 1 pinch a pinch of saffron
- ½ tsp ground cardamom
- 3 tbsp date syrup (dibs)
- 100 ml milk
Method
- Combine the flour, cornflour, baking powder, sugar and yeast.
- Warm the milk with the saffron and cardamom and stir it in, then knead to a cohesive, slightly wet dough.
- Rest, covered, 30 minutes.
- Shape into small balls and deep-fry at 160°C until golden.
- Drain and serve hot with sesame seeds and date syrup.
Notes
A flag on one figure before the method: the source recipe behind this chapter's research gives 100g baking powder for this quantity of flour, a figure that reads implausibly high and looks like a transcription error rather than a real household ratio; a proportionate 10g, around 2 teaspoons, is used below instead, named here as this chapter's own correction to the source's arithmetic rather than an invented figure.
The chef's own account of this dish is worth carrying whole. At Abu Dhabi's Michelin-starred Erth, chef Debi Prasad Rath recalls his own first encounter with luqaimat as formative to how he now plates the dessert for the tasting menu, one of several points in this chapter's research where a Gulf restaurant's modern plating traces directly back to a specific, personal, remembered dish rather than an abstract idea of "tradition."
What a modern chef changes
The same dough, precisely fried
Method
- Grind the cardamom fresh in a dedicated spice grinder just before mixing it into the dough, for a sharper, more volatile aroma than pre-ground cardamom holds.
- Hold the frying oil at a genuinely precise 160°C with a digital probe rather than judging by eye, for an even, blond-gold crust rather than the darker, harder shell uneven heat gives.
- Dehydrate a thin sheet of reduced date syrup into a brittle tuile, shattered over the finished luqaimat for a textural contrast the soft, syrup-soaked original does not have.