The Gulf and Arabia · Volume 06, The Khaleeji Pearling and Bedouin Coast
Luqaimat
The UAE
Illustration
- Time
- 1 hour 10
- Researched
- 3 sources cited
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
- ½ tsp ground cardamom
- 1 pinch saffron
- 100 ml milk
- enough for deep frying oil, for frying
To serve
- to serve sesame seeds
- 3 tbsp date syrup (dibs)
Method
- Mix the flour, cornflour, baking powder and yeast in a large bowl.
- Add the sugar and cardamom.
- Warm the milk with the saffron for its colour and scent, then add it to the dry ingredients.
- Knead until a cohesive dough forms.
- Cover and leave to rest 30 minutes.
- Shape the dough into small balls.
- Fry them in oil at 160°C until golden.
- Drain on kitchen paper.
- Serve hot, sprinkled with sesame and the date syrup.
Notes
The source recipe 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 our own correction to the source's arithmetic.
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 the research where a Gulf restaurant's modern plating traces directly back to a specific, personal, remembered dish.
The method is Zahrat Al Khaleej's (2 December 2024), followed step for step. The magazine's 2023 recipe makes a yeast batter with 350 g of flour, an egg, fennel seed and milk, loosened with water to a consistency and proved about an hour in a warm place.
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.