The 2023 Abu Dhabi Grand Prix and Khuzi
Welcome to Grand Prix Gastronomy! To end the year, I’m cooking khuzi, a rice dish adored in the United Arab Emirates.
This project is pretty simple. As a complement to each race weekend, I’ll be cooking the national dish of that race’s host country and sharing information about the process and that dish’s history along the way in an effort to grow more deeply immersed in the local culture from my own home.
What Is Khuzi?
Can you believe we’re already at the end of the season already? It’s almost poetic; the national dish of the United Arab Emirates is — again — a version of the machboos we made to kick off the 2023 season! And, as I’ve mentioned before through the season, I’m not going to re-make any one dish, so we’re going to end with khuzi.
Khuzi — also spelled quzi, qoozi, ouzi, or ghoozi and known as shuwaa — is a spiced lamb-based dish served with potatoes and rice on the side. Some people do consider it the national dish of the UAE, and it’s also quite similar to machboos — but because there’s enough of a difference that I decided to whip this up to celebrate the end of this F1 season.
This Week's Recipe
To try to stay as authentic as possible, I nabbed my khuzi recipe from UAE Universe, which claims to be made as easy as possible. Thankfully, the preparation and cooking details of this recipe are really nicely detailed, so you can rest easy knowing you’re going to be fully guided through every single step.
Khuzi is pretty much a whole meal in and of itself thanks to the inclusion of both rice and potatoes, but I wanted to take things a step further after trying tabbouleh for the first time. The grain salad is hugely popular throughout the Middle East, and its zesty, herby flavor makes for a great complement to the well-spiced lamb and rice.
Cooking Khuzi
The first thing you'll do for your khuzi is prep the lamb by patting it dry, trimming its fat, and slathering it in a layer of salt, pepper, ginger, garlic, and saffron. Traditionally, you'll have the lamb butterflied, but I do not have a butcher to do that for me, so I left mine as a little roast; if you go that route, just know it'll need a little extra time in the oven.
With your lamb prepped, you'll brown the lamb on all sides in a hot pan, then transfer the lamb to the side. Sauté some onions in that same pot, then add in three cloves of garlic, ginger, bay leaves, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, peppercorns, and saffron, and return the lamb to the pot. Cover with water, cover the pan, and boil the lamb for about two hours; the goal here is to start breaking down what is normally a very tough cut of meat to make it tender and delicious. I know that sounds weird, but just wait until the next step!
That step includes transferring the cooked lamb to a rimmed baking sheet and coating it with a mixture of ghee, tomato paste, salt, and pepper. Pop it into the oven and let it roast for another two hours, brushing it occasionally with its own juices and more of the ghee-tomato mixture. With this step, you're mainly adding flavor. Roasting the meat gives it a nice flavorful tomato crust, which is exactly what you want.
Then, you'll cook up some rice and roast potatoes; you can read the recipe for specific preparation rules, but the biggest thing to note is that you'll want to cook your rice in some liquid reserved from when you'd boiled the lamb.
To serve this dish, you'll definitely want a nice, fresh side. The recipe I've linked features a zesty salad, but I opted to whip up some tabbouleh instead. Serve that all alongside a syrah, a wine that's most at home with tasty meats and exotic spices.
So, What's the Verdict?
One of my absolute favorite parts of GPG has been discovering new flavors and preparations of foods it never would have occurred to me to try before — and this khuzi is a perfect representation of that. Slowly cooking the lamb made it so tender that it basically just fell apart under the touch of my fork, and the tomato-ghee coating kept it juicy while also developing a massively flavorful exterior.
The tabbouleh was great, as were the roast potatoes (you literally can never go wrong with roast potatoes), but I think the real star of the dish ended up being the rice! I've always considered myself to be simply Too White to figure out how to make a rice that doesn't suck, but GPG pushed my boundaries, and I learned. Simmering the rice in the liquid that the lamb had been cooked in was an absolute game-changer; I don't think I'm ever going cook rice in anything not deeply flavored again.
Let's Chat! It's The End Of The Year!
Can y’all believe it? The 2023 Formula 1 season is wrapping up this weekend, which means our cooking adventure is over. This endeavor has taught me so much, and I'm so grateful for all of the folks who have tried their hand at a wild new recipe as a result of this project. It means the absolute world to me to see your posts and the photos of your dishes. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
GPG isn't totally finished just yet, since I have some wrap-up posts I'm planning to write, but my eyes are already firmly turned to next year. I'd love to keep the spirit of GPG alive, but I'm not sure I'm fully committed to cooking along with every race in 2024; it's been a lot of effort, and with much of the calendar remaining the same, I'd need to find different things to cook.
However, I'm thinking of a few different ways to keep things going, and I figured I'd turn it to my fabulous audience to help me decide:
Please let me know!!!!!
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Thank you for a wonderful 2023!
Can you believe the 2023 F1 season is coming to an end? It feels especially weird this year having been so embedded in the culture of each race location and knowing that my dinner plans suddenly got a lot freer!
I really enjoyed this project and the feedback y’all left; it was incredible to connect over a meal, even if we did it virtually, and to see your plates as we made our way through the season.
I do feel like I've ticked my boxes with Grand Prix Gastronomy; after all, the 2024 race schedule isn't bringing with it many surprises, and I've already made the national (or next best) dish for each event. However, I would still love to see this project live on. If I were to revive GPG in 2023, what would you like to see? A different dish from each nation? A dish representative of each driver's nationality? A historical cook-through of countries that used to host F1 but don't anymore? Let me know!
ksks finish here