Saudi cuisine is as stubborn tradition as it is adventurous modern food. The rich diversity and complexity of Saudi Arabia are such that they are fulfilled in the cuisine, a backward glance in the rearview mirror to see what was there first and an open door to innovative contemporaneity.
Home food is the backbone of Kingdom’s cuisine. Home cuisine, cut from home culture and soil, still gets prepared traditionally and from local supplies. Simple food like long, seasoned rice food burn trenches, lentil soup, and honey deserts are testaments to farm origins and firm loves of soil. Recipes, some of which have been passed successively from generation to generation, look back into the past of the Kingdom’s cycles, starting with crop rotation to communal dining tradition.
New gastronomy has been at the forefront recently, revolutionizing the science of business cooking by incorporating molecular methods and global flavors of cuisine. Chefs across the Kingdom are fusing molecular gastronomy with foods from yesteryears, technically reproducing it to create innovation in texture, temperature, and appearance. This innovation is providing foods which not only maintain retro taste but also fresh sense of perception outside retro expectation.
The combination of the old and the new has been our hip zeitgeist of the times; in fusion foods that marry conventional taste and novel form. Deconstruction of the classics, for instance, retains classic elements of taste but alters form. This newness in our new world is also most disliked by new chefs, who boast of locally grown produce to reach further out to local farmers and have a lesser ecological footprint. This law, being green, also produces additional sensitizing to the ecologic and cultural nature of food.
Food also plays the role of fulfilling a meaningful social role in Saudi society. From dinner party splurges to dinner parties in the dining room, food makes social membership and identification possible. The new innovations and the older traditional foods have such shared emotions of occasion, one that transcends generation and culture.
Part of that broader cultural narrative is the construction of Saudi food identity—where tradition and dignity are balanced against requirements to be new. Kingdom’s food culture now is one of continuously shifting depiction of this tension, of the call and of the residents themselves that they are co-producers in a experience of food honoring what has been but positioned on the use of fullest possible potential of tomorrow.
