Stay home and still travel the world. Emirates helps travelers escape their everyday life and invites them on a culinary journey around the globe—discovering other cultures through their food. To bring travel inspiration into people’s home kitchens, Emirates chefs share the ideal three-course-menu to give globetrotters a taste of their next vacation, while staying home.
Starter: Spices and lentils in the United Arab Emirates
In the Middle East, lentils and other legumes are known as popular sources of nutrients. Therefore, as a starter, Emirates chef Said El Alam presents a traditional Arabic Lentil Soup.
“Thanks to many different spices its’ signature taste will immediately make you feel as if you were strolling around one of the famous exotic spice bazaars in the Gulf”, Said says about the dish. Emirates’ recipe for lentil soup is simple enough for any beginner chef and the perfect way to start your culinary journey. See the full video with step-by-step instructions here. For a truly Middle Eastern experience, Emirates has also made some of its most popular Arabic dishes available to its fans, including its signature Prawn machbous.
Main course: Flavours of India
For the main dish home chefs can visit India and taste a flavorful lamb biryani. Emirates chef Ravi Nage presents the traditional Indian dish lamb biryani with yoghurt raita: “Using typical Indian spices like cardamom will transfer you to one of the many beautiful spice plantations of the country such as the Cardamom Hills between Kerala and Tamil Nadu,” he elaborates. See the full videos with step-by-step instructions here: lamb biryani.
Last but not least, there is always room for desert and some chefs even claim the dessert is the most important part of a menu. Udo Leick, Emirates German Chef introduces Emirates’ recipe of sweet crepes with apple compot. Known by many different names in Germany/Switzerland, the sweet pan dish is very popular among all age groups and served both as main course or dessert. “Together with the delicious apple, cream cheese and raisin filling the taste will immediately take you to a cozy café in Paris or a chalet on a mountain-top in Southern Germany/Switzerland”, Udo enthuses over the dish. See the full video with step-by-step instructions here.
These international dishes as well as many other multi-course gourmet menus—which always adapted to the respective destination country and cooked with local ingredients—are taken from Emirates’ recipe books. Each year, more than 110 million meals from 12,450 different recipes are served on board Emirates’ restaurant in the sky with the same attention to detail in First, Business and Economy Class. The airline’s chefs focus on simple, well-cooked dishes that emphasize fresh ingredients of the highest quality and are changed on a monthly basis.
The Emirates Food Channel, available on YouTube, gives customers a behind-the-scenes look at how it creates its onboard menus and works with its global partners. The episodes showcase the detail that goes into menu development by Emirates chefs and ingredient sourcing for onboard meals.