Saloona

the everyday Gulf stew: tomato, whatever vegetables are in the house, and dried lime for the sourness that holds it together

Origin: Doha & the Arabian Gulf

From the journey of Tomato.

Saloona is the Gulf's weekday pot. A tomato base, a little meat or fish, and whatever vegetables the kitchen holds, soured with dried lime and spiced with bezar, served over plain rice. It is the counterpart to machboos: where the rice dish is for guests and occasions, saloona is what a household actually eats on a Tuesday, and there is no fixed ingredient list because there was never meant to be one. The tomato is the constant and it arrived late. Tomatoes reached the Arabian peninsula through Ottoman and Indian Ocean trade in the nineteenth century and were absorbed with unusual speed, and it is now difficult to describe Gulf home cooking without them: the base of saloona, of maraq, and of most machboos. Loomi supplies the acid. Limes are boiled in salt water and dried hard in the sun until they are black, light, and hollow-sounding, a Gulf preservation technique of real antiquity, and one or two pierced and dropped in will sour and perfume a whole pot. They must come out once they have given what they have, since left too long they turn medicinal and bitter. The dish is common across Qatar, the Emirates, Bahrain, and Kuwait with no meaningful difference, which is what one would expect of a domestic stew in a region that was a single trading coast long before it was a set of states.

Ingredients

Ingredients

  • 600 g lamb, chicken, or firm white fish, in pieces
  • 5 tomatoes, chopped
  • 3 tbsp tomato purée
  • 2 onions, chopped
  • 4 garlic cloves, crushed
  • 1 thumb of ginger, grated
  • 2 dried limes (loomi), pierced
  • 1 tbsp bezar or baharat
  • 1 tsp ground turmeric
  • 2 potatoes, in chunks
  • 2 carrots, thickly sliced
  • 1 courgette, in chunks
  • 1 green chilli, slit
  • 3 tbsp oil
  • 2 tsp salt, or to taste
  • 900 ml water

To finish

  • 1 small bunch coriander, chopped

Method

  1. Brown the meat in the oil in a heavy pot and set it aside. If using fish, skip this and add it near the end instead.
  2. Cook the onions until soft and golden, about ten minutes, then add the garlic and ginger for a minute.
  3. Add the bezar and turmeric and fry for thirty seconds, then the tomato purée and cook it out for three minutes.
  4. Add the chopped tomatoes and cook down hard for ten minutes, until they collapse and the oil separates. This is what gives the stew its body; a saloona built on watery tomato stays thin.
  5. Return the meat, add the water, the pierced limes, the chilli, and the salt, and simmer covered for thirty minutes.
  6. Add the potato and carrot and cook for fifteen minutes, then the courgette for a final eight. If using fish, add it with the courgette.
  7. Fish the dried limes out as soon as the stew tastes pleasantly sour, usually after about thirty minutes in the pot.
  8. Taste for salt. It should be clearly sour as well as savoury, which is what distinguishes it from a plain tomato stew.
  9. Scatter over the coriander and serve with plain white rice.

Notes

Cooking the tomatoes down properly before the liquid goes in is the difference between a saloona and a soup. Pull the loomi once they have soured the pot; they keep giving and eventually give bitterness. The vegetables are genuinely a matter of what is in the house, so treat the list as an example rather than a specification. Aubergine, okra, and spinach are all common.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

Mapping Culinary History

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Journey Point Map Key

Ingredient originTrade or transit route
Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control
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