Saleem: We have one dish called Maqluba, which means up-side-down. Maqluba is a Palestinian dish, in which we use, rice, vegetables, chicken, lamb or beef, it depends on your flavor. It is very flexible; you can use different kinds of ingredients.

Reporter: What is special about Maqluba?

Saleem: The most special thing about this dish is the way how we set up the ingredients inside the pot. First, after we fry some veggies like eggplants, cauliflowers, potatoes, carrots, or whatever you like, you can put any kinds of veggies you like. You just fry half of the time, not for fully-cooked. So you just fry for about three minutes. Then we put the veggies inside the pot first, then we put the meat. The meat is already boiled with the spices and olive oil. We use some Arabic special spices including cinnamon sticks, black pepper, allspices, bay leaves… We call it 7 spice or spice mix. We use the spices to add more flavor and the meat is tastier. The spices also kill the smell of the meat.

(Photo: Saleem Hammad)

Reporter: As you said making maqluba requires several steps including pre-cooking and pre-seasoning the meat and vegetables before layering everything in the pot, right? Typically, vegetables are fried before layering.

Saleem: Yes, you are right. We set up veggies, then the meat, then the rice and we add the water. The water we use is chicken broth. We usually boil the chicken for about 30 to 40 minutes and get the broth, which is very tasty. And we add the chicken broth, but we use less chicken broth than when we normally cook only rice because we the water coming out from the meat and veggie as well. We leave it to cook for about fifteen minutes like normal rice and then when we want to serve this dish we make it up-side-down, so the veggies, the meat, will be on the top and the rice is on the bottom. And the way it looks is like a cake, and it is very delicious, healthy because it has different ingredients in its veggies, meat and rice.

Reporter: Yummy! I really want to try to make Maqluba myself at home. Do you often make Maqluba in Vietnam?

Saleem: I have invited many of my Vietnamese friends to try this dish and everybody love it. They like the way we serve it. They like the taste of it. Do you know that sometimes it is not easy for Vietnamese people to eat the foreign dishes especially the dish comes from the Middle East or Indian food which has a lot of harsh smell? In Palestine we use less spice than in India.

Reporter: If I can’t find all the Arabic spices to make Maqluba, can I use some Vietnamese spices instead?

Saleem: As for me, after living in Vietnam for ten years, I understand how Vietnamese like to eat so even sometimes I use Nuoc Mam, fish sauce to add the Vietnamese flavor to my dish make Vietnamese people feel like it is a close thing to them. Well, it is not Vietnamese food but it is easy to eat.

Reporter: Thank you very much Saleem for your creative Maqluba recipe. I will definitely try to cook Maqluba one day. We hope you can share more recipes of Palestinian food on another VOV24/7 Food Delight. Good bye.