After a long, long day I arrived in Saudi Arabia again. The flight from LA was about an hour delayed so the trip was extra long. Also the flight from Frankfurt was delayed so all I all it took almost 21 hours to get here … But the coffee makes it worth it. I am in a new hotel this time; in the Park Hyatt. This hotel has a view on the huge fountain out in the bay. I think I will like it here.
During my visit here I visited a few of our customers that buy rice. Saudi Arabia consumes a very large amount of rice; much more than many other countries and people there like rice grown in the US. A very popular dish is called Kabsa or  كبسة  in Arabic.
This dish is a combination of rice, vegetables and meat with the spices being the unique ingredient. It typically includes cardamom, saffron, nutmeg and others to create a really unique flavoring. Different to how we eat rice in the US (and in the Netherlands) is that the rice is used a bed for the meat instead of rice on the side of the plate. Here is a picture of the dish ready to be eaten.
I visited several restaurants that have Kabsa on the menu and the amount of rice that they use is very large. One restaurant used about 50kg of rice every 30 minutes that they are open for lunch. They have cooking pots to cook 50kg rice at one time but it takes about 2 hours from the cold water to the fully cooked rice so they need about 4 or 5 of those pots to ‘stage’ their cooking and not run out of rice during lunch. Every day this restaurant alone uses 300 kg of rice. As you can imagine these are good customers for us 😉
