Middle Eastern & Gulf Recipes You Can Track in Radish

Machboos, luqaimat, balaleet

These three dishes cover a lunch, a dessert and a breakfast from the Emirati table. Machboos is the spiced rice-and-chicken centerpiece found at most Gulf family meals; luqaimat is the fried dough ball served with syrup that shows up at gatherings and during Ramadan; balaleet is the sweet vermicelli-and-omelette combination eaten at breakfast across the UAE. Each recipe below already exists inside the app's food library, built from CIQUAL composition data and a documented mass balance for cooking loss — not a guess at what "a plate of machboos" weighs.

Where two ingredients are proxies, not the real thing

Radish only shows a nutrient value when it can trace it to a real composition table — CIQUAL (ANSES) or USDA. For two ingredients in this trio, no official table currently references the exact Gulf product, so a documented substitute stands in, chosen for a close calorie and macro profile rather than for taste:

• Luqaimat's syrup: traditional recipes are drizzled with date syrup (dibs). CIQUAL doesn't carry a date syrup entry, so maple syrup — a similarly dense sugar syrup — is used as a calorie proxy.
• Balaleet's vermicelli: the traditional dish uses very fine wheat vermicelli. CIQUAL doesn't carry that exact cut, so cooked rice vermicelli, with a comparable carbohydrate profile, stands in.

Both substitutions are flagged inside the app on the recipe's own source line, next to the CIQUAL codes actually used for every other ingredient. That's the same rule that applies to every recipe in Radish: an estimate is always labelled as one, never presented as a measured value.

Prefer Google Play or the App Store directly? Get Radish →

General food information, not medical or dietary advice. A calorie counter is a tracking tool: it does not replace guidance from a health professional.