For the kombucha (yields 2 liters)

200g rose petals (damask / mohammadi roses)

200ml kombucha liquid

240g sugar

1.76 ml water

1 SCOBY

For the cooler:

Dried lime (will be put as one slice in each glass)

Tonic water 

First, the kombucha needs to be started and left to ferment for a period of two weeks prior to the drink being ready to serve. Dissolve the water and sugar and bring to a slow boil to make a simple syrup. Once the sugar syrup is ready & cooled down completely, add the rose petals in, the petals can infuse over night, or be put through a food processor until they are very fine, then sieving the remaining liquid and adding it to the kombucha liquid and SCOBY in a sterilised container. Leave the container open with a cloth tightly wrapped on top, and let the mixture sit in room temperature for 5 to 7 days, while checking on it every day. Once happy with the acidity of the rose mixture, seal the container with its air tight lid and place in the fridge for a period of two weeks. Once the kombucha is ready to serve, depending on the size of the glass, pour a portion of 75% rose kombucha syrup and top it off with 25% tonic water, adding a slice of dried lime and some ice. 

In this particular conversation, I intended to catch up with Moza about her time in pastry school, and how she experienced it from the lens of an artist. 

To me, an artist journeying into culinary school felt like a radical approach to expanding on a material practice. Kitchens and culinary schools mirror the brigade system, a traditional hierarchical structure that demands discipline, precision, and rigour. I was intrigued by an artist willingly integrating this structure into their lives.

I quickly learned how much I personally fetishized this process. My idea of a controlled, militant kitchen compounded with this notion of an alternative residency space turned out to be reductive compared to the generous information and insight Moza provided. Therefore, this article shifts away from that narrow lens. She is determined to dismantle tropes not only concerning her own identity, but also how food is labelled and spoken about, particularly in the art world.

Moza is a curious, sensitive, critical, and acutely aware storyteller. She has a way of pulling you in, holding your attention, and offering you a story packed with climaxes, humour, resolutions, and unresolved questions.

You’ll Never Work in the Kitchen

We hear of racism and sexism associated with commercial kitchens, but I learnt from Moza’s experience that this clumsy, inappropriate environment—the tempers, the steaming, the flinging around of tools, the mockery—deeply infuses the culinary school teaching methodology. Moza refers to the military hierarchy, recalling the other determined, eager students seemingly scuttling about, trying to earn their position. Building ‘resilience’—a term that, lately, feels like a double edged sword- is celebrated in the kitchen.

Unsurprisingly, Moza’s challenge consisted of proving the assumption that, as an Emirati woman, she was merely a hobbyist in the programme, with no intention of actually stepping into a kitchen. Her second challenge was being forced to default to the role of spokesperson for Emirati food history, coercing peers to stop seeing Dubai as a contemporary incubator, devoid of history and culture, but diverse enough to be an ideal place to teach the culinary arts. She resented being forced to be nationalistic, to teach obvious lessons—racism and dismissing diversity should not persist in educational environments.

Finding Nafas

In the culinary school kitchen, Moza managed to find her ‘nafas,’ the Arabic word for spirit, or breath. In cooking, ‘nafas’ is the intangible, alchemical, divine energy that elevates mere cooking to an exquisite outcome. Moza found magic in the complex layering of pastries to produce delicate masterpieces, holding space in this system for her own experience and integrity to flow. Coming from a culture that eyeballs measurements, baking cakes from boxed cake mixes, and subscribing to the convenience of canned milk—practices discounted at culinary school—Moza found these processes to hold more ‘nafas.’ As a contribution and celebration of her graduation, she endeavoured to make her family’s favourite dessert on the sufra, the family dining table, a custard, encompassing all her new knowledge, making the custard entirely from scratch. When given the choice, her family preferred the pre-fab custard they have been eating since the beginning of time. Moza made peace with that choice, and peace with the ready-made reinstating its place in popular favourites.

Never Meet Your Heroes

Embracing popular favourites and contested themes around Emirati food, Moza attended a talk by one of her favourite authors in Middle Eastern cookbook writing. From the high on arrival, she experienced a huge low when the author candidly said that Emirati food needs to be elevated. Elevation, this author suggested, might come from combining your food with foie gras: the French dish would elevate the Emirate one. Heartbroken and once again assuming an educator role, Moza raised her hand, claiming: Emirati food is already a hybrid of foods and cultures, combining aromatic and elegant ingredients; surely, we can quantify its success not by the number of restaurants serving these dishes in haute cuisine formats, but by the fact that these dishes are daily practices in the home.

The Best Honey in the World

In her Hayy Jameel commissioned work, There is An Edible Gold, Moza dedicated time to researching and shadowing beekeepers in the UAE. Within the beekeeping system, and the production of ‘local’ honey, Moza discovered that the bees producing honey came, somewhat ironically, from Europe (although the UAE is on its way to breeding an Emirati bee). She also found that labelling honey from a particular country flattened the nuances behind the honey distinction: flora, climate, altitude—all of which could not be read through national boundaries.

In The Fictional Recipe, Moza’s in-person activation of Rewilding the Kitchen in the form of writing workshop, participants developed texts challenging the status of the recipe as a functional, instructional document, transporting it instead to a level of sensitive literature. Weaving together many of Moza’s deconstructions of culinary practices with those of care and nourishment, the recipes expanded into a manifesto, fiction, diaristic writing, and more, finding a 'nafas’ belonging solely to the author. Participants of the workshop had the opportunity to taste Moza’s Joori Wa Loomi, a contribution she described as being her; her experiences and thoughts over the last few weeks melting and fermenting into a fragrant cooler.