UAE: Meet the chef who can't taste her own creations

Chef Aisha Doty AlHusseiny is known to create magic in the kitchen with her chocolate techniques and baking skills. However, she cannot taste any of her delectable pastry creations. “As a celiac, I cannot eat gluten,” she said, speaking to Khaleej Times. “But I am lucky because my husband and my two sons are my biggest critics. Especially my husband. He is very honest and direct. His comments help me improve as a chef and perfect my recipes.”

Celiac disease is a digestive disease that hurts a person’s small intestine. The only treatment for it is to stop the intake of gluten.

A walk into the chef’s establishment, Golden Ribbon Chocolates, will give people an inkling of how versatile her skills are. Serving up high quality Belgian chocolates with homemade fillings that are a fusion of French- Arabic flavours, American baked goods, French pastries and more, Chef Aisha brings her passion for fresh, organic ingredients to everything she brings.

However, her journey to becoming the celebrated chef that she is was fraught with challenges. From surviving breast cancer to learning how to cook after being diagnosed as a celiac to juggling the demands of raising a young family, it took several years for Aisha to be able to pursue her own dreams.

The girl who liked to bake

Growing up in rural Ohio, Aisha’s fondest memories were of assisting her grandmother to bake wedding cakes. “We had no bakeries there,” she recalled. “Everyone made everything at home. So my grandmother never charged people for the grand cakes she made. It was a passion for her. She would do it for church charities and cancer societies.”

At the time, little Aisha had her own tool - a needle that she would twirl along the cake as her grandmother decorated it. This would give the cake the grand look that it had. Her mother, a pharmacist, was also a passionate baker, but when Aisha wanted to pursue baking as a career, she objected to it.

“Sitting in the counselor’s office, my mother said that she would not tolerate her daughter working in another person’s kitchen,” she said. “So I picked English and became a teacher. That is where I met my husband.”

After marrying her Emirati husband, Mustafa Mohamad AlHusseiny, Aisha moved to the UAE where she spent the next almost two decades raising her family.

Challenges

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