Name: Hasan Hammoud
Role: Business Manager
Hometown: Sugar Land, TX
Class Year: 2025
Major: Industrial and Systems Engineering
Favorite Food: Moufataka (مفتقة)—Moufataka is a traditional Lebanese dessert, and is one that my mother would only make for special occasions. It is essentially a thick pudding made from rice, pine nuts, sugar, tahini, turmeric, and water. The recipe is rather simple. First, soak the desired portion of rice and let sit overnight and strain the following morning. Then, in a boiling pot of water, add the rice and turmeric and let boil until the rice has a homogenous, sticky/spongey texture. Now comes the labor intensive part: add the sugar, tahini, and pine nuts into the heated pot with the turmeric rice and begin stirring with a wooden spoon. You will likely have to fight the rice with the spoon a bit in order to make sure the mixture is fully incorporated (the mix should be quite dense)—so grab a couple of friends and take turns stirring! Once fully mixed, pour into a serving dish and let it cool to room temperature. If you would like, you can add additional pine nuts as a garnish. And that’s how you make moufataka. Sahtein!
Favorite Aggie Tradition: Aggie Traffic
Interesting Fact: For 20 years, I thought my first words were in Arabic. But then, after I started dating my girlfriend (who speaks Mandarin), my mom told me that my actual first word was 再见 (bye), a phrase I must have picked up while we lived in China.