#12 Morocco
- Jen
- Apr 13, 2020
- 5 min read
Updated: Jul 4, 2022
It is my friend and landlady (and more recently, colleague and fellow prisoner), Rhiannon’s, lucky day! At the start of this project I asked my close friends to pick a country they wanted to come over for and Rhiannon picked Morocco just in time for her birthday!
Moroccan food is good, really good, so I feel like I should take this one seriously. I’m therefore going to keep this one strictly business and try really hard not go off on any tangents.
I’ve seen enough Jamie Oliver and Nigel Slater cooking programmes to feel like I already have a reasonably good idea of what Moroccan food involves and I regularly use Moroccan flavours in my everyday cooking. The watery western version of this vibrant cuisine that I experience in the UK must be nothing compared to the delights you can immerse yourself in in the markets of Marrakesh, into the Atlas Mountains, on the Mediterranean coast and beyond. I’d LOVE to go! Travel buddies inquire within.
The typical Moroccan diet includes a variety of meat (no pork; Muslim), a huge selection of fruits and vegetable and plenty of wheat in the form of breads and couscous, which is served with most main meals. At the coast, seafood options include sardines, anchovies and mackerel.
Hot or cold salads made with cooked or raw vegetables are served with main dishes. The most famous is perhaps zaalouk, a tomato and aubergine salad. See what I cooked, below, for other examples.
Flavours & ingredients
Olives
Morocco are the sixth biggest national producer of olives in the world, for olive oil, for export and for domestic consumption. Olives are marinated in sweet flavours, spicy flavours and sour flavours and are used in many dishes.
Preserved lemons
Preserved lemons are typically associated with northern Africa but they’re also a thing on the Indian sub-continent. I’ve never gotten around to preserving my own lemons and the time between picking this out of the pan and Moroccan Monday wasn’t sufficient to allow my lemons to ferment! I can’t wait to be one of those farmhouse kitchen babes with everything homemade in fancy jars! Thankfully, not many others in Cardiff considered these to be a lockdown “essential” so the preserved lemons shelf at the supermarket was fully stocked.
Ras el hanout
ReH is the flavour of north Africa and is used extensively in Moroccan cooking. It’s Arabic for “head of the shop”, basically all the good stuff (My Dad Wrote a Porno fans will like that). It’s one of those things where there’s no legally defined recipe but every shop and family has their own version. It can include up to 50 different spices, but the important ones are cinnamon, cumin, coriander, allspice, black pepper, and ginger.
Harissa
Like ReH, harissa is ubiquitous in Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco. I’m sure we all know and love harissa so forgive me if this is not brand new information. Harissa is a chilli pepper paste made with olive oil, garlic and other tasty spices. It can be either a condiment or stirred into dishes like tagines and it’s one of the best things ever!
Bread
It’s not commonplace for a household to have its own oven in Morocco, as most of the cooking is done over an open fire. Instead, home bakers will prepare their bread dough in the morning, marking it with a family logo and get the kids to drop it off at and later pick it up from a communal oven. Imagine living next door to the communal bread oven; you’d spend your life salivating from the smells!
Moroccan classics
You think Moroccan, you think tagine, right? A tagine is the name of the conical-shaped clay pot and also the stew-type dish that is slow-cooked in the pot over coals. A tagine can use any meat, fish or selection of vegetables. The slow cooking leaves meat succulent and tender and allows the aromatic Moroccan spices to infuse throughout the dish. The best tagines carefully combine sweetness and sourness with the warm spices by incorporating dried fruits or honey, and, of course, the famous preserved lemons. I find that tagine-inspired dishes are great for healthy mid-week batch-cooking and they always taste great from the freezer.
Tanjia is local to Marrakesh, and again, the cooking receptacle and the dish share the same name. Meat (beef, lamb…or camel) is slow cooked in herbs and spices and there’s typically no vegetables added.
Harira – tomato-based soup with lentils and chickpeas. Different variations include meat, vermicelli and herbs and spices. It can be served with dried fruits and hard boiled eggs.
Bastilla is a special occasion spiced chicken pie with an almond topping encased in thin pastry that’s topped with sugar and cinnamon. On first review, it doesn’t sound too dissimilar to the shepherds’ pie-trifle Rachel made for Thanksgiving, but actually, tender chicken laced with ginger and cinnamon, sweet almonds and flaky pastry sounds really good if you think harder about it. I didn’t make a bastilla as part of this blog but I’m making it a priority to seek one out when we’re liberated from lockdown.
The sweet stuff
Think honey, cinnamon, oranges, dates and almonds to flavour pastries and biscuits of many different varieties. Below is merely the tip of the iceberg of delectable Moroccan sweet treats but I could happily continue this chat forever because everything sounds so yummy!
Variations of baklava exist in the Middle East, Greece, north Africa and probably plenty of other places too. Moroccan baklava uses a selection of nuts and is flavoured with orange, lemon and rose.
Seffa Medfouna is couscous and noodles mixed with sugar and almonds.
Briouat are like little sweet spring rolls.
Kaab el ghzal is a pastry stuffed with almond paste.
Halwa chebakia is pretzel-shaped dough deep fried, soaked in honey and sprinkled with sesame seeds.
Moroccan Monday for Rhi's birthday
What else is there to do with a day of annual leave during lockdown if you’re not preparing elaborate meals and playing drinking Tiger King?
Rhi’s birthday meal consisted of a chicken “tagine”, served with couscous, a selection of salads and homemade flatbreads…because buying ready baked bread is apparently out of fashion in lockdown.
The “tagine” (made in a saute pan) was the chicken, olive and preserved lemon tagine from Jamie Does using chicken legs only and I had to add fennel seeds in the absence of a bulb of fennel. I implore you to make this because it’s the easiest one-pot cooking and I promise that the fragrant, slightly zingy, meaty sauce and tender falling-off-the-bone chicken will bring you jubilation. Jamie, you’ve never let me down.
The flatbreads I made are known as msemen, which is a laminated bread, a bit like a breakfast pastry, made by stretching and folding the dough. The recipe I used called for mint leaves folded into the layers which gave it a nice lift. I love making bread but I’m no pro. The msemen were really yummy but I think they’re supposed to be a bit stretchy and they turned out a bit hard…perhaps didn’t knead enough.
Msemen are usually eaten for breakfast and dipped in honey. I served mine with melted honey butter. WARNING: if you decide to melt equal parts honey, butter, a pinch of salt and a drop of water together, it doesn’t matter how full you are, you WILL find more bread/couscous/your finger to consume the entire pot of the stuff.
My salads all kind of tasted the same as all three were flavoured with garlic, paprika, cumin, coriander and parsley, but tasted the same in a delicious way. These were: a carrot salad; taktouka, charred green peppers (so much smoke inhalation!) and cooked tomatoes; and bakoula, spiced stewed greens with preserved lemons.
I added garlic (naturally), preserved lemons, parsley, dried apricots and pistachios to the couscous. It’s a very pleasurable way to serve couscous, with the little nuggets of chew and crunch, and couscous is just wonderful for helping you to transport the tagine juices to your mouth without the need of a spoon.
Overall, a very tasty meal. I think after this experience that Morocco has just usurped Vietnam for number one spot on my dream destination list.
So Rhi, what shall I cook next? Food from MOLDOVA.
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