Oh boy, I’ve been looking forward to this one. Many of the cuisines we attempt on this blog are a mystery to us, but we’ve HAD Moroccan food, and it is awesome.
We had planned four dishes for this meal, so for the first time in a while, I had to make a spreadsheet to ensure everything came off at about the same time. We have a little metal recipe stand on the counter, and I was constantly flipping between the recipes, and cryptic schedule indications like “6:15 – Add lemons.”
But it all came off surprisingly to schedule, with no major disasters.
First up, and with no time pressure, because we made it in advance, is a delightful condiment called Harissa. If you are not familiar, harissa is chilis, oil, and other stuff, where the other stuff depends on the location and the specific recipe. In this case, we tried to find a specifically Moroccan version, which seemed to mean less herbs and more preserved lemon. (more on preserved lemons in a bit)
You soak your dried chilis to soften them up a bit, then just grind everything together to get a dip.
This is NOT apricot jam. If you apply this to anything in apricot jam quantities, it will kill you. A lot.
Absolutely delicious, but only a small dab or two at a time.
Then at 4:35 it was time to fire up the spreadsheet. Just for fun, I’m going to deviate from our usual practice of describing one recipe at a time, and bounce back and forth in the writeup just like we did while cooking, since I have the schedule in front of me.
Step 1? Well, it’s a meal on this blog, so what do you think?
“Prep Onions.”
…because of course it is.
Our first dish is a chicken tagine, one of many worldwide dishes, such as hot pot or karahi, that are named for the vessel in which they are cooked. We do not have a tagine, and while we are not averse to buying ingredients we will only use once, a large earthenware cooking pot is another story. So this is a Dutch oven.
The point of a tagine is to trap condensation and allow cooking with relatively small amounts of liquid, so throwing a lid on this pot is a reasonable substitute.
4:40 had two items – “Cook Onions” and “Mix dough.” Onions on the go, we mixed up dough consisting of wheat flour, water, rapid rise yeast and (the unique ingredient here) semolina flour. Visually, however, it’s just a relatively wet dough.
4:50: “Brown Chicken” and “Rest dough.” Well, the latter is pretty easy. It’s kind of like when Google maps tells you, “in 500 meters, continue straight.” So back over to the chicken. In addition to the chicken pieces, at this point you add a whole pile o’ spices and garlic, and the kitchen immediately started to smell amazing.
5:05: “Cook Chicken”, “Shape Dough,” AND “Soak couscous.” It may SEEM like a lot of these steps overlap, but assuming your mise en place is OK, the steps just don’t take very long. Case in point “Cook Chicken” is actually “dump in a cup of water, throw a bunch of cilantro on top, and then leave it alone for 50 minutes.”
Meanwhile, on the bread front, “shape dough” means to split it into two inch thick rounds, and then leave it alone again to rise.
Finally, “soak couscous” is what it sounds like. Put couscous in baking dish, put in water, done.
A word on this. Couscous is arguably the most important thing on this menu to Moroccan cuisine. It is frequently mentioned as the national dish. The most traditional way to prepare it would be to steam it three times, ideally using steam from the dish you are cooking.
We don’t have the hardware to do that, and we also needed this dish to be relatively simple, so as not to mess up the spreadsheet. So we’re using a hybrid technique where you soak the couscous first, then put it in the oven to steam.
Couscous soaking is not the most visually stunning image. (I think this was at the end of the soak, when all the water had been absorbed, but it looked basically the same, just underwater, at the start.)
We had a longish break here, while the bread rose, and the chicken cooked, so the couscous was actually next on our agenda, at 5:35, when it was covered in foil and placed in the oven to bake.
Twenty minutes later, we removed the chicken from the pot, and started reducing the sauce. Ten minutes after that, the couscous came out, and we whacked the heat up a bit to get ready for the bread, which had now risen quite a bit:
Into the oven at 6:10, and at 6:15 we hit “Add lemons.”
But not just ANY lemons, oh no – this was one of those aforementioned specialty ingredients!
These are lemons that have been brined for a while to produce a silky, intensely lemony flavor. You might be surprised to learn that the peel is what is typically used – more often than not, the pulp is discarded.
So we chopped up a bunch of preserved lemon peel and tossed it into the now quite reduced sauce, along with a jar of kalamata olives.
We’re not always the biggest olive fans, but this is one of those contexts where they really worked.
Final step, 6:25. Ironically it is “Warm up chicken” and “Cool bread.” Bread comes out of oven, chicken goes back into sauce, and precisely at 6:30, dinner is served!
Morocco is an Islamic country, so no booze for this meal. Instead, some nice mint tea. The Society for Music Theory mug was funnier before the weird time signatures rubbed off.
And here’s the delicious final spread! (Including the harissa, which is itself a final spread if you aren’t careful with it. That stuff’s REALLY hot.)
My heavens, will you look at that? Everything turned out perfectly. The couscous was super fluffy and un-lumpy. The bread was soft and delicious. The harissa will kill you if you look at it funny. And the tagine was absolutely heavenly – intensely lemony flavourful, with a nice salty kick from the olives. Just an absolute banger of a meal.
And with that, we have only two “M” countries left! It’s been a while, hasn’t it?
Next up: Mozambique!
One production note: This blog does not use f***ing AI. Never has, never will. There may be typos, but they are OUR typos, dammit.
Recipes:
Harissa
Chicken, Preserved Lemon, and Olives Tagine
Moroccan Bread (“Khobz”)
Couscous