Cooking with "The food of Morocco" by Paula Wolfert

[seabream]

It's about time we have a topic for this book on eGullet. Anyone else cooking with it?

Here's what I've made from it so far:

Marrakech tagine bread, page 101

It tasted good, but it puffed up more than it should have, in the oven. We loved the semolina taste, and will be trying this one again.

Grilled red pepper salad, page 89

This dish is fantastic. We ate it with the tagine bread, and we thought it pairs really nicely with bread. A winner.

Although... the amount of salt is way off (2 tsp). I wonder if the mistake is in the amount of salt in the ingredient list, or if she forgot to say to rinse the roasted peppers after being salted, but either way this would have been way too much salt. We reduced on the salt, and still thought it was a bit on the salty side.

Fish tagine with tomatoes, olives, and preserved lemons, page 246

I had high expectations for this dish, but wasn't that impressed. The charmoula does indeed have a wonderful flavor, but we thought it overwhelmed the fish. We love fish and prefer dishes where its subtle flavor comes through.

Today I'm planning to make:

Eggplant zaalouk, page 93

Tomatoes, preserved lemons, and sweet red peppers, page 86

Briwats with goat cheese and honey filling, page 147

Has anyone made any of the dishes I'll be making today? Any advice is welcome. Either way, I'll report back on those three dishes.

[seabream]

OK, here are my impressions on the three new dishes I cooked today:

Eggplant zaalouk, page 93

Our favorite of the three dishes. So good. The only thing I would recommend is to really season to taste (similar to cooking Thai) to balance the flavors. The amounts of seasonings we added ended up very different from the original recipe (tomatoes are out of season and not very sweet right now).

Tomatoes, preserved lemons, and sweet red peppers, page 86

Also good (although not quite as good as the eggplant). The preserved lemons add a nice touch.

Briwats with goat cheese and honey filling, page 147

We made our own warqa from scratch for these, and ended up making them cigar shape like in the photo in the book. Warqa is so time consuming, much more time consuming than I expected! It's also easier to get right than I expected - I thought I would have to throw away the first few sheets until I got the hang of it, but they all came out nice. The goat cheese and honey filling is decadent!

Will we make these again? Not sure we would spend so much time to make them from scratch again, maybe for a special occasion. But the same filling would be wonderful on purchased filo dough.

[patrickamory]

I've made the glazed chicken with apricots and the byssara (creamy fava bean soup).

Also made chicken tagine with preserved lemons and olives, but did not follow her recipe precisely (my chicken unfortunately did not come with a liver to thicken the sauce).

All delicious...

[JoNorvelleWalker]

I'm repeating myself from another thread, but lamb tagine with dates, chicken with apricots and pine nuts (which I had again tonight), pil-pil, chicken mechoui. My chicken with preserved lemons and olives was fairly close to her recipe. (I would not have used a liver if I'd had it!)

[Smithy]

You might reconsider the liver bit. I was surprised to find that it thickened the sauce and improved the texture without shifting the flavor noticeably. When I say "surprised", I mean pleasantly so.

[seabream]

And today I made what is my favorite dish from the book so far:

Butternut squash and tomato soup, page 189

Just awesome! I made no changes to the recipe.

I'm looking forward to making some of the dishes mentioned in this thread, so thank you everyone for your comments.

[JoNorvelleWalker]

Tonight was chicken mechoui, spit roasted. Chicken mechoui is such a wonderful dish but for me spit roasting anything is a pain so I don't do it very often. The results are worth it though. I served it with round bread and red olives.

[seabream]

I am planning to make the "Kefta tagine with tomatoes and eggs" (page 402) tomorrow. I am wondering what to serve as a side. Bread? It seems like the dish may have quite a bit of sauce...

Do Moroccans ever eat rice?

[patrickamory]

What about using coucous?

[Nicolai]

I am planning to make the "Kefta tagine with tomatoes and eggs" (page 402) tomorrow. I am wondering what to serve as a side. Bread? It seems like the dish may have quite a bit of sauce...

Do Moroccans ever eat rice?

Potatoes.

Oven roasted potatoes with garlic - spices and herbs....

[seabream]

I ended up making couscous with the kefta. I don't know how authentic/traditional it is, but it tasted fantastic together.

I also bought some Moroccan khlii and made the stew with lentils, butternut squash and khlii. It was excellent. Khlii is not cheap though...

[slkinsey]

As chance would have it, there is an extensive thread on Moroccan tagine cooking in which Paula herself has been a frequent contributor. One of the issues with her groundbreaking book, Couscous and Other Good Food from Morocco, is that the recipes are adaptations for the kinds of cookware an American home cook might be able to get in 1973. This, needless to say, did not include real tagines. Now that we can get real cooking tagines, I hope that that The Food of Morocco includes plenty of recipes that are written to be cooked in a tagine. If so, I am buying it asap!

[patrickamory]

slkinsey - it certainly does!

[JoNorvelleWalker]

Tonight was Lamb Tagine with Baby Spinich, Lemon, and Olives (pp 364-365). First time I had made it. Wonderful dish, but more effort than I was expecting. I sat down to dinner at 2:00 am. I've prepared enough Moroccan recipes that I should have known by now.

I made the dish very close to the printed recipe. I used a yellow sweet onion rather than a red onion, as that is what I had. I doubt the substitution made much difference. Generally (possibly because I am an American) I do not care for pepper cooked a long time, preferring to add freshly ground pepper at the table. Hence I initially substituted grains of paradise for the white pepper called for. But I felt guilty and added the white pepper anyhow.

For the coarse salt called for I used malha heena, as I've mentioned in the salt thread. No one else seems interested in malha heena. But for some reason I find the thought of a quarter billion year old (give or take a few months) haloarchaea spores in my tagine appealing. And it sure is pretty.

For most tagines I use my Le Cruset. It is larger than my Moroccan unglazed earthenware tagine and I don't have to worry about heat shock. But this recipe seemed well suited to the earthenware, so that is what I used.

From this thread:

http://forums.egullet.org/topic/63502-moroccan-tagine-cooking/page-4

I inferred that cinnamon was not used with dishes that are based on preserved lemon and olives, yet cinnamon is called for here? I would love to know more about the basis of classical Moroccan cooking than what Wolfert or any of the English language texts present.

Anyhow I ate a lot, washed down with freshly baked roundbread.

[patrickamory]

Tonight was Lamb Tagine with Baby Spinich, Lemon, and Olives (pp 364-365). First time I had made it. Wonderful dish, but more effort than I was expecting. I sat down to dinner at 2:00 am. I've prepared enough Moroccan recipes that I should have known by now.

2 AM! I too have been caught short by Moroccan recipes, and Wolfert's in general, that appear to be simpler than they actually are.

On the cinnamon issue, I gather from a post by Wolfert in the thread that you linked that cassia (or Chinese cinnamon) is used in tagines, while Ceylon cinnamon is used in desserts.

(I find cinnamon terminology incredibly confusing. Neither of the types above seem to be the thick, hard, "standard" cinnamon sticks, which come from Indonesia, but rather varieties of the flakier, softer stuff - the Chinese being less soft than the Ceylon. And it seems like the Chinese stuff is technically cassia while the Ceylonese stuff is "true cinnamon". Which leaves what we call cinnamon most regularly, c. burmannii, entirely out of the picture!)

(And then there's Saigon cinnamon, which is another thing again.)

[JoNorvelleWalker]

Tonight was Lamb Tagine with Baby Spinich, Lemon, and Olives (pp 364-365). First time I had made it. Wonderful dish, but more effort than I was expecting. I sat down to dinner at 2:00 am. I've prepared enough Moroccan recipes that I should have known by now.

2 AM! I too have been caught short by Moroccan recipes, and Wolfert's in general, that appear to be simpler than they actually are.

On the cinnamon issue, I gather from a post by Wolfert in the thread that you linked that cassia (or Chinese cinnamon) is used in tagines, while Ceylon cinnamon is used in desserts.

(I find cinnamon terminology incredibly confusing. Neither of the types above seem to be the thick, hard, "standard" cinnamon sticks, which come from Indonesia, but rather varieties of the flakier, softer stuff - the Chinese being less soft than the Ceylon. And it seems like the Chinese stuff is technically cassia while the Ceylonese stuff is "true cinnamon". Which leaves what we call cinnamon most regularly, c. burmannii, entirely out of the picture!)

(And then there's Saigon cinnamon, which is another thing again.)

The Lamb Tagine with Baby Spinich, Lemon, and Olives calls for Ceylon cinnamon, which I believe is what I used. The brand of cinnamon I have is Mediterranean Gourmet, which is not listed as a product on their website. In any event the unground version looks like Ceylon. It is good stuff though, a mild sweet cinnamon.

In the book Wolfert says she uses Cassia in bark form in certain dishes. Otherwise she seems to use Ceylon. Of course it would be wonderful if she would jump in here and correct us.

[JoNorvelleWalker]

I am revisiting Lamb Tagine with Medjul Dates (p387).  This is one of the typical Wolfert recipes that takes six times as long as one would expect.  I've made this recipe a few times and it is wonderful.

 

This time I precooked the lamb twenty hours at 58 deg C with my new Anova, and held the lamb in a 150 deg F oven while making the other preparations.  Instead of adding the minced onion in two batches, as called for, I added all the onion at one shot with the argan oil since the meat was precooked and very tender.

 

I reduced and filtered the sous vide juices to the specifed one cup, but next time I think I would dump the juices down the sink and just add one cup of water.  This was the messiest step of the process.

 

I braised the tagine for a couple hours and then browned with cinnamon and the Medjul dates in a 400 deg F oven as specified.

 

The results were tender and delicious, though it still took about six times as long as I expected.

[FlyingChopstik]

Lamb tagine with prunes and appples ---melt in your mouth tender prunes. The apples came out more crisp than expected.

[FlyingChopstik]

Chicken tagine with apricots

Lamb tagine with prunes, fried almonds, and tagine bread

Edited October 11, 2014 by FlyingChopstik (log)

[FlyingChopstik]

Seafood, spinach and noodle bastilla that i cooked yesterday. I posted about my experience making the bastilla in the bastilla thread.

[FlyingChopstik]

The tfaya (family style couscous) was time consuming but so worth it. I over steamed the couscous and im thinking its because i had to struggle to keep the steam from escaping on the sides of my new couscous steamer from Clay Coyote. I usually use a couscousier but this time i cooked the meat in a Chamba soup pot.

The second dish is what i am cooking now:fish tagine with tomato olive and preserved lemon. I made this before in a cazuela and it was delicious. I am cooking it this time in a clay Moroccan tagra from the northern Morocco. You can order the tagra from tagines.com.

[FlyingChopstik]

Marrakech tangia

I used 3 pounds of bone in beef in my Mexican bean pot to cook this recipe. After seasoning the meat, you just plop it all in the pot with the preserve lemon. I used more garlic, 6 to 7 instead of the 4 listed in the recipe. Then I added the 2 tsp of smen. You dont need to add any water, only the 2 tablespoons of saffron water. Aftee giving it a good stir, into the cold oven it went. Dont forget the wet parchment paper. I turned the oven to 250 F and forgot it about it.

7 hours later, the meat was meltingly tender and produced its own juice. We devoured it and it was REALLY delicious. Like you need to try this! I wouldnt even substitute a pressure cooker. Go get a tangia or bean pot and make this. Its so worth it and you can make veggies on the side like greens and squash and pour the juice from the tangia over them for added flavor.

Edited January 10, 2015 by FlyingChopstik (log)

[FlyingChopstik]

Apple Tarte Tatin

This dish is simple but always a hit at family gatherings. I use a cast iron pan to cook the apples and bake the pastry and then change to another dish when ready to serve. Cast iron heats up quickly and it can cause the apples to burn in the middle where the flame is

So i used a simmermat heat diffuser and the apples cooked with no burned bits whatsoever.

This tatin is so good. Its like ecstacy in your mouth. Creme fraiche accompanies it nicely.

[FlyingChopstik]

Chicken bastilla

This is pretty time consuming but you can definitely prepare the fried almonds, chivken and eggs in advance as Mrs Wolfert stated. I used Feuilles de brik and the bastilla came out wonderful. The flavors were delicious. My friends loved it and couldnt believe that it wasnt made in a restauraunt.

A tip from my friend to achieve the lines of cinnamon: after dusting the top of the bastilla with sugar, cut thin 1/4 inch strips of paper ( about 4 or 5 depending on size of bastilla). Lay thr strips at an angle across the top and dust with cinnamon. Then take the strips of paper and gently lift them to put excess cinnamon back into the bowl. Take strips again and line them along opposite angle ( think to makr diamond shape with lines) and dust once again with cinnsmon. Gently lift paper strips and dump excess cinnamon.... i know this may sounf confusingm i will try to post step by step photos next time.

[SLB]

FlyingChopstik, thanks for posting the pix.  I've never tried a bisteeya, but I think I'm going to take it on later this year.  

 

This is off-topic, but how do you like that Mexican bean pot?  I'm intrigued with it, but wondering whether the narrow mouth makes it hard to clean.

Edited March 9, 2015 by SLB (log)