Recettes

Maakouda (Moroccan Potato Cakes)

Maakouda is a Moroccan potato cake, mashed potato bound with egg and herbs, floured and deep fried until the outside crisps and the inside stays soft. It is street food, sold cheap and eaten either on its own or stuffed into a small baguette. Meknes is where it is most associated, and the city is described as the wine capital of North Africa. Maakouda is sold from stalls there and across the country, and it appears in Algeria and Tunisia too under the same set of spellings: maaqouda, maqouda, makouda. The comparison the source draws is with falafel, and it holds up: a cheap fried snack, sold from a stall, eaten in bread. It has simply never travelled the way falafel has. Ras el hanout is what marks it as Moroccan rather than a generic potato cake. The blend is optional in this recipe and the source strongly recommends it, and turmeric gives the colour. It is also a practical way to use up leftover mashed or baked potato, which is much of how it is made at home. Deep frying is traditional; the oven and the air fryer both work and are given as alternatives.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

35 minEasyMorocco · Moroccan

Recette de Blessing · Africook

Mhadjeb

Mhadjeb, also written mhajeb, mahjouba or m'hadjeb depending on the region and the transliteration, is an Algerian stuffed flatbread built from semolina dough stretched until it is almost translucent, folded around a cooked filling of onion, tomato and pepper, then griddled flat. It belongs to street food and to Ramadan. Through the fasting month it appears on stalls across Algerian towns in the hour before sunset, stacked and sold by the piece, and it is one of the dishes most associated with the table at iftar. Outside Ramadan it is everyday food, made in quantity at home and eaten warm. The name carries a story that Algerians tell about its origin. Mahjouba was said to be a woman who did not leave her house, and in Algerian usage the word carries both meanings at once, the secluded woman and the honourable one. She made these breads and sent them out with her children to sell in the market. The dish took her name and kept it. What makes it technically distinctive is the stretching. The dough is worked with oil rather than flour, then pulled out by hand on an oiled surface until it is thin enough to read through, which is what gives the finished bread its layered, papery texture against a soft, well-cooked filling.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

MediumAlgeria

Recette de Nympha · Africook

Tunisian Fricassé

A fricassé is a small oval roll of enriched dough, deep-fried and then split and packed with tuna, potato, olives, egg and harissa. It is Tunisian street food, and it is one of the country's most recognisable things to eat. The word does not mean what it means elsewhere. In French, a fricassée is a braise of meat in a white sauce; in Tunisia and its diaspora it means this sandwich and nothing else. That divergence is complete enough that searching the French term will not find you the Tunisian food. The filling is the point and it is fixed by convention rather than by recipe: tuna in olive oil, cooked potato, black olives, egg and harissa, with slata méchouia, the grilled pepper and tomato salad, very often alongside. Capers and preserved lemon appear in some versions. What matters is that the bread is fried rather than baked, which gives a rich, slightly greasy roll that stands up to a wet filling. **A significant gap in the source.** Its ingredient list contains only the dough, yeast, water, flour, egg, oil, salt. Not one of the filling ingredients it spends its article describing appears in it. The filling below has been reconstructed from that description and flagged. **It contains eggs and fish.**

1 hr 55 minMediumTunisia

Recette de Blessing · Africook

Hawawshi (Egyptian Stuffed Bread)

Hawawshi is pita stuffed with heavily spiced minced beef and baked until the meat cooks through and the bread crisps. It is Egyptian street food, sold across Cairo and Alexandria, where it is also known as baladi. The story attached to it is unusually specific for a street food. It is credited to a butcher named Ahmed Al-Hawash, working in Cairo's Tawfeek Souq in the early 1970s, with the dish taking his name. The source hedges this as legend and that is the right level of confidence, it is widely repeated, plausible given how recent it is, and not documented in a way that settles it. What makes it work is the raw filling. The meat goes into the bread uncooked, and the fat renders as it bakes, soaking into the pita from the inside while the outside crisps in the oven. Cooking the meat first would lose that entirely and give you a dry sandwich. The wet-vegetable problem is the one thing to get right, and the source handles it well: the onion, pepper, jalapeño and parsley are processed and then drained in a sieve before they go near the meat. Skipping that step floods the bread. Related dishes exist across the region, Lebanese arayes is the same idea with different spicing.

45 minEasyEgypt

Recette de Nympha · Africook