Recettes

Lamb Chops, Chermoula & Rice

Lamb chops with chermoula and yellow rice is Moroccan, grilled or roasted lamb served with a fresh herb sauce and turmeric-stained rice. Chermoula is the part worth knowing. It is a North African sauce and marinade built on fresh coriander and parsley, garlic, cumin, paprika, lemon and oil, and its name comes from the Arabic chermel, meaning to rub or to marinate. That etymology describes exactly how it is used: rubbed into meat or fish before cooking, and often served again alongside as a sauce. It is most associated with fish, where it is close to standard across Morocco and Algeria, but it works with lamb particularly well, the herbs and lemon cut through fat in a way that a heavier sauce would not. Lamb runs through Moroccan cooking at every level, from long slow tagines to chops straight off a grill, and this is at the fast end of that range. The rice is coloured and lightly perfumed with turmeric rather than saffron, which is the everyday choice, visually similar, entirely different in flavour and cost.

25 minMediumMorocco

Recette de FoodChef · Africook

Zviti

Zviti is a very hot Algerian dish from Bou Saada in M'Sila province, and it is defined as much by how it is served as by what goes into it. A semolina flatbread called rakhsis is crumbled into a tall wooden mortar, the mehrez, along with grilled peppers, tomatoes, garlic and a large quantity of chilli, and everything is crushed together with a wooden pestle. The mortar then goes to the table. Zviti is not portioned onto plates: everyone gathers around the mehrez and eats directly from it, and in some places it is presented on a special table with a hole cut in the middle to hold the pestle upright. It also goes by the name slata mehrez, which translates as the mortar salad. The heat is the point and Algerians are entirely open about the effect. Eating zviti involves sweating and gasping, and the description of it as a fire dish is affectionate rather than a warning. Some restaurants reduce the chilli or work olive oil and butter through it to soften it, which regulars regard as missing the idea. It is eaten as an accompaniment rather than a course, with a glass of lben, the fermented buttermilk, to cool the mouth between mouthfuls.

★★★★★Les mieux notées

45 minMediumAlgeria

Recette de Blessing · 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

Taktouka (Moroccan Pepper and Tomato Salad)

Taktouka is roasted peppers and grated tomato cooked down with onion, garlic, cumin and paprika into a thick warm salad. It is Moroccan, also popular in Algeria, and it is a mezze dish rather than a leaf salad. The name explains the texture. It comes from the Arabic taktak, meaning to grind or pound, and the vegetables end up soft and broken down rather than crisp. That is why the source opens by pre-empting the obvious question, why a salad needs a recipe, and it is a fair point: taktouka requires cooking, and cooking is most of it. It has regional names worth knowing. In eastern Morocco it is called flifla; in Algeria, felfla mechouia. Zaalouk, the aubergine version, is its closest sibling and works the same way. Grating the tomatoes rather than dicing them is the technique the source recommends and it is a good one. Cutting a tomato in half and grating the cut face against a box grater extracts the pulp and leaves the skin behind in your hand, no peeling, no blanching, and a smoother result. This dish is closely related to matbucha, the Moroccan-Jewish version, which is on this site. Matbucha is cooked longer, without onion or cumin, and the two are genuinely distinguished by community and by seasoning rather than being the same recipe under two names.

50 minEasyMorocco

Recette de Blessing · Africook