Moroccan Recipes

From Ghoriba Bahla to Moroccan Mint Tea, How to Cook Couscous to Sfenj (Moroccan Doughnuts). Everything Moroccan cooks, as it is cooked at home.

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Sfenj (Moroccan Doughnuts)

Sfenj are Moroccan doughnuts made from a very wet yeasted dough, shaped into rings by hand and deep-fried. They are crisp outside, chewy inside, and sold hot from street stalls across the country. The dough is the whole difficulty and the whole point. It is deliberately too sticky to knead or roll, closer to a thick batter than a bread dough, and that high hydration is what produces the light, chewy, open interior. Working it with dry hands is impossible, which is why the method has you keep a bowl of water beside you and wet your hands before touching it. Adding flour to make it manageable would be the obvious mistake and would give you a dense, ordinary doughnut. The street version is worth picturing. Vendors lift the finished sfenj from the oil with skewers and thread them onto a ribbon of palm leaf so customers can carry several at once. Some ask for them flattened and returned to the oil for a second fry, which makes them crisper still. Timing matters more than most fried things. Sfenj are eaten hot; cold, they go tough and lose the contrast entirely. The source's stated oil temperature is worth following, it is more specific than most.

4 hr 30 minMediumMorocco

Recipe by Nympha · Africook

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Msemen (Moroccan Layered Flatbread)

Msemen is a Moroccan flatbread made by spreading dough paper-thin, dotting it with butter and semolina, and folding it into a square, twice, before frying. The folding is what creates the layers, and the layers are the entire dish. The name is a description of the method. Msemen means oiled in Arabic, and the recipe uses a great deal of oil: on the work surface, on the hands, in the dough, dotted through the folds. That is not excess, it is technique. Oiled hands slide over the dough rather than tearing it, which is how you get it thin enough to see the surface through. The double fold is the structural step. Spread thin, dot with butter and semolina, fold into thirds, dot again, fold into thirds the other way. Each fold multiplies the layers, and the semolina between them keeps them from fusing, which is exactly the job flour does in a laminated puff pastry, arrived at from a completely different direction. Two things separate msemen from its Moroccan neighbours. Beghrir is the yeasted thousand-hole pancake, a different thing entirely. Rghaif is a broader family name that msemen belongs to. Cooking them in the order they were folded matters. The first ones have rested longest and spread most easily.

1 hr 30 minMediumMorocco

Recipe by Blessing · Africook

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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

Recipe by Blessing · Africook

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Mescouta (Moroccan Yoghurt Cake)

Meskouta is the everyday Moroccan cake, a plain, moist yoghurt cake scented with lemon, made constantly at home and served with mint tea. Its most charming feature is how it is measured. Many Moroccan households still bake by volume using whatever container is to hand, and meskouta is built around the empty yoghurt pot: one pot of yoghurt, then that same pot used to measure the oil, sugar and flour. No scales, no conversion, nothing to look up. It is why the cake is so often the first thing children are taught to bake, and why the recipe travels between families without ever being written down properly. The result is a simple, tender cake with a fine crumb, more like a pound cake than anything frosted. Lemon zest is standard, though lime works and is a common substitution. It is served plain, or with jam alongside to spread on the slice, which is the usual way at teatime. It is not a celebration cake and does not pretend to be, it is what is in the kitchen when someone calls round.

45 minEasyMorocco

Recipe by Nympha · Africook

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