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Moroccan Zaalouk (Cooked Eggplant and Tomato Salad)

Zaalouk is a classic Moroccan cooked salad of eggplant (aubergine) and tomatoes, gently seasoned with cumin, paprika, garlic, fresh coriander, and a touch of preserved lemon, then cooked down to a soft, almost spreadable consistency. It is served at room temperature as part of the Moroccan mezze spread that precedes most main meals. Despite being called a salad, Zaalouk is fully cooked. The eggplant is first roasted or grilled to develop smokiness, then combined with tomatoes and spices and cooked together until completely collapsed into a silky, intensely flavoured paste. It is served generously with warm bread for scooping and represents the sophisticated simplicity that defines Moroccan cooking at its best.

EasyMorocco

Recipe by Blessing · Africook

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Smoked Vegetables

Vegetables tossed in oil and smoked paprika and cooked low and slow in a barbecue smoker for one to two hours. Like smoked shrimp, this belongs to American barbecue rather than to any African tradition, and no country is named in the source. Which vegetables work is the useful part. Dense, firm vegetables hold up to the long, low process: potatoes, carrots, beets, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, onions, mushrooms, aubergine and winter squash such as butternut. Softer ones collapse before they take on any smoke. The recipe here uses courgette, yellow squash, onion, bell peppers, asparagus and carrots, which is at the softer end of that range and accordingly needs the shorter end of the time. Smoked paprika in the seasoning is doing something worth noticing: it brings smoke flavour independently of the smoker, which means the dish reads smoky even before the wood does its work. That is a useful trick in itself, and it means a version of this can be made in an oven with no smoker at all. Africa's charred vegetable traditions are different things entirely, Moroccan zaalouk, Egyptian baba ganoush, West African roasted pepper bases, where vegetables are blackened directly over flame rather than smoked slowly.

1 hr 45 minEasy

Recipe by Debby · 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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Grilled Vegetable and Barley Salad

Pearl barley cooked and cooled, tossed with grilled courgette, aubergine and peppers in a cumin and lemon dressing, with feta, herbs and pistachios. No country is claimed. **It is finished with pistachios, which the title gives no indication of.** Barley is the interesting part and the source makes a genuine point about it. In Egypt barley is eaten as a breakfast or dessert porridge rather than in salads, and it is one of the oldest cultivated grains in the region, domesticated in the Fertile Crescent and grown around the Nile for thousands of years. Turning it into a grain salad with grilled vegetables and feta is a modern Mediterranean move rather than an inherited one, which is worth being clear about. The technique that matters is cooling the barley completely before dressing it. Warm barley absorbs dressing greedily and unevenly, and it wilts the herbs. Cooled, it takes the dressing without soaking it all up in the first two minutes. Soaking the barley for an hour before cooking shortens the cooking time considerably and helps it cook evenly. Grilling the vegetables rather than roasting them is deliberate: the char is a flavour in its own right and it is the main thing standing up to the barley's earthiness. Its health section has not been carried across.

2 hr 10 minEasyEgypt

Recipe by Nympha · Africook

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Moroccan Zaalouk (Cooked Eggplant and Tomato Salad)

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