Moroccan cooking inspired by the streets of Marrakesh.

The best tagine I have ever had is the one I cooked myself while attending a cooking class in Marrakesh, Morocco. It’s probably also the only proper tagine I have ever had. Raja (the cook), who really did most of the work that day, also led me carefully and demonstrated every step in how to make traditional Moroccan dishes such as salad, Berber bread and chocolate-layered semolina pancakes. I watched and learned. Smelled and ate. It was absolutely my best day in Marrakesh.

The day started at an indoor market in Mellah (one of the neighborhoods inside Medina) where I could pick meat and vegetables for the cooking lesson. The market had everything from meat (even live chickens), vegetables, bread and milk. We got some beef, carrots, zucchini, tomatoes, potatoes, chili and olives for the tagine and some apricots, eggs and dark chocolate for desert.

The salad we made was really simple and fresh. Just finely chopped onion, cucumber, yellow pepper and tomato. Seasoned with a splash of olive oil, salt and freshly chopped mint.

The beef tagine was cooked in traditional ceramic tagine cookware on low heat for about three hours. At the bottom we arranged onions, garlic and chopped fresh cilantro. The cookware was placed on the stove and the heat was set to low. The meat was placed on top and spices (ginger powder, cumin, paprika, salt and black pepper) were added at the edges around the meat. When the meat had been turned once, we arranged carrots, potatoes, zucchini, one whole chili, ½ lemon, olives and parsley on top. Lastly we poured in a mixture of both olive and sunflower oil. Before the tagine “hat” was placed on top, a little water was added. Now and again we scooped up the cooking liquid and poured it over the vegetables and meat. In this way all ingredients got a nice taste of the spices without moving them around.

The Semolina Berber Bread  we made was baked on top of the stove in a skillet. In Morocco, bread is  served with almost any meal during the day and a must when having tagine. Raja’s recipe used only semolina flour but I stumbled upon some breads in the city that seemed to have a mixture of semolina and wheat flour. Unfortunately they were not as nice. Our local deli (a hole in the wall) in Kasbah sold something that looked like a rye version of the bread.

The sweet dessert semolina pancakes were really the thing that won my heart and also something that was new to me. These pancakes should not be mistaken for the more well known pancake, begrhir. Begrhir is a yeast based semolina pancake that is often served for breakfast with honey. These pancakes are baked on only one side and the yeast create decorative holes on the surface. Raja’s dessert pancakes were sweeter and made with baking powder. They create similar decorative holes but are baked on both sides.

Below I have tried to translate Raja’s semolina pancake recipe as best I could. Raja used a typical Moroccan teacup when measuring the ingredients, so her cup measure was slightly less than a standard measuring cup. My recipe is as close as I could come!

Sweet Semolina Pancakes
Serves 2-4 people

One egg
½ cup sugar ( I used sucanut)
½ cup milk (+ more if batter is too thick)
¾ cup semolina
One teaspoon baking powder
¼  sunflower oil (optional)*

Zest from one lemon**
One teaspoon ground cardamom**

I don’t really remember the order Raja mixed the ingredients together but I did it this way: Whisk egg and sugar until well blended before adding the milk. Mix together semolina flour and baking powder. Add the semolina mixture to the batter and whisk well together (make sure there are no lumps). Add the oil, lemon zest and cardamom. Let the batter rest for 15-30 minutes before baking the pancakes.

Heat up a frying pan with some neutral oil (if using nonstick you don’t need any oil in the pan). When the pan is hot lower the heat to medium. Spoon up some batter in the pan with a sauce ladle (You may need to add more milk to the batter if it’s too heavy. It should be fairly easy to pour into a pan). When the pancake has nice decorative holes and starts to get firm on top, flip the pancake over. The other side should now have a nice brown color. Press down the pancake with your spatula so the pancake doesn’t rise. Continue until done. Repeat until batter is finished.

It may take some time to get used to how much batter you need for every pancake. A finished pancake should be about 1/8” thick.

Serve the pancakes with sour cream and seasonal fruit and berries for breakfast or brunch. I loved it with a simple apple & orange fruit salad spiced with mint and chopped pistachio. The pancakes can also be done as Raja’s desert, layered with melted dark chocolate (she added some neutral oil to the chocolate) and topped with fresh mint and fruit of your choice. Serve it cool when the chocolate is firm.

*Raja used some neutral oil in the batter and fried the pancakes in a non-stick frying pan. As I didn’t use a non-stick pan I learned that the pancakes got a little greasy with oil both in the batter and in the pan.  They still tasted great but got firmer and easier to handle with oil only in the pan.
**Raja didn’t flavor her pancakes with cardamom and lemon, instead she used 1-2 teaspoons vanilla sugar. I just didn’t have any at home when re-creating the recipe. Both versions are equally delicious.

If you planing to go to Marrakesh and want to participate in a cooking class, I can warmly recommend Raja’s class. Contact Jean Peres at Riad Dar One for details and booking.

Illustrations by Johanna Kindvall

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ColumnTurns out, making your own cheese is easier than you can imagine.

Before you start reading the rest of this column, maybe I should clarify what kind of foodie I am.

Yes, I like to cook. Yes, I like to throw dinner parties. Yes, I spend a large part of my budget on food. Yes, I pretentiously pronounce any French culinary item with a French accent. But when it comes down to it, in the kitchen, I am incredibly low maintenance.

I rarely follow recipes, I don’t measure and I have never cooked anything that requires a thermometer. I only made clarified butter for the first time last year. If it’s too complicated I won’t touch it, because in my mind, food should be approachable; able to be enjoyed by everyone.

This could be why I’ve never taken an official cooking class. There was that time in Thailand where I learned how to make curry and pad thai in a balmy open air kitchen of Chang Mai, but that’s just what you do in Thailand. Culinary classes on home turf? Never.

Fortunately I have a good friend Sarah who knows what I want better than I do.

“I found this new culinary school. I really want to take a class.”

She proceeded with a long list of very tempting options.

“Ok, Fresh Cheese 101 it is,” I responded, not totally sure what I was getting myself into.

And that’s how I came to find myself in Portland’s Culinary Workshop (PCW) on Friday night with a cooking thermometer in my hand.

PCW opened earlier this year and is the brainchild of two food-loving women, Melinda Casady and Susana Holloway. Tired of working the professional circuit of culinary schools, the women wanted a place that was open, fun and educational. It’s all about getting their students to learn about good food, the kind of philosophy that anyone with a love of good food can get behind.

My visions of an intimidating chef hovering over my shoulder as I shakily held my thermometer in boiling milk soon disappeared, and by the time Susana had put a glass of wine in my hand and a Fresh Cheese 101 print out in front of me, I realized that I felt surprisingly at home. Cooking with fresh ingredients with glass of wine in hand? If I’m perfectly honest, it’s sort of my ideal Friday night.

Susana walked us through our first concoction, lemon cheese, a simple combination of milk and lemon. Had I known cheese was this easy, I would have started making it long ago.

To quickly summarize: heat milk to a certain level, add in an acid (lemon, vinegar, rennet, etc.) to separate the protein from the water, drain in cheesecloth and then salt and flavor. Here I had visions of complex, elaborate cooking methods and really the most difficult part was choosing what herbs you wanted to throw in the farmer’s cheese. It comes as no surprise then that fresh cheese making has taken off in the underworld of foodies.

So we made our way through lemon cheese, farmer’s cheese, yogurt cheese (like cheese for dummies – if you have a fear of cheesemaking, start with this one, you can’t go wrong), queso fresco and even a batch of mozarella, with Susana encouraging us the entire way.

We talked extensively about the necessity of fresh ingredients – PCW’s herb mixture comes straight from Susana’s garden – and where to track down harder to find items, like cheese salt, flakier than sea salt and easily obtained at urbancheesecraft.com. If you’re a self-proclaimed “cheese whore” watch out, this site will suck you in.

I learned that although you could probably spend a month experimenting with whole cow’s milk cheese and variations on the theme, goat’s milk is a totally different endeavor, as the goat’s milk found in most grocery stores is heavily pasteurized and therefore does not do well in the cheese making process. If you want your own chèvre, you better get the milk directly from the source.

At the end of the evening I had a paper shopping bag filled with a multitude of containers carrying enough cheese to last me for an entire week; like gold to a foodie. I was smart and took it all home to my parents when I went and visited, which certainly upped the daughter points.

End result of my first culinary class venture? New cooking obsession, and one that doesn’t entail a whole lot of work and is still going to impress at dinner parties. Just think of your foodie image potential:

“May I interest you in some fresh lemon cheese with oregano?”

Your guests won’t know what to do with themselves.

As for my cooking class fear, in my three hours spent mixing cheeses in a professionally outfitted kitchen I was reminded of one thing: now matter how much measuring I refuse to do, I am in fact a total food addict.

I’ll be back. But this time with my own thermometer.

Editor’s note: This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’s weekly column at EcoSalon, Foodie Underground, discovering what’s new and different in the underground food movement, from supper clubs to mini markets to the culinary avant garde.

Images: Anna Brones

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