All recipes

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TridSaffron chicken on pastry sheets

Before pastilla became the showpiece, Fez and Marrakech made trid, a dish so old it is sometimes called the grandmother of rfissa. Sheets of dough are stretched until you can read through them, cooked briefly on an upturned pot, then layered on a platter and soaked with the cooking juices of chicken simmered with onions, lentils, saffron and a whisper of fenugreek. The pastry softens into silky, almost noodle-like folds, the sauce is golden and peppery, and the chicken sits on top in big pieces to be shared by hand. It is served at family lunches, for guests, and to women after childbirth. Chef's tip: oil your hands and the work surface generously when stretching the dough; it is the oil, not flour, that lets it go paper-thin without tearing.

150 min

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RfissaChicken with shredded flatbread and lentils

Ask anyone in Rabat or Salé when they last ate rfissa and the answer is often a birth, a naming day or a big family Friday: it is the dish brought to new mothers, because fenugreek and lentils are believed to restore strength. Torn strips of msemen, the flaky square pancake, are steamed until soft and piled high, then drenched in a broth of chicken, onion, ras el hanout and fenugreek that is warming, earthy and a little bitter-sweet. The chicken crowns the mound and everyone eats from the shared platter. Use homemade or bought msemen; day-old is best. Chef's tip: steam the shredded msemen over the simmering broth before saucing it, so it swells and softens instead of turning claggy.

120 min

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Chicken kdra with almonds

Kdra takes its name from the tall copper pot it was cooked in, and in Fez it is a festive dish for weddings and family gatherings rather than an everyday tagine. The sauce is the point: kilos of onion melted down with smen, saffron, white pepper and cinnamon until it turns pale gold and creamy, with no tomato or paprika at all. Soft chickpeas and almonds simmered until tender go into it, and the whole thing is scooped up with bread. Expect a mellow, perfumed, buttery richness rather than heat. Chef's tip: soak and simmer the blanched almonds with the chicken; they lose their crunch and become creamy like the chickpeas, which is how Fassi cooks like them.

95 min

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Lemon verbena tea (louiza)

After a big dinner or before bed, many Moroccan households swap green mint tea for a pot of louiza, lemon verbena, whose long, narrow leaves give a pale golden infusion that smells of lemon sherbet and has no caffeine. The fresh herb is sold in bunches alongside mint and absinthe at market herb stalls, and dried leaves keep all year. Drink it plain, lightly sweetened, or brewed with a few mint sprigs. It is soothing, clean-tasting and fragrant. Chef's tip: pour boiling water over the leaves and let them steep off the heat for 5 minutes; boiling the leaves in the pot, a common mistake, turns the tea grassy and bitter.

10 min

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Sfenj (Moroccan doughnut rings)

Early in the morning, in medina lanes from Fez to Casablanca, the sfenji pulls handfuls of sticky dough from a bowl, pokes a hole through each with his thumb and drops the rings into a big pan of oil, where they puff into crisp, golden, irregular doughnuts with a chewy, airy inside. Customers carry them away threaded on a strip of palm leaf, to eat hot with mint tea or coffee, plain, dusted with sugar or dipped in honey. The dough is just flour, yeast, salt and water, and deliberately very wet; that is what gives the open, holey crumb. Allow about 1 1/2 hours for it to rise. Where sfenj go wrong is a dough that is too stiff; it should be sticky and slack, or the rings come out bready instead of open and chewy. Chef's tip: keep a bowl of water beside you and wet your hands before every piece, so the sticky dough slides off your fingers instead of clinging to them.

130 min

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Fekkas (twice-baked almond biscuits)

Before Eid and during Ramadan, Moroccan kitchens fill with the scent of fekkas: logs of a soft, eggy dough studded with almonds, raisins, aniseed and sesame are baked, cooled, sliced thin and baked again until dry, golden and very crunchy. They are offered to guests on trays with ghriba and other biscuits and dunked into mint tea or milky coffee, and they keep for weeks in a tin, so they are perfect to make ahead. The flavour is gently sweet, with liquorice notes from the anise and a little lemon. Avoid slicing the logs while they are still hot from the first bake; they crumble. Let them firm up first. Chef's tip: let the baked logs cool completely, ideally overnight, before slicing; warm logs crumble under the knife.

75 min

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Licuado de bananaBanana milk shake

Order a licuado in any Argentine café or bar and you will get a tall glass of fruit blended with milk (con leche) or water (con agua), and banana with milk is the one nearly everyone grows up on. It is breakfast for teenagers in a hurry, a merienda with tostados, and the drink parents in Buenos Aires make when the fruit bowl has spotty bananas. It should be thick, cold and smooth, with a light froth, sweet mainly from ripe fruit. Using under-ripe bananas is the mistake: they taste chalky and need lots of sugar, so wait for brown freckles. Chef's tip: slice and freeze the bananas the night before and you can skip the ice; the shake comes out colder and thicker without being watered down.

5 min

Argentinian Drinks

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Krachel (aniseed and sesame brioche buns)

Moroccan bakeries pile their windows with krachel, round, glossy buns of enriched dough perfumed with aniseed, toasted sesame and orange-flower water, and families bake them at home for breakfast, for guests and for feast days. They are soft and pillowy, lightly sweet, with a distinctive liquorice-like scent from the anise and a nutty crunch of sesame on top. Eat them warm with butter and jam, dipped into milky coffee, or with mint tea in the afternoon. The dough needs two rises, about 1 1/2 hours in all. Don't rush the rise: under-proved krachel bake dense and tight instead of soft and fluffy. Chef's tip: lightly toast the aniseed and sesame in a dry pan before adding them to the dough; it doubles their fragrance.

138 min

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Jben (fresh Moroccan cheese)

On the road into Chefchaouen, women from the Rif villages sit with rounds of jben wrapped in palm leaves, a fresh, soft, lightly salted cheese with a clean, milky tang. Breakfast in the north often means a slab of it drizzled with olive oil, sprinkled with dried thyme or za'atar, with olives, honey and warm bread. Traditionally jben is curdled with animal rennet (sometimes with thistle or fig sap), so check if you buy it; this home version uses vegetarian (microbial) rennet and pasteurised milk, and is drained in the fridge. Hands-on time is about an hour; the curd then needs 1–2 hours to set and 4–6 hours to drain. Keep it chilled and eat it within 4 days. Chef's tip: avoid UHT and ultra-pasteurised milk, which will not set into a firm curd; ordinary pasteurised whole milk works well.

60 min

Moroccan Basics

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Panaché (Moroccan mixed fruit milkshake)

Juice bars from Tangier to Agadir list a 'panaché' on the board, which in Morocco means a thick milkshake blended from whatever mix of fruit is in season, most often banana, apple, avocado and orange, served in a tall glass and sometimes topped with chopped dried fruit and nuts. Avocado is used as a sweet fruit here, and it makes the drink extra creamy. It is a favourite after school, as a quick breakfast or after an afternoon in the medina. Make it just before drinking: the orange juice can make the milk turn slightly grainy and the avocado darkens if it stands, which is the usual mistake. Chef's tip: use a ripe, soft avocado and a banana with brown freckles for natural sweetness, so you need very little sugar.

10 min

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Ras el hanout

Ras el hanout means 'head of the shop', and every spice seller in the Marrakech souk will tell you theirs is the best: a warm, complex mix of a dozen or more spices that they grind to their own formula. This home version balances earthy cumin and coriander with sweet cinnamon, ginger and turmeric, the perfume of cardamom and dried rosebuds, and the heat of black pepper. Rub it on vegetables before roasting, stir a teaspoon into tagines, lentils or couscous broth, or season chickpeas and roast pumpkin with it. Toasting the whole spices first takes 5 minutes and makes a real difference. Chef's tip: make small batches and store the blend in a sealed jar away from light; it is at its best for about 3 months.

15 min

Moroccan Basics

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Smen (salted, herbed butter)

Atlas households once kept jars of smen for months, even years, until the salted butter developed a pungent, almost blue-cheese aroma; a spoonful stirred into couscous, harira or a chicken tagine gives a depth nothing else can. Long ageing at room temperature is risky at home, so this is a safer fridge version: pasteurised unsalted butter is simmered with dried za'atar or oregano, strained, salted and then matured in the fridge for 2–4 weeks, which gives a mellow, nutty, faintly tangy smen rather than the fiercely strong old kind. For the real long-aged flavour, buy smen from a reputable shop. Use it a teaspoon at a time; it is meant as a seasoning, not a cooking fat. The mistake to avoid is leaving any milk solids or water in the butter, as that is what turns it rancid or mouldy rather than pleasantly aged. Chef's tip: strain it through muslin until perfectly clear; any milky bits left in the jar are what turn butter rancid.

30 min

Moroccan Basics

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Alfajor cordobésJam sandwich cakes with sugar glaze

Córdoba's version of the alfajor is the soft one: two tender, slightly spongy honey-scented rounds sandwiched with fruit jam, usually quince or mixed fruit, and coated in a thin sugar glaze that dries to a crackly white shell. They are sold by the dozen in the sierras towns of Villa General Belgrano, La Falda and Capilla del Monte, where tourists buy boxes on the way home from holidays. Expect a gentle crunch, a cakey bite and a tart-sweet centre, best with a cup of coffee or mate. Overworking the dough is where they usually go wrong: knead it like bread and the rounds bake tough and flat, so mix only until it comes together. Quince paste (dulce de membrillo) loosened with water works well if you can't find a soft quince jam. Chef's tip: dry the glazed alfajores for 5 minutes in a barely warm oven; the glaze sets glassy and crackles when you bite.

70 min

Argentinian Baking

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Alfajor santafesinoPastry discs with dulce de leche

Santa Fe's alfajor is a different animal from the soft cornflour kind sold everywhere else: three wafer-thin, crackly discs of yolk-rich pastry, stacked with dulce de leche, then dipped in a cooked sugar glaze that sets hard, white and shiny. Bakeries in Santa Fe city and along the Paraná river ship them all over the country in boxes, and travellers bring them home as the regional present. Bite through and the glaze shatters, the pastry flakes and the dulce de leche holds it all together. Thick pastry is the mistake that ruins the texture; it has to be rolled until you can almost see the worktop through it, or the alfajor turns bready. Some old recipes add a splash of cane spirit to the dough; this version uses only water and is alcohol-free. Use a thick, pastry-chef's dulce de leche (repostero) so it doesn't ooze. Chef's tip: bake the discs in batches and keep the rest of the dough covered; it dries out fast and then cracks when rolled.

120 min

Argentinian Baking

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Moroccan spiced coffee

In many Moroccan homes, coffee is bought ready-mixed from the roaster with a spoonful of 'attria', a warm blend of ground spices such as cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cardamom, black pepper and toasted sesame, that gives it a rounded, gently peppery aroma. It is brewed in a pan or a pot and sipped black and sweet, or with a splash of milk, after lunch, with pastries for guests, or on cold mornings. The spices soften the bitterness and make the whole kitchen smell wonderful. This home version mixes the spices into ordinary ground coffee. Chef's tip: keep the coffee at a bare simmer and never let it boil hard; vigorous boiling, the usual mistake, extracts bitterness from both coffee and spices.

10 min

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Nous-nous (half-half coffee)

Sit down at a café terrace in Casablanca, Rabat or Marrakech and order a 'nous-nous' (from 'nus', half) and you will get a small glass of half espresso, half steamed milk, often layered so the coffee floats in a dark band over the pale milk with a cap of foam. It is the default morning and afternoon coffee for many Moroccans, sipped slowly while watching the street, usually with a sugar lump or two on the saucer. It is smaller and stronger than a latte and milkier than a macchiato. A moka pot works fine at home if you have no espresso machine. Chef's tip: heat the milk only to 60–65 °C, hot to the touch but not scalding; boiled milk loses its sweetness and the foam collapses, a common mistake.

5 min

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Moroccan almond milk (sharbat louz)

At Moroccan weddings and engagement parties, silver trays of tall glasses filled with sharbat louz are passed among the guests: chilled milk blended smooth with blanched almonds, sugar and a perfume of orange-flower water. It is also a favourite summer drink at home and is often offered to break the fast in Ramadan. The taste is creamy, delicate and nutty, a world away from carton almond milk, since it is real dairy milk enriched with almonds. Serve it very cold, on its own or with sweets. A common mistake is skipping the straining, which leaves a gritty drink instead of a smooth, silky one. Chef's tip: blend the almonds with the sugar and a little milk first, into a fine paste, before adding the rest; that way it ends up silky rather than gritty. Not for anyone with a nut allergy.

15 min

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Meskouta (Moroccan orange cake)

Every Moroccan home cook seems to have a meskouta recipe, the light, fluffy sponge that is baked in a ring tin and set out for afternoon tea, unexpected guests or a children's snack. This one is flavoured with fresh orange juice and zest; many families make a yogurt version instead, using the yogurt pot to measure everything, and that variation is in the steps. The crumb is airy and moist, not too sweet, and it pairs perfectly with mint tea or a glass of milk. No mixer is strictly needed, but it helps. Chef's tip: beat the eggs and sugar for a full 5 minutes until pale and tripled in volume; under-whipped eggs, the usual mistake, make a dense, flat meskouta.

55 min