Lessons in Moroccan cooking: Tagine Kefta
- beachmontabroad
- Jul 26, 2017
- 2 min read
Our homemade tagine kefta, which is made with meatballs, egg and a tomato sauce.
With about 10 days of Moroccan meals under our belts, we were ready to learn how to make some of these delicious foods! Our Fez host, Ghita, was happy to teach us beginners how to make *the most simple* tagine meal.
A tagine is a wide, shallow clay cooking dish with a cone-shaped cover.
A tagine is a wide, shallow, clay cooking dish with a cone-shaped cover. This cover creates a unique shape that keeps in the heat and moisture inside and cooks the food quickly! Tagines are very common dishes in Morocco and can be used to make meals with a variety of ingredients.
On the day of our informal lesson, we made tagine kefta, which is a dish of meatballs and egg in a tomato sauce.
The first order of business was to make a sauce. Ms. Cassidy grated the tomatoes for the base and added them to the onions, garlic and spices simmering in olive oil.
Meanwhile, Ms. Pollock was working on rolling the ground lamb into small meatballs. These meatballs were the perfect bite-size portion! Once these were made, Ghita showed us how to carefully add them (evenly spaced) to the tagine.
We placed the cover on and let it cook for about 10-15 minutes.
A few minutes in, Ghita cracked a few eggs over the meatballs and sauce. We replaced the cover and let the meal cook a little longer. When the eggs were fully cooked, we added the finishing touches of parsley and were ready to bring it to the table! In traditional style, we used bread to help us eat the delicious dish with our hands.
At the end of the meal, Ghita asked us to help us "clean the dish" and despite our full stomaches, we obliged. It was that good! We will definitely be taking this cooking lesson home.
Comments