Algerian Cuisine Cuisine Algerienne by Farid ZADI

Terracotta Tagine Cookware Review and Comparison

Algerian handmade tagine compared to Portuguese assembly line made tagine.

Even with just a few pictures I think it's apparent that handmade tagines look and feel more substantial. The "rustic" appearance certainly lends an element of homey charm to any kitchen. At this point I have a small but growing collection of terracotta cookware and this one is by far the one guests zone in on the most. Not because it's most elegant or stylish, but because it has what certain kinds of foodies associate with the "real" thing. Nevermind that this "real thing" makes little difference to the vast majority of contemporary North African home cooks outside the realm of special occasions and nostalgia.

Both the Algerian and Portuguese tagines are glazed on the inside.

CELEBRATE THE 3rd BlogDay ON AUGUST 31st

I'm also working on my food blog roll. Mostly I'm looking for food blogs from Mediterranean countries with a focus on food and culture. Outside of the Mediterranean I'll be following spice routes and silk roads. I suspect that I'll link to quite a few blogs from Latin America, when I see recipes such as Sopa Seca de Fideos or Migas- the connections to Andalusia and Hispano-Muslim cooking are obvious.

Edited to add my five blog picks for blog day in no particular order. I chose home cooks who seem to avoid the cliches that would be professional or professional food writers often fall into.

1. TriniGourmet
(Trinidad)
2. Indonesia Eats
(From Indonesia now in Canada)
3. Zlamushka's Spicy Kitchen
(Sweden)
4 this little mainyacha is learning to cook
(From Nepal now in NYC)
5. Malaysian Delicacies 

BlogDay2007

Review of North African Recipes on Food Network's Website

I probably should have started these reviews a long time ago. After looking at many of the recipes available online I can see how certain stereotypes about North African cuisine have developed and why I am sometimes asked what I consider to be odd "cultural anthropology" kind of questions.

I'm a bit surprised to find that quite a few recipes spice dishes much more aggressively than I do. Certainly variations in spicing and quantities occur between Algerian/North African cooks. So, I'm not using that as a gauge for "authenticity" or "good taste". Taste is subjective and changes like fashion. I tend to prefer my dishes to be more subtly spiced or just "perfumed" with spices.

Chicken Tagine with Olives and Preserved Lemons recipe courtesy Boujemaa Mars, La Mamounia, Marrakech.

Ingredients:

Rock salt
1 whole large chicken, cut into 8 pieces
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar
5 tablespoons olive oil
1 large bunch fresh cilantro, chopped
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon real saffron
Pinch fine salt
1/2 pound onions, chopped
5 cloves garlic, chopped
1 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon paprika
1 teaspoon turmeric
1/4 pound gizzards, optional
1/4 pound chicken liver, optional
1/4 cup mixed olives, pitted
3 small preserved lemons

This is certainly a real North African recipe. But I think it's really more for people who are already familiar with North African cooking, not a recipe for the uninitiated.  The addition of liver and gizzards is quite nice, but for an inexperienced cook the look of the dish could turn out rather unappealing.

One way to make the dish more visually cleaner would be to saute the liver and gizzards separately in a dersa spice paste, sprinkle with chopped herbs and use it for a garnish around the chicken .

The chef's recipe includes 3 small preserved lemons, it could be that the chef meant a type of very small lemon we have in North Africa, they are about the size of limes which would be the equivalent of an average to large American supermarket lemon .

If he meant lemons that are small American supermarket size then I would add a note for a non-North African audience to a recipe like this, "This recipe is definitely for lovers of preserved lemon. In North Africa there are cooks who add several preserved lemons to tagines to cater to locals who really love the briny lemony flavor. But this can be inaccessibly salty for those who aren't accustomed to the flavor. Since North African cooks prepare dishes to suit their personal tastes, reduce the amount of preserved lemons to suit yours".

Updating the traditional versus disrupting the spirit of the dish altogether

In my Emile Henry tagine recipe critique Cook worm  commented, "Thank you for this. I've come across many tagine recipes both in and outside of North African cookbooks, and some of the differences seem surprising. I'm wondering what you think is acceptable as far as expanding and conscientiously updating the traditional, versus disrupting the spirit of the dish altogether."

My critique of the recipe for chicken with preserved lemons and olives on the Emile Henry website was based on whether or not it's a good recipe. Normally I don't critique recipes, but these types of questions come up often enough for me consider posting reviews more often.

I found the Emile Henry recipe while googling for something when I came upon Kim Vallee's blog. I suspect that quite a few people have tried Emile Henry's recipe with disappointing results, perhaps they even suspected that it would be bad but trusted the company website enough to try it.

Their recipe is just plain awful and totally careless. There are so many chicken and preserved lemon recipes available online and in cookbooks for the life of me I cannot understand why they posted a terrible one on their website. Furthermore it's easy enough for such a big company to find an experienced recipe writer who understands North African tagine cooking.

My criticism of this particular recipe has nothing to do with whether or not it's "authentic" or "traditional". "Authentic" or "traditional" doesn't always mean delicious or even tasty.

Lamb and Fig Tagine Cooked in a Clay Tagine- It's Fig Season!

This is another intermediate tagine recipe, which means I am assuming basic knowledge of clay tagine cooking for the cook who wants to try this. You can make this tagine, as with all my clay tagine recipes, in a casserole or dutch oven. Many of my recipes can also be prepared in a pressure cooker or slow cooker. Contemporary North Africans cooks mix old and new cooking techniques.

I used thick lamb loin chops- but duck, chicken, veal or rabbit are also delicious with figs. However, the cooking methods must be modified a bit for different proteins.

I sprinkled the lamb chops with spices and a 1/4 teaspoons of salt, placed them in my clay tagine with 4 tablespoons of olive oil and turned the heat on a low setting to seize the meat, not brown it. I added one cup of water and let it braise for 2 hours, adding more water as needed. Remember the rate of moisture loss can vary considerably depending on the type of clay tagine you use.

When the meat is almost done cooking let the braising liquid reduce to a glaze of olive oil and rendered lamb fat. At this point the lamb chops will start browning. Remove the lamb pieces from the tagine when they are lightly browned on both sides.

Cut the figs in half or quarters depending on how large they are. Add them to the tagine and cook until they start to caramelize. If you're not experienced with cooking in clay and controlling heat, I suggest browning the figs in a non stick skillet. The sugars from the figs will caramelize and it's just a short step to burning if the tagine vessel gets too hot. Remember clay retains heat longer than say a non-stick skillet, once a clay vessel is hot moving it off the fire won't work as a quick way to reduce temperatures to impede burning.

Chicken Tagine with preserved lemon and olives recipe from the Emile Henry website

Occasionally I am asked to review recipes. A reader asked me about this recipe posted on Emily Henry's website .

1 chicken 1.5 kg / 3.3 lb, cut into pieces
2 preserved lemons
100 g / 1.5 cup green olives
3 onions, chopped
1 teaspoon ginger (fresh or dried)
1 teaspoon saffron
1 bunch flat parsley
1 teaspoon coriander / cilandro [sic], chopped
Juice of 2 lemons
5 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon butter
Salt, pepper

This is their list of ingredients. Throw the recipe out, it's no good. It will taste awful. The amount of olives, lemon, lemon juice,  and onions are excessive.  The dish will be much too salty and acidic. My mouth puckers just reading the recipe. The directions don't mention discarding the pulp and rinsing the rind. Imagine the sodium content of this dish!  The 1 teaspoon of chopped cilantro is amusing.

My Mediterranean Creole™ Mechoui Master™ and CamelVan™

It's Not a Motorcycle, Baby. It's a Mobile Barbecue Pit

My crew and I have been coming up with various designs for my Mechoui Master™. We were thinking of a larger kitchen on wheels with a Mechoui Master™ bbq rigged to a trailer and a motorcycle with a bbq pit for mobile cooking events, demonstrations, book signings and so on.

I'm not wild about the color of the model in the link and I want a more Italian racing style one than a chopper. I'm thinking of something like this. And, no my helmet won't be a couscoussière or a tagine vessel and I don't have a tattoo of a camel.

Ramadan Recipes Around the World

In anticipation of one of my upcoming cookery books about spice trade routes and silk roads for this year's Ramadan I'm traveling the world (virtually) in search of recipes. My wife and I have already begun preliminary research for our books and we have a pantry stocked with the necessary spices.

I think I'll start with Indian Ocean trade and the South Indian State of Kerala. Grains, Greens and Grated Coconuts: Recipes and Remembrances of a Vegetarian Legacy by my friend Ammini Ramachandran (www.peppertrail.com), an excellent source of historical information and delicious recipes. Ammini's cookbook is one of the first to focus on the Hindu traditions of Kerala for a Western audience. She tells us though that Kerala cuisine is informed by a confluence of peoples including Muslims and Christians. Indian Ocean trade, as with all trade, is not just about ingredients and goods- it is also about the migration of peoples and dynamic exchanges of ideas.

Ammini sent me a copy of Malabar Muslim Cookery by Ummi Abdula (book link) - I can see quite a few similarities with North African cooking in terms of basic techniques. Obviously we don't use tropical ingredients such as coconuts or mangoes in Algerian cookery, but after a quick glance of the recipes in the book I estimate that I have about 95% of the spices and herbs, the remaining 5% are really easy to find in Los Angeles.

Then I'll go "island hopping" over to Southern Thailand inspired by a recent meal at Jitlada in Hollywood to make a Mussaman beef curry then go just a little further south into Malaysia for a flaky roti canai.

I'll sprinkle in a little food history and make cultural connections on our Ramadan culinary adventure. For example Malaysian roti canai, Indian paratha and Algerian meloui are all cousins and share very similar preparation methods. Of course there are fine distinctions between them, what I hope to do is offer something balanced between looking at things too broadly from miles away and standing one inch in front of the blackboard. 

I doubt that I'll have enough time to cover the entire realm of Islamic cooking, but there is always next Ramadan... Oh, and what I mean by Islamic cuisine is something along the lines of what Rachel Laudan wrote in "The Mexican Kitchen's Islamic Connection":

Today Mexican families still sit down to dinners that reveal their Islamic origins. They begin with a “watery” soup (sopa aguada), such as a broth with tiny albondigas. Then comes a “dry soup” (sopa seca), such as “Spanish rice,” which is none other than the pilau of the Islamic world. The main course is a piece of chicken or meat accompanied by a green sauce, a nut sauce (nogada), an almond sauce (almendrada) or a spicy reddish-brown sauce (mole). After the meal comes a quince paste, with a little fresh cheese. Accompanying the meal is a refreshing drink—an agua fresca, as the Islamic sharbat is called in Mexico—a colorful, lightly sweetened homemade beverage of lime, melon or milky ground rice with almonds and cinnamon.

 

 

Food in Film- Hosted by The Well-Seasoned Cook

Well-Seasoned Cook

So think about the films that you’ve enjoyed, perhaps even watched countless times. The movies don’t have to be about food or drink per se such as Babette’s Feast or  Like Water for Chocolate (although they can be), but also think about flicks that lick at those food moments revealed with startling clarity, vague adumbration, or the light or dark reflections of the mood at hand.

I chose Indigenes (also known as Days of Glory), which was nominated for an Oscar in the "Best Foreign Film" category. This was the fourth Academy Award nomination for Algeria*.  Previous nominations were:

DUST OF LIFE (1995) -- Nominee, Foreign Language Film
LE BAL (1983) -- Nominee, Foreign Language Film
Z (1969) -- Winner, Foreign Language Film

Five of the films North African actors recieved best actor awards at Cannes.

Film synopsis from Oscar.com

For the North African troops fighting for France during the Second World War, their experience in uniform becomes a painful lesson in just how little regard their colonial rulers have for their humanity. As one company of soldiers pushes north through Europe, its members continue to find themselves denied the basic rights taken for granted by their French counterparts.

There is a scene in the movie where the Maghrebi and African soldiers are denied tomatoes at meal time because they are "luxuries reserved for whites only". Algerian Corporal Abdelkader takes a basket of tomatoes and crushes them with his boots defiantly stating that if all the soldiers don't get tomatoes, no one will.

An Algerian tomato puree recipe seems fitting, but a little too basic. So I'll present  Algerian peppers stuffed with goat cheese garnished with tomatoes.  I used jalapenos for this version, but piquillos and poblanos are fine for this dish.

Monthly Mingle- Liquid Dreams hosted by What's For Lunch Honey?

What's For Lunch Honey?

My liquid dream (pardon me) is Algerian Coffee with Almond Cherbet (ice). This is an incredibly easy and delicious iced coffee. I used Natural Almond Syrup (Sciroppo Orzata) from Sicily since there are no Algerian brands available in the States. There are a few other Italian brands available in the states, check your local Italian deli or specialty food store.

The recipes is best given in ratios. 1 part almond syrup to 1 part water frozen. Scrape or "shave" ice with a spoon, it's quite easy to do as it doesn't freeze as hard as a plain water does.

Brew some strong coffee, espresso is nice, but you can adjust to suit your taste and tolerance for caffeine. Chill the coffee and pour on top of the shaved ice into small cups. Use approzimately equal parts shaved almond ice to coffee. The drink is sweet, so add more coffee if desired. I used Algerian mint tea cups.