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On our first night in Immessouane, we noticed Nawal cooking up a delicious tajine – the staple Moroccan dish – in the hostel’s communal kitchen. On our second night, we asked if we could record her as she cooked. We thought we’d post the result here in case anyone wanted to try out the recipe.

You can download the audio file to listen to it while you’re cooking, or just play it here:

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Moroccan tajines are cooked in tajine dishes, but we reckon a thick-bottomed pan with a lid would probably work OK. This tajine is made of eel, caught by an artisanal fisherman in a small fishing village on Morocco’s Atlantic coast. If you don’t eat fish (or only eat sustainably fished seafood and don’t have access to artisanal, line-caught eel on your high street…), you could also use vegetables, chicken or meat. While this dish contains a lot of fish, you don’t need a lot of meat in chicken / mutton tajines; the meat is there to give flavour to the rest of the dish.

The recipe

Disclaimer: Not only am I a terrible cook, but I also had to edit the audio file down from 40 to ten minutes, so it may have lost something in the process. If the recipe fails, please blame my editing skills and memory rather than Nawal’s cooking; the original tajine was truly delicious! We have since replicated this recipe and it tastes good to us (but then we’re cyclists, so everything does…).

For the sauce:
1/2kg of fresh tomatoes, grated apart from their skins
1/2 large bunch fresh coriander, finely chopped
3 large pinches of a mixture of a paprika, cumin and black pepper (note: this mixture is pre-mixed in Morocco and I’m not too sure of the ratios used…)
2 cloves garlic
1/2 lemon
A good glug of oil
Salt to taste

For the tajine:
1 kg eel, chopped into large chunks
1/2 large bunch fresh coriander, finely chopped
3 large pinches of a mixture of a paprika, cumin and black pepper
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
2 green peppers, in round slices
3 slices of lemon
2 slices of tomato
1/2 a small cup of water
Salt to taste
Bread

First, chop the coriander and garlic. Divide into two. Rub one half into the eel, along with three large pinches of a paprika, cumin and black pepper mix and a pinch of salt. Put to one side for fifteen minutes.

Next, to make the tajine base or sauce, grate (or squeeze) half a kilo of fresh tomatoes into a bowl, throwing away the skins. Into this sauce, add the other half of the chopped coriander and garlic. Squeeze in half a lemon. Add three large pinches of a paprika, cumin and black pepper mixture. Add salt to taste.

Place this sauce into the base of the tajine dish / pan and then put the eel on top, gently pushing it into the sauce. Next, chop two green peppers into round slices and place the slices on top of the eel. Put two slices of tomato and three lemon slices on top of the green pepper, and add final seasoning to taste. Pour half a small cup of water into the middle of the tajine.

Put the tajine / pan on a hob at a very low heat (Morroccans tend to use a metal plate covering the gas hobs to spread the heat evenly and avoid burning the sauce). While the audio says leave it for half an hour, ours was actually cooked for two hours.

If you want the proper Moroccan experience, serve it communally in the pan it was cooked in, and use hunks of bread to scoop the tajine and soak up the sauce.

Bon apetite!