Food Recap: Morocco

Here’s a flashback from my trip to Morocco a month ago. Seeing as it was a food trip, I wanted to make sure I posted some pictures of the food I ate there. I had hoped to do this sooner, but it took awhile for me to feel ready to see Moroccan food again. I wish I had been able to take more pictures, but this was all I can manage at the time. If you haven’t read about my trip to Morocco, you can check out here.

My Favorites: Camel Burger, Mint Tea, and Orange Slices with Cinnamon

We got to try a camel burger in Meknes on day two of the tour. This was before I’d gotten sick and I was starving that day so this burger tasted amazing to me. They served them to us with Moroccan mint tea. Mint tea is a specialty of Morocco – they make green tea in a pot, then add mint leaves to the glasses and pour the hot tea in.

There’s a whole ritual for making and pouring tea in Morocco and we got to see this being done in the village where we stayed in the mountains. The amount of sugar that they add to the tea is incredible; they even put less in for us that what they normally would and it was still a lot. It’s no wonder why diabetes is also a problem in Morocco, and perhaps all that sugar was why I liked it so much.

Despite sugar being common in the Moroccan diet, dessert is not really dessert as I know it. Sometimes there’s ice cream, but most of the time dessert is simply fresh fruit. Although it sounds simple, I really loved the round orange slices that they sprinkled with cinnamon. I never thought to do this before, but it does turn them into something that is just a little special.

Moroccan Tagine

The tagine is probably the most well known of Moroccan dishes. It’s cooked in a special clay pot that is also called a tagine and it comes in various combinations of meat and vegetables. While we were staying in a village in the mountains we got to see a cooking demonstration of how they’re made.

Couscous

Couscous has been a favorite of mine even before I went to Morocco. We got a cooking demonstration at the guest house we stayed in during our night in Moulay Idriss, where the woman showed us how she prepares to couscous, meat, and vegetables for the meal.

Pastilla

Another Moroccan specialty, pastilla is a dish that is both savory and sweet at the same time. I’m not sure this kind of combination really appeals to me, but it is nonetheless a popular Moroccan meal. In Fes, we got to learn how pastilla is made and then we each got to assemble our own personal pastilla which we ate for dinner.

Moroccan Bread

We were served fresh Moroccan bread rounds at nearly every meal. I am such a huge fan of freshly baked bread, but I had a bit of a love-hate relationship with these as it became the only food I could manage to eat there for awhile. We got to learn how to make this bread at the place we stayed in the mountains. The women make it right there in a wood-fired oven in one of the rooms of the house.

Breakfast Breads

We ate a lot of bread for breakfast and luckily there were several variations to try. Some were small, thick rounds, almost like English muffins, some were large and thin, like a fried tortilla, and others were thick and squishy, like a giant crumpet. We always had various kinds of sauces and spreads to eat with them, like marmalade, lemon curd, or honey.

Berber “Pizza”

This one had caught my interest from the moment I saw it in the itinerary – I was really curious to see what this “pizza” would really be like. I only tried a taste of it, but the similarities to actual pizza are few. It does vaguely resemble the look of a pizza as it’s shaped in a large round circle, but the taste is very different. It is more like a actual pie of sorts, stuffed with meats and vegetables. We got to see a cooking demonstration of this dish at our lodging in the desert.

Food Tasting in Marrakech

We got to do a bit of food tasting in Marrakech in the medina, but I only managed to get a couple photos. But yes, I did try the snail soup and I have the picture to prove it!