Hey Everybody. Welcome back to our kitchen. This is such an exciting day for me
because I'm making one of my favorite dishes. There's just nothing quite like this
incredible blend of North African spices. Before we get started, let me just stress
right away, you do not need a tagine to make this. You can use two small pots,
you use saute pans, you can use a roasting pan – when I'm doing this for a crowd,
I don't use the tagine because I don't have a tagine that's big enough, so I
use a giant wok. So, the first thing that I've done is I've preheated this tagine. Now,
this is a nice one from Le Creuset, and it has an iron bottom. First thing that I
want to do is season my chicken with some salt. And I'm going to add a little
bit of oil.
And I'm going to brown my chicken.
Browning actually means to make your food brown.
It does not say beiging. Beijing is the capital of China.
Remember, brown is the color of flavor.
I'm going to tuck to my sausages in.
Might as well get our couscous ready. I'm
going to add some salt to my couscous. I'm adding this to a cup and a half of
boiling water, and I'm just going to stir it and throw the lid back on. All right,
so, our chicken is browned beautifully and we have nice little crusty bits at
the bottom, and I'm going to put the onions in there. I want to time
everything with when the chicken is going to be finished cooking. The nice thing
about the tagine, the shape, is while I'm cooking all the vegetables and things, I
can just push the chicken and the sausage to the edges of the pan, and do
everything in the middle. So, I've got some minced garlic, and we'll let those sweat.
I've got some beautiful julienned red pepper.
Got some whole cumin seeds.
Ground coriander right on top of that
so that I'm toasting my herbs and spices in that
fat. I've got that beautiful Pimenton there,
smoky paprika, which I love
with this dish. I'm going to take a little bit of the stock and I'm just
going to moisten our saffron. As you can see, it's now turned yellow,
the aroma has started to come out, so it's going to be easier to diffuse
all of that saffron flavor into the dish.
Let's add our artichoke hearts. Doesn't
matter if there's little water in there, right?
And this is a braise. Fresh squeezed
orange juice. Chicken stock.
While that comes to a boil, we have another
important ingredient to add that's worth talking about.
These are preserved lemons.
I prefer not to have a seed, so when I slice it, I'm just
going to knock a couple of those seeds off. I love buying North African produce
it's some of the finest in the world.
Oh – I forgot my cinnamon stick. Put that in
there. I'm going to sprinkle my chickpeas right on top.
This is only going to cook
about 45 minutes or an hour. Put a lid on this, and let it simmer away.
I'm just going to stare it for an hour.
So, here's what our tagine has become. Let's get rid
of our cinnamon stick that has taken care of its job. Put some couscous while
it's still warm in the bowl. Let's give everybody chicken leg.
Tuck down the sausage. Let's get sauce and chickpeas in there. Let's get an artichoke.
Some people throw the olives and the fruit
and the nuts into the tagine.
I like the contrast.
Some people do whole nuts.
I just think that the color of the pistachio when it's put on
at the last minute, releases all that aroma. Parsley.
And the last thing I do, and here's that beautiful Tunisian
olive oil, just a little bit of that.
I'm not sure that dinner is going to get any better. Those big
flavors, the saffron, have all kind of softened and intermingled with each
other. But the defining note throughout the whole thing, is that preserved lemon.
If you like things a little spicy,
you can stir some harissa into the
couscous, or maybe let people stir some in themselves. If you say you love food,
if you say you love to cook, there are certain dishes within each culinary
canon in all the cultures around the world that you should know how to do.
The idea here today,
is to teach you a typical Moroccan dish,
probably the most famous.
So, now you know how to make tagine.