North Africa · Volume 14, The Tagine and the Preserve
Djaj mqualli
Fez
Illustration
- Time
- Hands on 1 hour 30 · Waiting 1 hour
- Researched
- Researched from 101 sources in the brief
The Fassi benchmark and the dish most often ruined in Britain. Everything this chapter argues is in it: preserved lemon dosed in two forms at two moments, saffron and dried ginger doing separate jobs, a teaspoon of smen carrying a depth nothing else reaches, and body coming from three onions rather than from flour.
As tradition built it
Serves 4 to 6. About 1 hour 30, plus at least 1 hour marinating.
Ingredients
- 1.5 kg chicken, jointed, with the giblets
- 3 medium onions, finely chopped
- a generous pinch saffron threads, warmed, crumbled, steeped in hot water
- 1 tsp ground dried ginger
- 2 tsp turmeric, one for the marinade and one for the sauce
- 2 garlic cloves, crushed
- 1 tsp smen
- ½ preserved lemon, pulp only, for the pot
- 1 preserved lemon, rind only, for the garnish
- 60 g purple or violet olives
- 60 ml mixed olive and vegetable oil
Method
- Mix the chicken with the saffron and its water, the ginger, one teaspoon of turmeric, the garlic, the smen and salt. Marinate at least 1 hour.
- Put the chicken and all its marinade in the pot with the giblets, one chopped onion, and only 60 ml of water. Simmer 10 to 15 minutes.
- When the water has gone and the meat has coloured, add the oil and enough hot water to come two thirds up the bird. Simmer to tender, about an hour in total.
- Lift the chicken out. Add the remaining two onions and the second teaspoon of turmeric to the hot fat and liquor and toss and break them with a spatula until you have a silky paste.
- Stop when the sauce starts separating from the oil. There is no other test.
- Stir in the preserved lemon pulp. Optionally return the chicken and brown it in the residual oil. Garnish with olives and strips of rind.
What a modern chef changes
Browned separately, the lemon dosed as two ingredients, daghmira by Method II
Rungs 2, 3 and 5
Method
- Brown the chicken hard and separately first. Dry pan, hot, in batches, skin down, then deglaze and pour everything back. Rung 2: inside the pot, at or just under 100°C, Maillard chemistry cannot happen at all.
- Split the preserved lemon into two dosed components. Blitz the pulp of half a lemon with a tablespoon of its own brine to a purée and weigh it into the marinade. Mince the rind of a second lemon and scatter it raw at the pass. Rung 5: the purée is the salt-acid backbone and needs an hour; the rind is peel oil and geraniol and needs zero.
- Use daghmira Method II and time it. One onion with the bird for the hour, two in at the end into hot fat, forty minutes. That gives more pectin body than two hours of dilute early cooking, because in the first case you are reducing an emulsion and in the second you are boiling pectin apart. Rung 3.
- Dose the smen on a 0.1 g scale and take the salt down. At 8 to 10 per cent salt, 5 g carries half a gram of salt as well as its free fatty acids.