North Africa · Volume 14, The Tagine and the Preserve
Fish tagine with chermoula
The Atlantic coast
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- Hands on 1 hour · Waiting 2 hours
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
In the north this is cooked in a tagra, a shallow open earthenware dish, not in a coned tagine. The same cuisine picks a different vessel because fish is a different physical problem, and a cone's perimeter irrigation is wrong for something that will fall apart in an hour. The layering order is not decoration: it is an insulation strategy and a cooking-time strategy at once.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 1 hour, plus at least 2 hours marinating.
Ingredients
- 1 kg firm thick fish: meagre, sea bass or sea bream; or whole sardines
- 1 onion sliced thin, or 4 celery ribs
- 3 carrots, in 5 mm sticks
- 3 potatoes, in 6 mm slices
- 3 tomatoes, sliced
- 2 bell peppers, sliced thin
- 1 lemon, sliced, plus olives and whole chillies
- 60 to 120 ml water. That is all
Method
- Make the chermoula. Half marinates the fish for at least 2 hours or overnight; half is layered in.
- Build in strict order. Sliced onion as the base, or celery ribs laid like a raft to keep everything off the hot clay. Then carrots, then seasoned potatoes, then tomatoes, then the reserved chermoula, then the fish with its marinade, then the peppers, then lemon slices, olives and whole chillies on top.
- Add 60 to 120 ml water only. Cover, set on a diffuser over medium-low heat, cook about 1 hour, until the liquid has reduced to sauce.
- Do not stir. Do not lift the lid.
Notes
For the chermoula: 3 cups coriander leaf; 1 cup flat parsley leaf; 6 to 8 garlic cloves; 1 tbsp ground cumin; 1 tbsp sweet paprika; 1 tsp salt; 60 ml extra virgin olive oil.
What a modern chef changes
Chermoula split into three uses, the fish cooked to temperature, the lemon changed
Rungs 4, 1 and 5
Method
- Make chermoula in a mortar, not a blender. A blender emulsifies it into a smoothie and shears the herb cells so hard the chlorophyll oxidises and it goes khaki within the hour.
- Use it three times, at three temperatures. As the marinade, hours ahead, where garlic and cumin penetrate. Layered in, where it cooks and rounds. And a spoonful raw at the pass. Rung 4 applied to a paste: cuminaldehyde survives an hour of gentle cooking, coriander leaf aldehydes do not survive ten minutes.
- Take the fish off by temperature, not by the clock. The hour is the vegetables' time. Cook the vegetable layers 35 minutes with the chermoula, then lay the fish on for the last 15 to 20, checking for 50°C in the thickest part. Rung 1 makes this possible: with a working reflux, the vegetables underneath are steaming rather than boiling and will not overcook while you wait.
- Finish with preserved lemon rind rather than the lemon slices. Rung 5. Raw slices cooked an hour give pith bitterness and citric sharpness; minced preserved rind gives peel oil and lactic roundness.