North Africa · Volume 14, The Tagine and the Preserve
Tagoula
The High and Middle Atlas
Illustration
- Time
- 1 hour 30
- Researched
- Researched from 101 sources in the brief
Three ingredients. It is here because it is the oldest layer in Morocco and the exact opposite of the Fassi repertoire: no saffron, no sugar, no spice cabinet, no cone. Eaten at Yennayer, the Amazigh New Year, and as post-natal food. Barley in Amazigh symbolism carries endurance and humility where wheat carries celebration, and this is what endurance and humility taste like.
As tradition built it
About 1 hour 30 minutes.
Ingredients
- 250g barley grits, very coarsely milled
- 2 litres water
- 1 tsp salt
To finish
- optional argan oil
- optional honey
- optional walnuts or almonds
Method
- Wash the barley grits well and drain them.
- Put the water, salt and grits in a pan and bring it to the boil over a high heat, then turn it low.
- Simmer about an hour and a half, stirring with a wooden spoon, until the grits are tender.
- Serve on a plate with argan oil and almonds or walnuts, and honey if you like.
Notes
The recipe is Layla Dahamou's, for Morocco World News. TelQuel Arabic, after Al-Hossein Ait Bahsine, uses three times the grits' volume in water, stirs until it is all absorbed, and melts samn with thyme or saffron into a hollow in the middle of the dish. In Souss Massa, Hespress and MAP report, whole barley or maize is boiled nearly two hours before flour goes in, and it is eaten with honey or country buttermilk.
What a modern chef changes
Two liquids, a rest, and the argan protected
Rungs 6, 5 and 4
Method
- Slake the grits cold before they meet heat. Mix them to a slurry with 400 ml of the cold water, then rain that into the remaining 1.6 litres at a simmer. No lumps, and roughly half the stirring. This is the same cold-slake principle every grain paste on the continent arrived at independently.
- Replace a third of the water with lben or a thinned live yoghurt, added in the last 20 minutes. Rung 5. Lben sits at pH 4.25 with diacetyl-producing cultures, and barley with soured dairy is within this region's own grammar rather than imported into it. Add it late: at a rolling simmer for ninety minutes it would split.
- Rest it 10 minutes off the heat, covered. Barley starch continues to hydrate after the pan comes off, and ten minutes takes it from grainy to silky with no further work.
- Never heat the argan. Rung 4 as a rule: culinary argan's entire character is roasted-kernel volatiles, and heating destroys them. Warm the bowl, not the oil.