Chicken tagine with preserved lemon

Ingredients

• Chicken, jointed1.4 kg
• Preserved lemon — peel only2
• Green olives150 g
• Onions — thinly sliced2
• Garlic4 clove
• Ground ginger1 tsp
• Turmeric1 tsp
• Saffron1 pinch
• Coriander and parsley6 sprig
• Olive oil60 ml
• Water200 ml
• Salt and pepperto taste

Salt and spices grow more slowly than the rest: doubling a dish does not double the pepper.

Weight converts to ounces and volume to cups. Grams of flour are not turned into cups, because that depends on how tightly it is packed.

Method

1. 1

   Grind the garlic, ginger, turmeric, saffron, chopped herbs, oil, salt and pepper into a paste. Rub it over the chicken and leave it an hour.

   60 min

2. 2

   Spread the onion in an even layer over the base of the tagine or a heavy pan: it keeps the chicken off the bottom and becomes part of the sauce.

   5 min

3. 3

   Set the chicken on top skin up, pour the water down the side, cover and cook over a low flame for forty minutes without lifting the lid.

   40 min

4. 4

   Add the preserved lemon peel in strips and the olives, cover and give it twenty minutes more.

   20 min

5. 5

   Take the lid off and reduce the sauce for five minutes if it is still loose. Check the salt only at the end: the lemon and olives have already provided it.

   5 min

About the dish

Preserved lemon is not a substitutable ingredient. A month in salt strips the peel of bitterness and gives it a dense sour-salt flavour a fresh lemon simply does not have. The flesh is thrown away; only the peel is used.

A tagine works by its cone: steam rises, condenses on the walls and runs back down. That is why so little liquid goes in — barely any leaves. In an ordinary covered pan you will need twice as much.

The spices are not fried in oil here but ground with it into a paste and rubbed over the chicken. The mixture is called chermoula and doubles as the marinade.

Worth knowing

• — Preserved lemons are made at home: cut a cross into each, pack them with salt, press them into a jar and wait a month. Nothing else is needed.
• — Rinse and taste the olives before they go in. Very salty ones want half an hour of soaking, or the sauce becomes impossible.
• — Serve with bread rather than couscous: the sauce is mopped up. In Morocco couscous is its own Friday dish, not a side.

Nutrition

Per serving at the base yield, calculated from the ingredients rather than measured in a lab.

Calories

560 kcal

Protein

44 g

Fat

36 g

Carbs

12 g

More from Morocco

• Harira — A thick soup of lentils, chickpeas and tomato, bound with a flour slurry and finished with lemon.