Marrakech Food Tour
Coming to Marrakech, I had in my mind to do a cooking class, since I've gotten a lot out of the cooking classes I've taken around the world over the years. But then, I came across Marrakech Food Tours online, and thought that in my limited time in Marrakech, it might be more eye-opening to do a food tour and be exposed to new dishes I'd not heard about, and wouldn't think to try.
There is an option between a day and evening tour. In order to maximize my time in the city, I thought a evening tour would be better, because it would be after monuments and stores closed. Besides, the website promised "more freaky" foods at night.
They didn't say why on the website, but our tour guide explained that the midday meal is usually eaten at home, while at night locals come out to walk around the city and have snacks and street food. So some of the stalls open only in the evening.
Our first stop was a restaurant in a row of tangia restaurants. Tangia is a specialty of Marrakech, where lamb is slowly braised in a clay pot nestled next to the furnaces heating the public baths. What an energy efficient way of cooking! It's prepared with cumin and preserved lemon, and I think this might have been my favorite dish out of the whole tour!
We also got to sample steamed sheep head. My group - all Americans - got rather squeamish. But c'mon, you don't get squeamish eating guanciale (pork cheek) right? :) The meat was indeed very tender, but needed a lot of seasoning from the cumin salt.
Next stop was a seller of olives and preserved lemons, where we sampled different types of olives. One of the benefits of the food tour is that we knew when we could take photos or not. Quite understandably, Moroccan people don't like their pictures taken by tourists. At this stall we could take photos since the tour paid, but not at other stalls.
After the olives, we had a lovely flatbread, with layer upon layer of dough and oil, kind of like a roti.
Ours was filled with tomato and onion, but it's also available with other stuffing like cheese. This was delicious!
We proceeded to a stall with spleen sandwiches. It's actually not pure spleen, but rather spleen chopped up with meat for added body and flavor.
It's then stuffed into this spongy bread which was ubiquitous. This was pretty good.
Another sandwich in that round bread was this fresh sardine sandwich. The sardines were kind of mashed at the bottom, and on top was a tomato, onion, cilantro, and olive mixture. Kind of like Mexican salsa, but with olives! I also enjoyed this a lot, but was starting to become very, very full!
Our final stop before dessert was a couscous place. We had a little starter of a warm tomato salad.
And then the main event - vegetable couscous, topped with caramelized onion and raisins. This was absolutely eye-opening! Couscous is not traditionally prepared the way I've always thought one prepares couscous. I thought couscous was made by adding hot water to the dry couscous and letting it sit.
But actually one adds cold water, and then steams the couscous in a two-tiered pot like this. Then more water, then more steaming, over a period of a couple hours! The result is couscous that's as light as air, each grain distinct from the next. It was a bit like the experience of eating cotton candy, where you're eating, but the food is so airy you're not sure if you're really chewing on anything!
Then we finished with orange slices with cinnamon. A couple of the women on my tour were finishing up a two week tour of Morocco, and they said that this was a very, very common dessert and they sometimes got tired of it. I definitely would not have thought to make this combination, but I really enjoyed this bit of fresh fruit.
Finally, we ended with juice and cookies. I got an avocado, date, and almond shake on the advice of the tour guide, and this plate of cookies which I took home. I love all kinds of nuts, and so of course I wanted to enjoy these slowly! My favorite was the crescent, stuffed with almond paste.
I would highly recommend Marrakech Food Tours; it's a wonderful way to be introduced to the city. I loved being able to eat at restaurants or stalls that didn't seem particularly welcoming or tourist-friendly at first, giving me the courage to visit them again. Definitely, these were my favorite places to eat, not the "safe" tourist restaurants that all of the guidebooks point to.
