Moroccan Spinach Salad (and Fez Cooking Class)

When I travel I love taking cooking classes: besides broadening my culinary picture of the world I enjoy connecting with my colleagues in other geographies. I attended a cooking class in Marrakesh four years ago to learn the basics of Moroccan cooking, key ingredients and techniques. The biggest revelation of the class was the amount of labor that goes into cooking couscous. Yes, cooking couscous, an ingredient considered instant in the West. I don’t know what shocked me more - the fact that couscous takes one and a half hours to prepare or the innocent ignorance of people who choose to believe that it does not require cooking at all. In our globalized kitchens we easily forget to credit the people who originated a certain food, and so we miss an opportunity to learn from them.

Moroccan cooks prepare couscous in a couscoussier, a steaming basket placed over a pot of fragrant stock with herbs and vegetables. But it is not steaming per se that does the trick: after a half an hour of steaming you transfer the couscous into gsaa, a large shallow clay dish also used as a working surface to knead Moroccan bread, khobz. Then you pour water over the couscous and start to caress the couscous gently allowing the granules to absorb all the water. After that you transfer the couscous back to the steaming basket for a half an hour longer and repeat the trick 2 more times. One and a half hours later you can proudly serve perfect and ever-so-fluffy couscous with the vegetables from the stock and anything else you prepared. This is Moroccan home cooking for you.

On my second visit to Morocco this February I wanted to know more and took a cooking class in Fez. Our host Zeynep (how we called her in a Turkish manner) was a soft-spoken woman with a wealth of knowledge about Moroccan cooking she learned from her grandmother.

The day started with a visit to a local market in the medina, traditional quoter of every Moroccan city. Siham, our translator, explained that most people in the medina shop daily and cook according to the availability of the goods at the market. For instance, Zeynep chose lovely artichokes and long green beans to accompany lamb in the tajine, a centerpiece of our lunch to be.

As Zeynep was picking vegetables for the salads, I asked her about mallow (ebegümeci in Turkish), or malva leaves, we saw at every market in Morocco. We saute these wild greens or fashion them into sarma, as if they were the grape leaves in Turkey. Zeynep explained that Moroccan cooks saute mallow with herbs and spices. At the next stall set up by a village woman Zeynep picked two huge bundles of mallow and promised to show me how to cook the greens, Moroccan way.

As we arrived at Zeynep’s house, a three-storey building opening into a small courtyard, where the joint family is residing, Zeynep’s sisters set up a working area on the balcony near the kitchen, and the preparation kicked off.

We started with Moroccan bread, khobz: freshly baked golden-brown disks dusted with fine semolina accompany every meal in Morocco. Most women in the medina make their bread daily and entrust the baking to a seasoned pro operating a nearby communal oven: for the half a dirham (30 kuruş or 15 cents) you can get your loaf baked in the stone oven holding decades if not centuries of the accumulated heat.

Zeynep sat on a kilim, placed a clay tray of gsaa in front of her and started putting together a simple dough of wheat flour, fine semolina, water, yeast and salt. Zeynep’s confident moves revealed she bakes every day and thinks nothing of it. Bread baking is such a universal activity present in every cultures and yet so specific to each region: not surprisingly, Zeynep demonstrated the kneading and shaping techniques I have never seen before.

As we left the bread to proof, we focused on the tajine, a dish called after the clay pot where it cooks. And this is when I had a heartbreak. I had already lived cognitive dissonance during our stay in Morocco when after placing an order for tajine you see it arriving 10 minutes later. I thought clay cookware assumes slow-cooking. Take güveç, Turkish clay pot used to cook meat and vegetables without hurry until they reveal the best of their textures and flavors.

Zeynep explained the trick: nowadays Moroccan cooks prefer pressure cookers and use a hot tajine pot to either finish or only serve the dishes. Moroccan restaurants still insist they serve an exotic “tajine” rather than a prosy stew. Probably, for the same reason Moroccan rugs sellers insist their goods are Berber. We all travel to find authentic. We just don’t know that the new authentic in the so deceivingly medieval medina of Fez might be Chinese rugs and pressure cookers.

Heartbreak or not, I was curious to see how Zeynep builds the flavor in her dishes; after all it is what defines a national cuisine. Take an onion, garlic and tomato paste, and here is the base for a Turkish dish. Take onions, carrots and celery, and you are about to make something French. Zeynep used liberal quantities of parsley, coriander and garlic to start all the dishes we cooked. She would then fortify these aromatics with spices - never less than three in a given dish. Moroccan cooks are masters of using spices! Every bite holds so many different flavor nuances: here comes the slight heat of chilli, here is the earthiness of cumin, here is the sweetness of paprika. There is never a forte - all spices are subtle. They are flirting with you revealing just a bit of themselves and inviting you to take another bite for more.

We put together chermoula, a signature Moroccan marinade, for the lamb, and Zeynep seared the chermoula-rubbed lamb chunks in the pressure cooker before adding water, closing the lead and sending it to the kitchen stove. Meanwhile, we prepped the long beans and peeled artichokes for the lamb tajine. I confess artichokes were intimidating: Istanbul greengrocers have spoiled us by making freshly peeled artichoke hearts readily available. However after a few attempts I got confidence to peel artichokes on my own. The rules are simple: you should fearlessly (and quickly to prevent discoloring of the vegetable) trim all the leaves, just don’t cut too much off the white artichoke bottom. Then bravely scoop out all the fuzz from the center. Done!

And we chopped onions. I would not normally mention it. I chop onions every day and consider myself pretty efficient at producing any cut of onion. But the kind of onion chopping Zeynep and her older sister demonstrated introduced me to a different dimension of the knife skills. The ladies used no cutting board. They did all the chopping with a small but sharp knife while holding a vegetable or a bunch of herbs in their hands. With onion, Zeynep would start by cutting long meridians across the layers and then would cut off thin slices that drop as nice dices in the mixing bowl. I enthusiastically tried to mimic the technique, and my onion quickly got unruly. I will stick to the cutting board, please.

To finish the tajine preparation, we steamed the beans and then sauteed them with onions and spices. Lamb was transferred to the tajine dish by then, we added the vegetables on top, covered with the lead and let everything cook together.

For the Moroccan salads of zaalouk and checkchouka we charred the eggplants and green peppers. Initially, I was not excited about the dishes: we do a lot of things with charcoal grilled eggplant in Turkey, and in summer I often include one in my cooking classes. But here came a surprise: with exactly the same ingredients and the addition of spices the dish that started looking Turkish became unmistakably Moroccan. Zeynep cooked the tomatoes along with chillies and the trio of garlic, parsley and coriander. In Turkey we use all the same ingredients (minus the coriander), just raw, in the smoked eggplant salad. Zeynep then threw in cumin, paprika and black pepper to finally distinguish the salad from its Turkish relative. Finally, she divided this fragrant tomato sauce between the eggplant puree (for zaalouk) and the diced smoked green pepper (for checkchouka). Do I need to mention that both salads turned delicious?

And yet the most surprising dish of the class was mallow salad. We shredded the mallow: finally, I was given a cutting board, and my productivity quadrupled. We steamed the greens first. Zeynep sneaked a few garlic cloves in the pile of shredded greens (garlic turns so creamy and so-palatable-as-is when cooked with moisture). We proceeded with the already familiar Moroccan way of sauteing the herbs and spices and then added the steamed mallow. Zeynep used preserved lemon to decorate the dish. The resulting texture of the salad was creamy and nicely oily, and the flavor was pleasantly sour, mildly hot and a tad sweet.

Zeynep made us sample the mallow right out of the pot. We sad, not too much, please, we need to leave some stomach space for the lunch. She had to smile slyly seeing how we gobbled down the small plate in seconds. Zeynep said that once she prepared the dish for dinner, left the pot at the kitchen and went out. When back she found the pot was nearly empty because her husband ate most of the salad. Consider yourself warned and don’t ever leave a pot of this salad unattended.

Moroccan Spinach Salad

Moroccan cooks use both mallow and spinach to make this salad. I thought I’d go with the spinach since mallow might be harder to find outside of Morocco or Turkey. The unique combination of olive oil, herbs and spices result in a rich flavor, and so the salad is best enjoyed in small quantities as a starter.

Serves 4

Prep time: 10 min
Cook time: 20 min
Total time: 30 min

Ingredients

400 g fresh spinach leaves (almost no stems)
3 large cloves garlic, unpeeled
1/4 cup parsley, finely chopped
2 tbsp coriander, finely chopped
3 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp sweet paprika
3/4 tsp ground cumin
1/2 tsp fine sea salt
2 pinches red hot pepper flakes
1 tsp lemon juice
preserved lemon skin, for garnish
red olives, for garnish

Directions

Steam spinach: Finely shred the spinach leaves and transfer them plus the unpeeled garlic cloves in the steam cooker. If you don’t have a steam cooker make one by placing a metal sieve / colander over a fitting bowl of boiling water so that the level of water does not reach your sieve / colander. Cover with a fitting lid. In Morocco they use plastic wrap to seal the gap between the sieve and bowl. I use a cotton kitchen towel (and sometimes a weight on the lid) to make sure that the bowl, sieve and lid fit tightly and a minimal amount of steam escaping. Steam spinach over vividly boiling water for 10 minutes.

Cook salad: Fetch the garlic from the steamed spinach, peel it and finely mince with a knife or simply crash with a fork. Warm up the olive oil in a medium pan, toss in the minced / mashed garlic, chopped parsley and coriander, sweet paprika and cumin. Stir to release the aromas of the spices. After 2-3 min add the spinach and salt. Saute for about 5-7 min on the medium heat, or until the spinach dries up. Finally, add the red hot pepper flakes and lemon juice. Serve warm with preserved lemon peel and red olives for the ultimate Moroccan touch.