We decided to learn a little bit about how to navigate the Marrakesh Medina Souks (market) area including Djemaa el Fna square and grab a bit to eat at the same time. We latched onto a blog by an expat woman who with her Marrakesh husband, Youssef, have created a tourism company that aims to help travelers learn about the country. Here is her blog and a link to the Food Tour Website: http://marocmama.com/ and http://marrakechfoodtours.com/. We made four official stops on the tour and a couple of additional and the food was great and there was too much of it.
The first stop was for lack of a better term, Moroccan sheep BBQ. There are three BBQ shops adjacent to each other and owned by three different families. The families have been running their businesses for generations and if one of them eventually decides to sell their shop, they can only sell it to one of the other remaining families. The BBQ is done several ways, the first way involves huge mud ovens that are underground where up to 35 prepared sheep can be cooked at one time. The second way, would be just the sheep’s head wrapped in green leaves and cooked in a smaller oven, and the third way is using a clay tagine (cooking time one to two hours) or a tangia (clay jar/pot that is buried in hot ashes over night). Cooking in a tagine is Moroccan but cooking a tangia is only done in Marrakesh. In the picture of a hole below where you can see our feet, is the large sheep ovens. They only clean these ovens once a year during fasting month of Ramadan. It is only then that there is enough time to cool them and eventually clean them. Not a job that either of us would want to have. The second picture with a hole is the small oven that they keep the leaf-wrapped sheep heads and keep clay pots warm while waiting for customers.
The gentleman in purple is a Wine and Food writer from Poland that was part of our tour party. He was quite a talker. Here you can see him with the sheep’s eyeball he just plucked out, then the photo that I like to call, the moment of truth, where his mind, his taste buds and his stomach have a moment of discord after eating, said, eyeball. About 15 minutes later, he disappeared from our group in a bit of a hurry, and when he rejoined us, he didn’t eat anything the rest of the night. There must be a limerick here, ‘there once was a food critic from Poland…’
We ate on the 3rd floor of the open air restaurant and you can see a little bit of the Souk (market area) and a little bit of Djemaa El Fna Square. We sampled all the different types of olives at one of these stalls and must say that salt is very prevalent.
Our next stop was much like the first one in that it could really be considered a full meal. We had a variation of a tagine where the meat was cooked, but all of the vegetables were not, and then all of it is stuffed into the pocket of local bread with sauces. What was interesting is that the minced meat was mixed with sardines. Yum, but in a vain attempt at not getting too full, we split half a sandwich. The second photo is of a bakery shop with sticky, sweet, rolls that attract a LOT of bees (see all those little bees?). I’m not sure how many times the seller or a client gets stung per day!
Next stop is what we like to call, the beignet or donut man. The first series is of him doing the normal thing and you eat them with either sugar or honey. The second set is him making an egg sandwich. To do the later, he starts two donuts cooking and then pulls them before they are done, then he smashes each of them, kind of creating a nest for the egg, then he puts them back into the oil and cracks an egg over one of them and then flips the remaining one on top- flip, submerge, flip submerge and its ready. We split one two days later for breakfast.
We continued to walk through the Medina’s Souk area and take in the sights and attempt to understand how to get around or at least limit the amount of time that one is lost. An English couple on our tour had a short-handed paper map they used (with the phone number of the Riad where they were staying). I attempted to use my phone’s GPS. The GPS works great until you can no longer see the sky and then its pretty useless, and with the tall walls and overhangs of the Medina, it was 50/50 at best. Here are some sights:
Then we headed underground for a couple of stops. The first one was a community oven. It used to be that homes didn’t have ovens that could cook bread, so each day the woman of the house would make dough and then take it to the community oven to be cooked. This man would do the cooking and then the woman or a child in the family would come back later and pickup the bread. The traditional bread, a round dense loaf, is baked in a wood fired oven. According to Youssef, the baker is the ears and eyes of the community. Before you marry it is wise to ask the baker what sort of family you are potentially marrying into – he will know. Now days, many community ovens have closed as people have better cooking ovens in the homes with gas, but they will sometimes still use them in the summer when cooking in the home only compounds the heat. Some of the community ovens that didn’t close have become bakeries.
The other two photos shows the man who ‘burns just about anything’ to heat water for a Hammam or a steam room / bath house, and to cook Tangia.
Next stops included some prickly pear cactus, some spleen and other minced meat, and some snails. All of which were good, but most likely best not to become a staple.
Our next stop was the old slave markets where the courtyard hosts a large number of shops that are run by widows and our guide told us about how tough they had to be to get to the point where they own their own shops and that he would never make them cross. Women’s rights still have a long way to go in traditional Morocco. BTW this slave market was not where Africans were sold to America. They were sold to other Islamic countries. We ate the best couscous we’ve ever had – amazing. This is not your pre-packaged stuff we get in the US. Semolina grains are steamed and fluffed several times over a broth-based stew, each time handled with care and receiving different treatment, such as additional water, salt, oil and “smen” (clarified and aged butter). This is couscous made with love for family. In the west we have a tradition of Sunday meals with family and in Morocco, every Friday, families go to their neighborhood mosque and return home to enjoy delicious couscous.
Finally we topped off the night with almond smoothies and fresh cookies. We may never have learned so much or eaten so much in three and a half hours.
