Moroccan Thrills and Grills

MARRAKECH, Morocco —  This legendary red city at the foot of the Atlas Mountains entirely lives up to its reputation for splendor and squalor, for stately mosques, labyrinthine alleys and kaleidoscopically colorful markets bursting with everything from rugs to rose water.

As for the food--well, it’s easy to see why chefs from all over the world take inspiration from Morocco. The cuisine of this Arab kingdom combines the refinement of France with the exoticism of Africa and the Middle East. Moroccan cooking is unusual enough to challenge your taste buds but familiar enough to be comfort food. It’s a cuisine of explosive flavors, built on a lavish use of spices and an intricate interplay of textures and tastes.

This is certainly the case of the kebabs, sausages, chops, roasts, organ meats and seafood that constitute the Moroccan grill. Grilling occupies a central position in Morocco’s culinary life, being practiced in public squares and crowded markets, at sidewalk cafes and waterfront restaurants. Almost anywhere you turn, you will smell the sweet scent of lamb roasting over charcoal. Look skyward at dusk and the sky will be filled with plumes of smoke rising from a thousand cook shacks and pushcart barbecue grills.

But there’s a curious paradox at work here. Thumb through a classical Moroccan cookbook and you’ll find few, if any, grilled dishes. Moroccan haute cuisine relies mainly on wet cooking methods such as stewing, steaming and deep-frying. Think of Morocco’s most famous dishes: couscous, tajine, bestila. None are cooked on a grill. Grilled fare is the popular food of Morocco, what people eat when they’re in a hurry, on a budget or in the mood for casual dining. And eat it they do, with gusto.

This became apparent my first day in Marrakech, at my very first stop, the Djemaa el-Fna. This fabled piazza, the entryway to the old city, offers a total immersion in everything that is exotic and wondrous about Morocco: the shrill trumpets of the snake charmers (those are real cobras coiled on the blankets), the sing-song shouts of the storytellers, the cries of the hustlers and beggars. The din is positively cacophonous, and it continues from morning to midnight.

Come nightfall, the Djemaa el-Fna fills with open-air cook stalls, such as Stall No. 26, run by a ruggedly handsome man in crisp white paper cap, Mohammed Moutawakel. Every day, around 5 p.m., Moutawakel sets out white enamel trays piled high with couscous, hand-cut French fries and shiny salads of peppers, carrots and other vegetables. But the star attractions here are the lamb chops and kebabs sizzling away on his grill.

The secret to a great kebab, explains Moutawakel, is to intersperse the cubes of meat with pieces of lamb tail fat. The fat melts during grilling, basting the lamb, keeping it moist and tender. Unlike many American backyard grillers, Moutawakel is not afraid of the flare-ups that shoot up when drops of melting fat hit the fire. “Flare-ups are the best way to give the meat a charred, smoky flavor,” he says.

Moutawakel seasons his lamb with a mixture of cumin, salt and garlic powder. The accompaniments, variations of which you experience throughout Morocco, include a spicy fresh tomato sauce, a tangy shallot and parsley relish and a wedge of crusty Moroccan flat bread. You dine under the stars, surrounded by the circus-like swirl of activity in the Djemaa el-Fna. Barbecue just doesn’t get any better.

Well, actually, it’s not half bad on Bani Marine Street, a few blocks away from the Djemaa. Bani Marine Street is one of the many “barbecue lanes” found in the newer quarters of Marrakech. The crowded street is lined with simple storefront grill restaurants. You don’t really need a menu; the bill of fare is displayed in the window: stacks of lamb chops, trays of liver, coils of merguez sausage red with paprika and cayenne and decoratively sculpted mounds of kufta (ground spiced lamb).

There are plenty of items Americans would relish, such as the lamb steaks, chops and shish kebabs. (To combat the toughness of Moroccan beef, cooks cut the meat for kebabs into cubes as small as your thumbnail.) There are also plenty of items most Americans wouldn’t eat: lambs’ brains, testicles and spleen. The last comes stuffed with chopped onions and parsley and tastes like tough, spongy, strong-flavored liver. It seems to be one of those foods you have to have been brought up on to enjoy.

A meal at one of the Bani Marine street restaurants is a simple but soul-satisfying experience: a dish of olives, a plate of kebabs, served with fire-toasted bread, shallot relish and fiery harissa.

The relish is a rather ingenious concoction. Parsley is a natural mouthwash that neutralizes the pungency of the shallots. Harissa is a North African hot sauce of ground red pepper and pureed tomatoes. You also get a tiny dish of salt and powdered cumin. Should you be in a hurry, the restaurants will be happy to package these ingredients in a split loaf of bread, wrapped in paper for carry-out eating.

At least one grilled meat dish has made the leap from street food to the stratosphere of haute cuisine: meshwi, usually spelled in the French fashion as mechoui. Like American barbecue or Brazilian churrasco, mechoui refers simultaneously to a single dish, a style of cooking and a kind of meal.

The original mechoui was a whole lamb stuffed with herbs, rubbed with butter and spices and roasted on a spit over an open pit fire. You can still find this style of mechoui in villages in the countryside. As mechoui moved from the country to the city, cooks abandoned the open fire for a wood-fired underground oven.

My next stop took me to the heart of the souk, that Ali-Baba-esque labyrinth of shops and alleyways that constitutes the main market of Marrakech. My destination was the mechoui shop of Housseine Admou. A wiry man with a salt-and-pepper mustache, wearing a black djellaba, Housseine has owned this tiny shop, in the center of the souk, for 40 years. He proudly shows me his trade license--No. E 67830--qualifying him as a master ro^tisseur.

Actually, when I arrive, there isn’t much to look at. Four white tile walls. A bare earthenware floor from which rises a rickety cast-iron stovepipe. It turns out that the action at a mechoui parlor takes place not above ground but beneath it. Under the floor is an urn-shaped clay oven, 9 feet deep and 5 feet across, tapering to an opening in the center of the floor perhaps 14 inches wide. The mechoui pit (tannu^r) is descended from the same Babylonian ancestor as the Indian tandoor oven.

Twice a day, Housseine builds a roaring fire in the underground oven, letting the logs burn down to embers. Twice a day, he spits whole, freshly slaughtered lambs on thick wooden poles and lowers them into the oven. The lambs are seasoned with salt, pepper and cumin, then smoke-roasted in the underground oven for two to three hours. The meat that emerges is moist and tender, with crisp skin and a subtle smoky flavor that makes me think of American barbecue. It is nothing short of sublime.

Moroccan barbecue may seem like a relentlessly carnivorous experience. There’s a definite premium placed on meat, especially lamb. But our next stop proved that Moroccans also know how to enjoy the pleasures of grilled seafood.

Essaouira is a port city with 17th century ramparts on the northwest coast of Morocco, a two-hour drive from Marrakech. (Normally, that is, it would take two hours, but a flash flood washed out part of the road, delaying our arrival.) We got there just in time for lunch on the concrete wharf where the fishing boats dock. We made our way through a tangle of fishing nets, braved a gantlet of touts (each attempting to lure us to the stall of his employer) and parted a swarm of flies that would have given a North American health inspector a heart attack.

Once we were seated we enjoyed impeccably fresh seafood the way God meant it to be eaten: charred over charcoal, surrounded by bobbing fishing boats, in sight of the azure ocean from which it was taken hours earlier. There was seafood to suit every appetite and budget: sardines, squid, whiting, crab, Dover sole no bigger than the palm of your hand. There were strange sea creatures such as the succulent slipper lobster, and ziz al-bahr (cigale de mer), a prawn-like shellfish whose name literally means “sea cicada.” There were amazingly sweet shrimp grilled whole in the shells. (We learned to snap off the heads with our thumbs and suck out the sweet juices.)

The accompaniments to the seafood mixed grill were elemental in their simplicity: tangy tomato salad, crusty Moroccan bread, wedges of lemon for squeezing. And talk about fresh--the vendors clean the fish the moment you order it.

The grilling is equally simple. The fish are placed in a hinged wire grill laid directly on the coals. The only seasonings are a generous basting of oil and a sprinkling of sea salt. But flavored by the sea breeze and served under the whirling gulls in the wide blue sky, seafood never tasted better.

Moroccan grilling is easy to do on a North American barbecue grill. The main ingredients--lamb, beef, shrimp--are readily available. You probably already have the seasonings--cumin, coriander, paprika--in your spice rack. So put on some Moroccan Gnawa music (played on a strange, ultimately West African three-stringed instrument and available at any record store that sells world music) and let the feast begin.

* Raichlen is the author of “High-Flavor, Low-Fat Vegetarian Cooking” (Viking).

LAMB CHOPS STALL NO. 26

12 small rib lamb chops

4 teaspoons salt

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1 teaspoon garlic powder

1 teaspoon white pepper

Serve this with the Minted Tomato Sauce and a spoonful of Shallot Relish, as well as a generous pinch of seasoned salt. This recipe will make a little more spice mix than you need for 4 servings. Save the remainder for future use.

Place 3 lamb chops flat on cutting board in a row, ribs pointing in same direction on diagonal. Run metal skewer through chops at 60-degree angle to ribs. Skewer remaining chops same way.

Combine salt, cumin, garlic powder and white pepper in small bowl and stir to mix. Season lamb chops on both sides with half of mixture. Place other half mixture in tiny bowls for serving.

Preheat grill to high. Grill lamb until cooked to taste, 3 to 4 minutes per side for medium. Transfer lamb to plates or platter for serving.

Makes 4 servings.

Each serving contains about:

149 calories; 2,420 mg sodium; 56 mg cholesterol; 8 grams fat; 1 gram carbohydrates; 17 grams protein; 0.07 gram fiber.

MINTED TOMATO SAUCE

2 large tomatoes (about 1 pound)

1 large shallot or 1/2 small onion

3 tablespoons chopped mint or parsley

Salt, pepper

Cut tomatoes in half widthwise. Grate tomatoes through large holes of grater into shallow bowl. Grate shallot in same way. Stir in mint and season to taste with salt and pepper.

Makes 1 3/4 cups.

Each 1-tablespoon serving contains about:

4 calories; 12 mg sodium; 0 cholesterol; 0 fat; 1 gram carbohydrates; 0 protein; 0.11 gram fiber.

SHALLOT RELISH

4 to 5 shallots, finely chopped (1/2 cup)

1/2 cup finely chopped parsley (preferably flat-leaf)

1 tablespoon olive oil

1 tablespoon lemon juice

Salt

Freshly ground black pepper

Combine shallots, parsley, oil, lemon juice and salt and pepper to taste in bowl.

Makes about 3/4 cup.

Each 1-tablespoon serving contains about:

14 calories; 26 mg sodium; 0 cholesterol; 1 gram fat; 1 gram carbohydrates; 0 protein; 0.05 gram fiber.

BANI MARINE STREET BEEF KEBABS

1 1/2 pounds beef sirloin, cut into 1/2-inch cubes

1 onion, finely chopped or grated

1/4 cup finely chopped parsley (preferably flat-leaf)

1 teaspoon paprika

1 teaspoon salt

1tablespoon plus 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin

1/2 teaspoon ground white pepper

2 tablespoons oil

1 tablespoon salt

It doesn’t hurt to put a little fatty beef or beef fat on the kebabs as well as the lean sirloin. This should be served with Shallot Relish and either Minted Tomato Sauce or Harissa, as well as some Moroccan, French or pita bread warmed on the grill.

Toss beef with onion, parsley, paprika, salt, 1/2 teaspoon cumin, pepper and oil in nonreactive bowl. Let marinate at least 4 hours or, ideally, overnight.

Place salt and 1 tablespoon cumin in tiny bowls, side by side, in neat piles.

Thread beef onto metal skewers, 5 or 6 cubes to skewer. Grill until cooked to taste, about 3 minutes per side for medium. (Moroccans tend to eat their beef a little more well done than we do.)

To serve, slide meat off skewers onto plates. Let each guest season meat with salt and cumin.

Makes 4 to 6 servings.

Each of 6 servings contains about:

162 calories; 1,626 mg sodium; 52 mg cholesterol; 8 grams fat; 3 grams carbohydrates; 19 grams protein; 0.38 gram fiber.

HARISSA

2 tomatoes

1 small onion or 2 shallots

2 tablespoons minced parsley (preferably flat-leaf)

2 to 4 teaspoons hot paprika or 1 to 2 teaspoons cayenne pepper

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 tablespoon lemon juice

Salt, freshly ground black pepper

Cut tomatoes in half. Grate each tomato half on coarse side of grater into mixing bowl. (Hold cut side of tomato halves to grater and grate flesh just to the skin. Discard skin.)

Grate onion into mixing bowl. Stir in parsley, paprika, oil, lemon juice and salt and pepper to taste. Mixture should be highly seasoned.

Makes 2 cups.

Each 1-tablespoon serving contains about:

10 calories; 10 mg sodium; 0 cholesterol; 1 gram fat; 1 gram carbohydrates; 0 protein; 0.09 gram fiber.

SEAFOOD MIXED GRILL IN THE STYLE OF ESSAOUIRA

TOMATO SALAD

4 tomatoes, seeded and finely chopped

1 large red onion, finely chopped

3 tablespoons chopped parsley (preferably flat-leaf)

1/4 cup olive oil

2 tablespoons lemon juice or to taste

Salt, pepper

FISH

2 pounds shrimp, ideally in shells

16 fresh sardines

8 fresh whitings

1 pound fresh squid, cleaned

1/2 cup olive oil

Sea salt

Freshly ground black pepper

Lemon wedges

Moroccan bread, French bread or pita bread

Feel free to vary the fish selection based on whatever looks freshest in your area.

TOMATO SALAD

Combine tomatoes, onion, olive oil, lemon juice and salt and pepper to taste in bowl and toss to mix. Correct seasoning and add salt or lemon juice to taste.

FISH

Brush shrimp, sardines, whitings and squid with olive oil and season to taste with salt and pepper. Grill over high heat until cooked, about 3 minutes per side for sardines and whiting, 1 to 2 minutes per side for shrimp and squid. Baste seafood with olive oil as necessary and squeeze fresh lemon juice on top.

To serve, place grilled seafood on plates or platter with wedges of lemon for squeezing. Eat fish with Tomato Salad and chunks of bread for mopping up juices.

Makes 8 servings.

Each serving contains about:

415 calories; 339 mg sodium; 318 mg cholesterol; 26 grams fat; 7 grams carbohydrates; 38 grams protein; 0.48 gram fiber.