Weird Crap I Eat: Everything Morocco

As discussed in the previous post, Morocco is an incredible place for looking at food.  It’s also a great place to eat, and I like to eat.  So this entry is about the eating, and a little bit of the travels.

After an overnight direct flight from JFK we landed in Casablanca and had a brief layover before hopping on a train to Fes which was about three hours away.   Because we hadn’t eaten since the previous night, I was hungry but hoping to hold out for grilled meat somewhere.  So we started with some coffee, croissants, mint tea, and banana milk.

Good start to the day and trip, except for that goddamned book. Zach's questions to our guides and regular lengthy references to it throughout the trip threatened my sanity. I threatened everyone else's by talking about food for 23 hours out of the day

Mint tea is served as a greeting everywhere you go in Morocco.  It’s black tea, fresh mint leaves, and a few cubes of sugar steeped together.  Always served from a silver teapot into glasses instead of ceramic mugs.  It’s sweetness and warmth were welcome due to the chilly temperatures at the time we visited.

En route to Fes, the landscape was not what I expected at all; lots of rolling green hills with delicious animals grazing on them.

"G-L-A-M... O-R-OUS, Riding first classsss, up on the tracks" or something like that. We bought first class train tickets. They were ten dollars

After arriving in Fes, we took a cab to our riad and discovered that, since it was Friday, most of the medina was shut down.  I was starving and devastated.  So we headed to the souk in the new section of Fes and I prayed to find something edible there.  Luckily, shortly after exiting the cab, I saw some locals hanging around a counter with this behind the glass.

I was deliriously hungry and incredibly excited to find this place, but this glass case didn't appear refrigerated

Sure there was chicken, lamb kefta, and beef, but that skewer of liver looked too good to pass up.  Or was it kidney?  The dude running the stall responded to that question (asked in English) by mooing at me.  Glad we got that straightened out.

I ordered 4 skewers for 10 dihram (or $1.25) grilled and served inside half a loaf of khobz and sprinkled with cumin, salt, paprika and some sort of chili pepper.

Took a few bites before I remembered to take the photo. Was too excited to eat

I decided it was liver, despite having a little bit of crunch to it which was unexpected.  The best and most flavorful bites were the ones that included the one piece of fat on each skewer which you may have noticed in the previous picture.  Overall, I though the liver had a surprisingly mild flavor and the sandwich was very tasty if a little dry.  Danny disagreed with my assessment when he tasted it, so I guess i just like liver.

To get that taste out of his mouth, we found a guy who was cooking small links of merguez sausage inside the souk.

Tiny charcoal grill that he fans heavily with a piece of cardboard to get heated up anytime someone orders

This was served identically to the liver: pulled off the skewers into a half loaf of local bread.  Danny and Zach both ate it without complaint, but it was definitely a little funky.  The sausage was mainly blood and fat and tasted like it, but for a dollar on the street we didn’t expect much more than that.

After picking up Jae at the train station, we headed out for dinner where I had my first tagine.  Tagine is a ceramic dish with a cone-like top, but its also a style of food; basically a one pot slow cooked meal.  It was a little subpar.

I will never understand why I can't take an in-focus picture in a reasonably well-lit room. Superzoom is great, but that blurry photo option that I can't turn off annoys me

Whole slices of salted preserved lemon rinds, un-pitted olives, and a half chicken all cooked together.  If the tagine had a bed of couscous, it would have been a hundred times better, but instead it was just a lot of strong flavors with nothing neutral to absorb them.  Oh well, we quickly learned that restaurants weren’t where you found the best food.

The next day Mohammed, our previously discussed guide for the day, brought us to a restaurant inside the medina for lunch.  We knew we were being pulled into a tourist trap owned by Mohammed’s buddies, but the food ended up being relatively decent.  We were started off with a bunch of small cold appetizers which you piled up on local bread.

Everything was vegetarian and pretty good, but glad to see I am not the only one who doesn't like lentils

The main event for me, and something Mohammed promised me I would be able to order, was pigeon pastilla, or pigeon pie.

Didn't expect the dusting of powdered sugar and cinnamon. Reminded me of how shocked I was when the Monte Cristo sandwich I ordered at The Office in Bridgewater, NJ when I was twelve came out with powdered sugar on it

The pastilla was in an individual portion size and was basically a pastry filled with pigeon meat (some still on the bone), nuts, eggs, and spices.

Just a pigeon donut

The tiny bones were annoying.  Some were soft enough to easily chew, but others had to be fished out in the mouth and removed.  I was getting more comfortable with this process from my time in China, but it made for a less enjoyable experience.  The flavor of the spices and pigeon meat was great, though.

The next day we took a minibus to Merzouga on the fringe of the Sahara desert where we planned to ride camels into the desert and stay in a Berber camp for the night.  Which we did.

This was about the point that we were all shifting uncomfortably and wondering if everyone else's groin region was in as much excruciating pain as ours. Which was the entire time. Also, your DB is the second one from the back

Camels are deceptively tall, extremely wide around the midsection, pretty cranky, and carry a unique odor.  Which meant we had a lot in common.  Camels are also remarkably comfortable with carrying over 200 pounds of DB on their back over steep dunes on shifting sand.

I know this isn't food related, but its an awesome picture. That's the head of my camel, which I named Sal. The camel in front was Zach's, which he named Richard. Both names were well chosen

Shortly after sunset, our camels completed their seven kilometer trip into the desert and dropped us off at the Berber camp where we would spend the night.

We were freaking exhausted from a long day and I was stunned by how comfortable and amazing this sleeping situation looked

Over in the main tent, which was about the same size, we waited anxiously for our guides to cook dinner since we ate an early lunch and hadn’t settled at camp until long after dark.  The first course of khobz and soup, that I think was made from bones, vegetables and pieces of lamb fat, was one of the most welcome and enjoyable eating experiences of my life.

I guessed it was just a vegetable soup until I got a nice big piece of tender lamb fat

I inhaled this soup due to hunger but it was definitely good. Not an overwhelming amount of saltiness, and the occasional white blob of fat that gave the soup it’s meaty flavor.  Next up was a tagine of chicken, root vegetables, and couscous.

Civilized Jae with his fork and plate, everyone else used the bread to reach in and grab bits of food

The chicken was a half bird with heart and liver still attached to the ribs.  Pretty strong tasting, but a great meal to put us all to sleep.

We woke with the sunrise to head out of the desert.

Souvenirs from the desert included about 400 photos, a plastic water bottle filled with sand, and the privilege of still finding the distinct red sand in random pockets of my backpack to this day

Over the next two days we made our way to Marrakech at a leisurely pace.  We stopped often to take in amazing sights like the Dades Valley and gorges, the High Atlas mountains, Ait Benhaddou, and the film studio at Ouarzazate.  I also got pretty sick of eating tagines and looked forward to the food that Marrakech would have to offer.  It didn’t disappoint.

The main square in Marrakech is called Djemaa el Fna.  You should have seen how I spelled that before googling it; it looked like I sat on the keyboard.  During the day it’s mostly street performances along with dates, juice, and spice vendors.

Nuts, dates, and dried fruit

Fresh OJ. Really good, especially since we were all run down and needed the vitamin C

Spices

Its a pretty intimidating place because its huge and there is constantly someone trying to sell you something or throwing some sort of animal on you.

Thank you sir, but my glasses are now crooked

You take a couple pictures with said animal, and then pay the guy ten dihram so that he doesn’t tell the animal to rip your eyes out.  I got lucky; Danny had a giant snake thrown onto his shoulders, which would have ruined my jeans and given me nightmares for a few months.

Around sunset the food vendors hit the square.  Each food stall is numbered and is basically an outdoor restaurant with tables and chairs

It was drizzling that night, hence the covers around the food stalls

I had seen shows about this and was extremely excited for the tremendous amount of new eating experiences that I would be able to choose from.  Right after we arrived the first night, I hit one of the many snail stalls.

I was a little apprehensive due to the allergic history, but it also smelled good and I was hungry

The cooking liquid is loaded with spices and bay leaves and has a flavor that mixes shellfish saltiness with sweet and spicy.  The broth is considered to have medicinal qualities and many people pay one dihram for a bowl of just liquid.  I went for the 5 dihram small bowl of snails.

They looked pretty funky as you pulled them out using toothpicks but by this point I was getting pretty good at it

The snails were very tender and had good flavor.  Considering that a small bowl had 12 of them, I can’t imagine eating a large bowl which was more than double the size for 10 dihram.

If you like french-style escargot, you might not like this since it doesn’t have the butter and garlic that makes escargot great.  However, it is a good reference point that 12 snails cost about 60 cents vs. the $15 you’d pay for 6 in a French restaurant.  Also, no allergic reaction, guess that allergy might have gone away.

We ate dinner at a funny nightclub that featured people dressed like sailors and Michael Jackson impersonators that sounded out the lyrics to entire songs.  First odd item of the following day was this fruit.

No idea what these are...

The guy on the far right would cut into the hard outer shell and pop out a round ball that looked like, and had the staining potential of, a cooked beet.

...which of course didn't slow me down

It also had the texture of a cooked beet with a couple small seeds and a mild sweet and sour flavor.  If you know what that fruit is, please comment.

After walking around for about 6 hours and heading back to the hotel to shower and take naps, we were ready to hit the square for dinner.  The previous night I saw one particular food item that really scared me but seemed like a unique experience.  My apologies to the squeamish, but I was looking forward to trying sheep’s brains.

I was legitimately trembling with adrenaline and fear when I took this picture

I ordered and watched as they quickly poached the brains, cut them, and put them on a plate with some cheek meat from the sheeps head (just to the right of the brains in the picture).  They added a piece of bread dipped into the poaching liquid as well.

Thanks for the picture Danny. That piece of bread was as sticky as it looks in the picture

The first bite didn’t go so well.  I ate it completely unadorned and as I was chewing/getting an idea of the texture I started thinking a little too hard about what I was eating.  The texture is creamy, and the flavor is mildly lamb-like and livery.  I had to take a little pause, eat some cheek meat and drink some water.  The next bite was much better and led me to take several more, since I figured out the importance of a sprinkle of cumin salt and wrapping in a piece of dry bread.

Ma Dowley won't be calling the local Connecticut radio station on my behalf; cleaning my plate wasn't going to happen

The dipped bread was really the funkiest part.  It tasted fine, but stuck to my fingers and teeth and anything that came into contact with it.  Time to move on.

The diners shown here must have been ecstatic when the annoying Americans got up, stopped taking pictures and let them enjoy their dinner. Which was steamed sheep head and brains

We headed over to stall #1 which was by far the most packed and is noted on travel sites as having the best food on the square.

I welcomed normal food and avoided the stuffed organ meat they offered

You pick your meat or side dishes and they grab a few skewers and throw them onto the grill.  The eggplant and grilled sweet potato balls were really awesome, and all of the meat was fresh and had nice flavor.

Finally, desert:

This was recommended to us by the riad owner, so we had to try it

The cake has a pleasantly mealy texture (if that’s possible) and tasted like it was entirely made of cinnamon.  The tea was very heavily spiced, almost to the point of being spicy.  Each of these on their own wasn’t that great, but when you took a bite of the cake followed by a sip of the tea, it was actually pretty tasty and unique.

If you are somehow still reading this post, I will wrap it up with one last meal that also happened to be our best.  On the last day, we finally found an alley that is nicknamed Meshwi alley and arrived right at noon when they opened up.  Meshwi is lamb that is hung vertically in an underground clay oven to cook whole.  Just as we arrived, the first lamb of the day hit the table.

This smelled and looked sooooooo good

As we stepped up, the cook took a couple small crispy pieces from the shoulder and gave them to each of us to sample.  A truly ridiculous piece of food.  Crispy and salty outside and incredibly tender inside.  We ordered a half kilo which he took from all areas of the lamb and lead us to a table behind the stall where we could sit and eat.

After one bite Jae got up and ordered another half kilo

As we walked to the table, we stepped over the lid to the underground clay oven.  The cook was nice enough to take the lid off and show us the inside.

Lot of heat coming out of this. The buckets are filled with the meat that was taken off the lamb we were eating and kept warm in the oven for people who weren't as punctual as us

Right as we finished up our meal, the butcher showed up with a fresh lamb that he prepared for cooking.  I was completely mesmerized by how quickly and precisely this guy worked.

This dude split a whole lamb perfectly down the center of the spine using only a machete, while wearing designer jeans, sunglasses, and a leather jacket. I think his website is mohammedisadb.com

As he finished binding the lamb around the metal hook that it would hang from in the oven, he cut two slits at the shoulder joints and stuffed balls of fat into both openings.  Explains how the meat stays moist throughout cooking.

Probably been done this way for over a thousand years, but with less panache. The bundle of fat is visible in the opening made by the shoulder joint

And that was it.  We went to a fantasia show for dinner (think Moroccan Medieval Times) and then I boarded a plane for home the next morning.

Sorry for the long post, wanted to give some context along the way by showing what we did and there was a lot of amazing food to cover.  Will be back to cooking my own food for next week’s post.

Pete’s Travels: the Markets of Morocco

When I was growing up, I would watch MTV Spring Break and think to myself, “I can’t wait to go on spring breaks like that when I am older!”.  Then I went to college and instead of spending my spring breaks in Panama City playing Truth or Date with a bikini-clad coed, I spent them with the rest of the Bates Crew team not drinking, waking up early, and generally appalled by the opposite sex.

When I got to business school, I wondered if I would finally take that tequila-fueled spring break I dreamt about so many years prior.  But, I realized I am happily married, would swim wearing a t-shirt if it was socially acceptable, and find Ed Hardy clothing to be a reasonable sign of poor education.  So instead, I introduced Morocco to this DB.

Leather hat, sunglasses, business school shirt, muscle kiss. Thats Pete's Recipe for being A DB. Write that down

The trip location was decided somewhat haphazardly, but we all agreed it was a place we likely wouldn’t visit with our significant others and that there was a lot we wanted to see.  I was most excited to visit the markets (or souks) in the Fes and Marrakech medinas, since they’ve both been in business for over 800 years.  Neither dissapointed.

First stop was Fes where we stayed at a small riad (or inn) just inside the medina walls.  On our second day, we hired a local guide named Mohammed to show us around the medina since there are a lot of sites to see and its an incredibly confusing place to navigate yourself.

This is a typical way to cut across the medina, a 50 yard long alley that is narrower than my shoulders. Without a guide I likely would still be lost in the medina

After walking for about 15 minutes and taking a few confusing turns, I recognized that we were in the heart of the food section of the souk.  The most surprising thing, was that I was surrounded on all sides by meat and produce yet it had none of the off-putting smells I had encountered in markets in Italy and China.  It smelled clean and kinda delicious.

We arrived in the market section of the medina around 10AM and it was crowded until we left at 4PM, Mohammed is the way too cool for school dude in the jellaba

The most notorious food item that I was interested in finding was khelea, a breakfast food that nearly made Andrew Zimmern throw up when he ate it.  I asked our guide about it and he made it sound like it was as common a part of breakfast as bacon or sausage in the U.S.  Which he must have assumed was pretty common since he was talking to me.  He pointed out a butcher that was making it.

Big bucket of kaleah. Moroccan vendors have an obsession with presenting food in a conical manner. Looks great with spices, kinda foul with meat and fat

This stuff was everywhere.  From my understanding, its meat (I think beef) that is cooked, salted, then packed in animal fat or olive oil to keep it preserved at room temperature.  Its taken from that cone and put into smaller containers for sale to the multitudes of Moroccans looking for it.  Aside from the olive vendors, it was the most common item we saw.

I was happy that I traveled with three idiots who didn't like olives so that the free ones served with meals were all mine

Back to the kaleah.  Most stalls offered a variety of cuts of meat and animal fat vs. olive oil.

These containers were everywhere, I counted at least 20 stalls that had it

As it turns out, this stuff isn’t nearly as gross as it sounds and we ate it mixed in with our eggs without even knowing what it was.  The texture and flavor was similar to the air dried beef in creamed chipped beef.  Not entirely sure what grossed out Zimmern so much.

Once we got past the overwhelming visual of being surrounded by kaleah, we realized that we were right in the middle of the meat market.  They specialize in beef and lamb and all parts of the animal are available.  Individual vendors specialized in the prime cuts or the organ meats, but rarely carried both.  The latter was definitely the more photogenic subject matter.

The prime cuts

The organs. Hows that for a contrast? Fresh fava beans on one side of the stall, and what I have since discovered but didn't notice when taking the picture is a pair of testicles on the far left edge of the picture. Cow, not fellow traveler

Kidneys, brains, hooves, tongues, bones, and whole sheeps heads.  Sounds like what Pop Ryan used to tell me was in hot dogs.  At this point I was excitedly asking Mohammed way too many questions which he happily answered with only the slightest hint of fear in his eyes.

Boiled brains and steamed sheep heads are both very common foods in Morocco, while the other sheep organs like kidney, heart, and pancreas are usually stuffed with other ingredients and grilled or fried.  Check out how much larger the beef counterparts are.

I was even overwhelmed by this stall. All of these organs were enormous

The beef heart I cooked last summer was half the size of the one at this stall, but that was nothing compared to the stuffed pancreas the guy next store was selling.

I mean, what the hell?

Apparently this is like Moroccan scrapple, stuffed with other chopped organs and rice, but it was ten times more terrifying to look at.  I am still not positive that this was pancreas since I can’t find any images online of anything similar, but thats what Mohammed said.  Here’s a sliced version.

Those red onions and tomatoes aren't making the main event look any less scary

At this point, we had seen every single part of these animals except for their skin, until I turned around without looking and somebody carrying about 30 skins ran into me.  He was heading to the tannery, which is also located inside of the medina, to drop off his haul.

That's dye in the foreground, not blood. It'll make more sense in the next picture

The tannery made up for the complete lack of foul smells in the food market.  This facility processes camel, cow, and sheep skins primarily, and does it all in the labor intensive manner that its been done for hundreds of years.

The white containers in the back are for the initial treatment, the front containers are where the skins are dyed and scraped

The initial treatment needs ammonia in the mix.  In Morocco, they stick with their traditions and use pigeon poop as the source of ammonia, which definitely doesn’t help make a funky smelling process any less funky smelling.  Regardless, it was a very cool process to watch and explained the extremely large amount of leather goods available in the medina.  Including the hat from the first photo that cost me $10.

Back to the food, this time the seafood and shellfish section.  Lots of fresh stuff coming in from the coast daily.

Again, no overpowering odors. Smelled like a high quality fish market

The fish looked amazing but without a place to cook, much like the meat stalls, it was somewhat painful to look at.  We also didn’t see much seafood on menus or at the street food stalls, which made it a little worse.  What we did see at a lot of food stalls were snails.

These little dudes were trying to escape left and right

The last time I ate snails I was twelve and had a serious allergic reaction.  I came to Morocco prepared with antihistamines and an asthma inhaler since I was very excited to try this local delicacy.  There are a lot of things wrong with that previous sentence.  More on that in a future post.

I was starting to recognize that there was more challenging food available for eating than I could possibly handle.  Feeling intimidated, I distracted myself with the woman making crepes a few stalls down.

I could have been completely hypnotized watching this process for hours

This was really cool to watch.  That sphere is metal and very hot, so she would drape the crepe dough around the entire dome where it would instantly turn transparent and then slowly turn the opaque yellowish color you associate with french crepes.

After about a minute, she would peel it off and fold it on itself which made for a layered crepe with air inside, kind of like pita bread.  Most mornings these were served with breakfast at the riads we stayed at.  A little fresh sheeps milk cheese, a little honey, with a cup of coffee on the side, and you had a delicious start to the day.  Speaking of sheeps milk, these stands were on the fringes of the market for easy pickup.

Note the kaleah above the sheeps milk products

The glasses are filled with sheeps milk yogurt that is similar to the texture of a smoothie; the plates have a cheese that is closest to ricotta.  You couldn’t stand and look for too long since there were a lot of donkeys being led into the market at the entrance by this stand.  You know, since the narrow alleys aren’t crowded enough without lumbering, stupid donkeys.

Throughout the day we constantly had to press ourselves against the wall so a donkey could get by. Most of the time, they were carrying nothing heavier than something a human could carry in themselves. So, Morocco is full of lazy donkey owners. How's that for a sweeping generalization?

The other crazy thing about the medina relates back to an expression Mohammed said was very common in Morocco, “Don’t judge a palace by it’s door”.  Kind of an equivalent to “don’t judge a book by it’s cover” but they mean it literally, unlike our meaning of not making assumptions about an unattractive person until you see how funny they are (hi).

Every door in the medina looks the same, but we would duck into certain ones with Mohammed’s guidance and discover a beautiful palace inside.

This place had an average door, followed by an unassuming staircase straight down, opening up into an enormous open indoor courtyard with ornately decorated mosaic walls

There was ton of great things to see in the souks, but my personal favorite was the community bakery.  Aside from the people carrying animal skins, the most common sight was people carrying their homemade dough to the community bakery to make khobz; the local flat-ish, round bread that is plentiful with every meal.

This is the least blurry the baker looked in any picture I took and I had no idea how to say "slow down so I can take an awesome picture for my occasionally viewed food blog!" in Arabic

This guy works in a basement-type setup all day baking bread.  Most people mark the top of their loaves with a unique set of slash marks to make sure they get their own bread at the end of the day.  They pay about 1 Dihram (or 15 cents) to the baker per loaf to get it cooked in this huge wood-fired, honeycomb-style oven.  The loaves are constantly cycled in and out of the oven and thrown onto the floured floor to rest.

This was so cool for someone who loves food. This guy essentially has a role in hundreds of family meals every day

Morocco was a country that made me hungry at every turn.  There were so many unique food items and you could tell that people really put a lot of care into the food that they made and sold.  My next post will dive into the foods that I had the courage to try, and also unique experiences like a tagine cooked in the Saraha by our Berber hippie guide.  It was a very cool trip.

Sorry for the long post and the hiatus.  As usual, I will try to be more regular with posts and get into a groove again.