The Tag Sale Tagine

On the day of the Annual Townwide Tag Sale in my town, my girlfriends and I wore ourselves cranky driving around town following brightly colored (and not so brightly colored) signs for tag sales starting at 9am in the morning. By 2pm, we were determined to get off the road and get some lunch. En route to the diner, we turned onto Pine Street and hit one last tag sale. Sitting on a table, next to some dogwood patterned stoneware that was my Italian grandmother’s signature, was an earthenware tagine with brown and orange designs. I had wanted a tagine for some time, but I knew I wouldn’t use it enough to justify paying the $50+ price tag that they carried at the higher end kitchen goods stores. So I asked the tag sale lady how much the tagine cost, and she had no idea what I was talking about! I had to point to the earthenware vessel on the table before she came up with a price of $10. Granted, our second stop of the morning had been All-You-Can-Carry for $10, so that seemed a little steep for a tag sale. But then I put things in perspective of what I thought it would cost to buy one new, and I happily paid her asking price. So I became the new owner of an old tagine, and we were off to lunch!

What is a Tagine?

A tagine is a two-part North African earthenware pot. The flat-bottomed base is circular with low sides. The cover is designed either as a cone or a dome to allow the steam to rise, condense, and drip back into the base. Because the lid returns the condensed liquid to the pot, a minimal amount of water is used in cooking, which makes it appropriate for areas where access to water is limited.

The word “tagine” also refers to the North African Berber dish made in this earthenware pot. The dish is typically a stew made of meat, chicken, or fish, together with vegetables or fruit. Moroccan and Algerian tagines are also slow cooked savory stews, similar to the North African Berber tagines. The Tunisian tagine is very different; it more closely resembles an Italian frittata.

The Research

As always the first stop in my search for a new recipe was the Epicurious site. And it didn’t disappoint: it returned 42 recipes containing the word “tagine.” Although only 30 of those recipes were actually for tagines, that still seemed like a wide enough variety to find something to suit my needs. The recipe results included lamb tagines, chicken tagines, and vegetarian tagines, as well as more offbeat tagines, such as ones based on beef short ribs or monkfish. Of course, my research didn’t end with the simply query to Epicurious. I also had to check the Saveur website for good measure. That search returned nine recipes containing the word “tagine,” but only six of those were actually for tagines. Three were for chicken tagines and three were for lamb tagines.

Still curious about what I could find, my third stop was Eat Your Books. I knew I didn’t have a Moroccan cookbook in my collection, so I figured that the likelihood of it coming back with any decent results was slim. Much to my surprise, the query returned 26 recipes from both my cookbooks and the blogs that I was following. Most of the recipes were from my collection of the Cooking Light Annual Recipes editions, with a few from the Cook’s Illustrated volumes and the Bon Appetit compendium in my library. There were only four or five from the Serious Eats blog, which I thought was unusual since the blogs tend to latch on to trends more tenaciously than actual print publications.

Across all that research, I had about 65 different recipes to choose from. That was an astonishing number for what I thought was an esoteric piece of kitchen equipment. Since I had an entire eggplant left in my refrigerator from “catering” a farewell party for a good friend, I was curious if I could use that up in a tagine. The best way to figure that out would be to go back into Eat Your Books and use the “Filter By” feature to select eggplant. That would limit the recipes to only those that listed eggplant as an ingredient. If that failed, I could always go back into Epicurious, search for “eggplant tagine,” and see what that returns. Fortunately, the filtered search on Eat Your Books returned exactly what I was looking for: a recipe for a vegetarian eggplant and tomato tagine.

It was another stroke of luck that the recipe I wanted was in one of the Cooking Light Annual Recipes books, which I kept all together in a special place in my kitchen, so the required book was easy to find. Much to my delight, the eggplant and tomato recipe was part of an article entitled “Tasty Tagines,” which not only included multiple tagine recipes, but also included a full page of “Tagine 101” that discussed the techniques, flavors, and tools of making a traditional tagine. However, much to my dismay, all the recipes in the article had been adapted to become more accessible to home cooks and were written to use a Dutch oven rather than the traditional earthenware tagine.

At this point, my options were either to find a new recipe or do additional research to figure out how to adapt the Cooking Light recipe to prepare in a traditional tagine vessel. Upon careful inspection of my chosen recipe, there really were no “low and slow” cooking steps that could be done in a traditional tagine vessel. Aside from roasting the eggplant in the oven at high heat for 30 minutes, it seemed like everything came together in the Dutch oven within ten minutes.

So I went back to the full Eat Your Books recipe list to look at the five options offered on the Serious Eats blog. Three were lamb tagines, which I wouldn’t consider because lamb isn’t readily available where I do my grocery shopping. Another was a 30-Minute Chicken Tagine, which was much too quick to be done the traditional way. The last recipe, Spring Tagine of Chicken with Potato and Peas, seemed a little odd to be making in the fall, but I decided to glance it over anyway. Unfortunately, the contributing author took a recipe that originally called for a traditional tagine vessel and adapted it to a Dutch oven. So that one was out as well.

After spending about half an hour sifting through the remaining cookbook recipes and the recipes on Epicurious, I was no wiser about how to use the traditional earthenware vessel. All of those recipes had been adapted to skillets and Dutch ovens. In an odd fit of desperation, I typed into my Google search box “How do I cook with a tagine” and was matched to a search for “How do you cook in a tagine.” That brought up a few results from Australia and New Zealand, and a one result from Ten Thousand Villages, which is a U.S. store that sells fair trade artisan products (I shop there a lot at Christmas!) The Ten Thousand Villages post was exactly what I wanted: it discussed how to season a tagine prior to use, how to cook in a tagine, and even gave a simple chicken recipe to prepare in a tagine. I was in business!

Eggplant and Tomato Tagine

Since I definitely wanted to use up the eggplant in my refrigerator, I decided that I would still attempt the Eggplant and Tomato Tagine recipe, if only to get a feel for whether I actually liked tagines. However, because the recipe was coming from an Annual Recipes volume of Cooking Light, I didn’t really expect it to be all that authentic. Simple to prepare and low calorie, perhaps; but not as true to North African flavors as a Cook’s Illustrated or a Bon Appetit recipe might be.

Unfortunately, I was wrong about the “simple to prepare” assumption. Although the recipe steps were very straightforward and only required three to five minutes each, I had to overcome the major roadblock of peeling and cubing two pounds of eggplant before even beginning the recipe. And so the tagine slipped from Sunday night dinner to Monday night and again all the way to Wednesday night dinner. Fortunately, I wasn’t too late getting home from work that evening and was on a phone call that distracted me from the tedium of peeling and cubing eggplant. However, in my preparation for the recipe, I failed to notice that the first step required salting and draining the eggplant for 20 minutes prior to roasting for 30 minutes. I was starting to get hungry, so I took my chances, skipped the salting and draining step, spread the eggplant cubes out on a foil lined baking tin, and put the baking tin straight into the oven.

During the 30 minutes that the eggplant was roasting, I stayed busy. First, I had to prepare the red pepper garnish, which was easy. All I had to do was finely chop a clean red bell pepper and sauté that for about five minutes in olive oil. After it was done, I set it aside in a stoneware container with a plastic lid to keep warm. Next, I had to dig out my Dutch oven. I probably could have used my red soup pot, which was on the drying rack, but I decided that was too deep for all the stirring involved. Once the Dutch oven was removed from its hiding place, I had to make some couscous as an accompaniment to the meal to round it out. Couscous is always so super simple: boil water, butter, and spices; pour that over the dry couscous; mix well; cover and let stand; fluff before serving. Of course, I still had time left over after accomplishing those three tasks, so I set about working on another small project to fill the time.

Once the eggplant finished roasting, I pulled the baking tin from the oven and set it aside to cool. Then I started the tagine in my Dutch oven. Five ingredients – tomato paste, diced tomatoes, sweet paprika, ground cumin, minced garlic – went into the Dutch oven and were heated until boiling. Since the headnote said that a can of chickpeas could be added to the recipe to turn it into a main dish, I drained the can and added those at this point as well. I added the eggplant and ground black pepper after I left the mixture boil a little bit. The eggplant seemed to suck up some of the tomato juices, as the mixture almost instantly became drier. After the eggplant was heated through and well combined, the recipe was ready.

I served myself dinner in accordance with the recipe guidelines – kind of. I measured one cup of couscous into a soup bowl, measured one cup of tagine on top of that, and then garnished with a few forkfuls of sautéed red pepper. I thought that the meal was good for what it was. The tagine tasted predominately of tomato and eggplant, probably because I followed the recipe’s trace measurements for the spices. I’m torn as to whether I would make it again. The taste didn’t really rock my world; however, eggplant drama aside, it came together quickly and easily using mostly pantry ingredients.

The leftovers made for quick and easy dinners for the next few nights. The taste of the spices did not get stronger with age, which would have livened up the dish a little; otherwise, the dish held up really well in the refrigerator.

Chicken with Apricots and Almonds

Checking the ingredient list of the Chicken with Apricots and Almonds recipe from Ten Thousand Villages against the contents of my cabinets and freezer, the only ingredient that I had to add to my grocery list was dried apricots. On my very next trip to the grocery store, I bought dried apricots so that I would be ready to prepare the tagine recipe as soon as possible.

Before I started on the Chicken with Apricots and Almonds, I made two unfortunate discoveries. First, a tagine must be seasoned prior to its first use. Depending on the seasoning instructions that you read, the seasoning process involves heating in the oven, oiling, heating in the oven again, cooling, and soaking. Or it could involve soaking overnight, then oiling, heating in the oven, cooling, and washing. Either way, the seasoning process was a must and it looked pretty lengthy.

My second unfortunate discovery was that before I even began the seasoning process, I had to verify that my particular tagine was actually ceramic cookware and not a decorative serving piece. Of course, the website that warned me of this gave me no information as to how to determine which of the two my particular tagine was. So I agonized for almost three months as to whether to risk putting my new to me tagine in the oven. Finally, I decided that it would probably be okay because the bottom rims of both the lid and the base were unglazed, which would allow the earthenware to expand without exploding. Besides, it was only a ten dollar investment. So if it did explode, it would be more of an emotional loss than a financial one.

I will admit that I was more than a little nervous when I put my cold tagine into a 325F oven (per the instructions on the Ten Thousand Villages website) to begin the seasoning process. But nothing went wrong when I put it in or when I pulled it out ten minutes later. There was a little bit of a strange sound when I poured the room temperature olive oil into the hot base, but no cracks or other abnormalities formed as a result. I used a paper towel to rub the oil all over the hot base, while carefully holding it with an orca, and then repeated the process on the slightly cooler lid. The next bake was for 20 minutes, and still nothing went wrong. I could tell that the glaze on the lid had become crackled, but that seemed to be okay. Before soaking the tagine, I let the lid and the base cool for 30 minutes. Even then I soaked them in hot water. The water got kind of oily, but otherwise there didn’t seem to be any detriment to the pottery.

By the time the tagine had completed its regulation soaking period of 20 minutes, it was past 8pm. I decided that was too late to start a recipe that required 45 minutes of cooking time; therefore, I opted to let the tagine sit in the water overnight as recommended by the other website and use one of my low maintenance stainless steel pots to prepare some pasta for dinner.

Before work the next morning, I pulled the tagine out of its water bath and set it out to dry so that it would be good to go for dinner after the gym that evening. Sure enough, by the time I got back to the house, the tagine was nice and dry, but still very oily.

The recipe itself came together very quickly, probably because I omitted a couple ingredients and skipped a couple steps. The recipe called for four boneless chicken breasts, but chicken tenders were on sale at the grocery store, so I used about two pounds of that instead. The dry spices seemed scant, so I doubled all of them. I deliberately omitted the onion (because I was tired and didn’t feel like chopping an onion) and accidentally forgot about the garlic and cilantro. I mixed all of that in the base of the tagine, added the prescribed amount of water, covered it, set it in a cold oven, and turned on the heat to 350F for 45 minutes.

Because I had doubled the spices for the chicken, I also doubled the apricots and the sauce. It was supposed to get nice and syrupy after 15 minutes, but it took closer to 20 minutes. I skipped the Toasting almonds step because it turned out that I didn’t have any whole almonds in the house. I had sliced almonds. I wasn’t about to attempt to toast those because I was afraid that they would burn too quickly.

When I pulled the tagine out from the oven and uncovered it, the base was filled with juices. It smelled incredible! But I had to do the safety check with a digital thermometer, and the chicken was definitely a safe temperature. I poured over the apricot sauce and topped with an abundance of sliced almonds, and then served myself a bit with the juices, the apricots, and the almonds. It was so good! The spice was a bit aggressive – but that was my fault for doubling them!

The tagine itself cleaned up very easily. The top just needed to be wiped down and set aside to dry. After I transferred the leftover food to another dish that would fit in the refrigerator, all I had to do was rinse the base of the tagine and set that aside to dry. Once dried, the pieces got a light coat of oil for good measure. I decided to defer the problem of where to store it to another day.

The Verdict

While both tagines came together very quickly and easily, I definitely preferred cooking the dish in an earthenware tagine to a cast iron Dutch oven. Once the tagine was seasoned, it was very easy to use and just as easy to clean. Literally mix all the raw foods in the base, cover it, pop it into a cold oven, turn the oven on, wait for it, eat your food, rinse it, and let it dry. I have found at least one other website with recipes for cooking in an earthenware tagine, but I still haven’t solved the problem of where to store it.