How I make Moroccan Chicken Tagine

This is an authentic Moroccan Chicken Tagine and it makes a wonderful meal. It is fairly simple to make and can also be cooked in a casserole dish as long as it has a lid. I substituted the Olives for poached Apricots which was inspired by Chef Kevin Ashtons video on Lamb Tagine at https://youtu.be/v9C6gtpNiFY?si=sTOkHd1Wqb5ohvAQ
Thank you Kevin.

To make this meal you will need:-
Marinade:-
1/4 tsp Saffron Threads
200ml Chicken Stock
2 Preserved Lemons
3 Garlic Cloves crushed
1 tsp Sea Salt
1/4 tsp Ground Black Pepper
2 tsps Paprika
1 tsp Ground Cumin
1 tsp Ground Ginger
1/2 tsp Chilli Flakes
A handful of Parsley and Coriander chopped
2 tbsps Olive Oil

Tagine:-
2 tbsps Olive Oil
4 Chicken thighs
1 large Onion Chopped
1/4 tsp Sea Salt
1 pinch of Ground Cinnamon
1/2 tsp Ground Turmeric
8 dried Apricots
1 tbsp Runny Honey
1 tsp Mixed Spice

Enjoy!

Hi there and welcome to my channel. Today I’m going to show you how I make a Moroccan chicken tine. Now this is actually a traditional Moroccan dish of chicken pieces brazed with spices, garlic, onion. You would normally find olives in it, but I’ve replaced them with dried apricots and preserved lemons. So here’s a list of all the ingredients that you’ll need. Most of them were straightforward. I’ve broken it down to marinade and the tine. Um, the only issue you might have is getting saffron threads and the preserved lemons, which aren’t normally available in supermarkets. I actually ordered mine and got them through Amazon. So, anyway, let’s have a look and see how we put it all together. Okay, to start off with, we’re going to make 200 ml of chicken stock. Um, basically just follow the instructions of whichever your preferred stock is. I’m just using bestow here. Okay. Now, we want to put about 1/4 of a teaspoon of saffron into a small dish. As you can see, what we want to do is add the stock to the saffron and leave it to sit a while. >> [clears throat and cough] >> Just top the bowl up. All this is going into the marinade. We’re doing the marinade to start off with. Just stir that in and just let it stand. [clears throat] Okay, I got two small preserved lemons here. So, you just want to cut the knobbybly bit off at the end. What you want to do is quarter these and then [clears throat] scrape out the flesh, discarding any pips or seeds. These lemons are actually preserved in salt and they sit in jars for months. The salt actually extracts the lemon juice out of them. So, just get rid of any seeds. And then you want to scrape out the the flesh. Because these are so small, it’s actually quite fiddly. So, don’t cut your fingers. I’ve set aside a white bowl to put all the um the marinade in. So once you’ve scraped out all the flesh from uh your two lemons, then just [clears throat] chop it up as small as you can and put it into the white bowl for the marinade. You also want to cut the lemon peel which has been left over into strips because this will go into the tine uh during the cooking process. So just cut them into strips and then put them in a bowl and set them aside until you need them. Right. You just want to crush three garlic cloves into the marinade. Mix it in. Right. You now want a a handful of coriander and just chop it up fairly small and add that to the marinade. And you want to do exactly the same with a handful of parsley. Just chop it up. Put it in the bowl for the marinade. >> [snorts] >> Well, I did that. >> You now want to add roughly a teaspoon of salt and a bit of pepper. 1/4 of a teaspoon of black pepper. Right. You now want to add the stock where you had the saffron soaking in. Just scrape [clears throat] it all in. Any gravy left in the bowl, just add it in the bowl that you use to mix it up. So, you want to add a teaspoon of ground ginger. [clears throat] And the same a teaspoon of ground cumin. and um two teaspoons of paprika. You can use sweet paprika if you want, but I just use a normal paprika. I find that just as tasty. Now you want some chili flakes. I actually use cashmere chili flakes here because they’re not too hot, but they’re but they do give the right amount of bite to the marinade. And then you add two teaspoon sorry two tablespoons of olive oil. >> [panting] >> So you just want to mix it all in with a whisk so everything is combined. Okay. Now for your chicken. Basically, these are chicken thighs with the bone in and the skin on. on the um skin side. What you want to do is cut three slits down to the bone. Um this allows the marinade to actually soak in. I’m actually going to um marinade this overnight. So, what I do is I I get each piece of chicken, cut three slits in, put it in a bowl, and then pour some marinade over. And then I’ll do the rest or do the same with the other the remaining chicken. It just gives you uh an opportunity to work each piece of chicken into the marinade so it all gets soaked in. It’s a bit messy on your fingers, but such as the life of a chef. Not that I’m a chef, a cook. So, just work all that marinade in. [snorts] >> [clears throat] >> And then once you’ve done the last piece of chicken, just chuck in all the rest of the marinade, whatever you’ve got left in the bowl. So you want everything mixed in so that all of the chicken pieces are completely covered in marinade. And what I’m going to do with this is pop it in the fridge overnight. So, I’ve actually put all of this into a sealable container. I’ll just lock the lid down, shake it about, and then put it in the fridge overnight. I think the minimum marinade time was about 3 hours. Um, if [clears throat] you want to cook the meal on the same day as you make the marinade, then by all means put it in the fridge for 3 hours. I prefer it overnight. So, now for the tine part. We’re going to chop up an onion. You just need one medium to large size onion. Right. A chef taught me to do this. Basically, if when you’re chopping onion or any other vegetable, the board slides around on the work surface, then just put a wet or damp cloth underneath and it won’t slide around anymore. Very good idea. >> Chef taught me. >> Thank you to Kevin Ashton for that. Most of the times I just forget. I think I’m so used to the board moving around that I just compensate without even thinking of putting a wet cloth underneath. Okay, for me it’s now the next day and um I’ve just taken this out of the fridge. This is the chicken in the marinade and we’re going to prepare it for cooking. So, we just dig it out with a pair of tongs, put it on a plate, Any remaining marinade left in the bowl after you’ve taken the chicken Just leave it there. Put it to one side because you will need that to um cover the chicken later on in the cooking process. Right. So, we now have our tjine. We’re going to add two tablespoons of olive oil and bring it up to a medium heat. So, we’re now adding our chicken skin side down. You want to make sure the skin side is down when you initially put it in the pan. What you want to do here is just brown off the skin. I mean, if the skin actually sticks to the bottom of the pan, it doesn’t matter too much. As it turned out here, it was a marinade that stuck to the pan. This, by the way, is the bottom of the tine. I keep calling it a pan, but it’s actually the bottom of the tine. Okay, it’s frying away. You want to be frying this skin side down for about 5 minutes initially and then just turn it over. And you want to just turn it over every now and then just to make sure both sides are cooked. All the fat will render out of the chicken and add to the bowl or add to what’s in the bottom of the pan. So once the chicken’s browned on both sides and you want to take it out of the pan. Let’s put it onto the plate where it was sat before that will still have some of the marinade on it. Now we put in our onion. And we just want to fry this until it’s soft. It will take on the color of the um of the chicken and it will sort of brown off a bit. So just fry it until it goes soft. a little bit of cinnamon. Okay. So, we’re going to add a pinch of cinnamon and 1/4 of a teaspoon of turmeric and just mix it in. And now we’re going to turn the heat down low. Now return the chicken to the pan. This time you want it skin side up. What you want to do is pour any marinade left over onto the top of the chicken to make sure that it’s covered. Right. You want to pop the heat up slightly so that the juices just start to bubble. And then when that happens, you can put the lid on and cook it for an hour. With this oven, I actually set it to four. Four was the optimum temperature to get it to just bubble. As you can see, once it’s bubbling, you want to put the lid on [snorts] and cook it for an hour. Just set the timer. Right here, we’re going to prepare the apricots. Basically, you want to um poach them. And this was actually shown to me in a YouTube video by Chef Kevin Ashton and I’ll put a link to that because it’s actually he did a lamb tene and it’s very interesting to watch. Right. So, you got 150 ml of water in a small pan which is now bubbling away. You want to add one teaspoon of mixed spice and a tablespoon of clear honey. And you want to bring this to the simmer after mixing it in. And you’re going to put it I use about eight um apricots, the uh dried apricots. Right. Once it’s simmering, you want to um keep it going for about 4 minutes. This will poach the apricots. And then once your 4 minutes is up, just take them out. Now, what you want to do now is to reduce this to a sort of syrup consistency. A watery syrup consistency is what I did. I tended to find that with the camera overhead, it just steamed up the lens, so I sort of missed quite a bit of it out. So, there’s your syrup. And you just want to pour that on the apricots and they will go into the tine once the hour is up. [bell] Okay, so your hour is up. Woohoo. Yes, it’s hot. It’s hot, right? So, you want to take the lid off and you want to just make sure that um you cover the chicken with the gravy. Now, you’re going to add your uh apricots. I just pop them on top of the chicken. These apricots are very nice actually, especially the way that I was shown how to poach them. And now the lemon peel from the preserved lemons that you had, but now is the time to add them. So, you add them to the uh to the juice. I just give the uh chicken a quick check for tenderness. It’s very tender, as you can see. Pop the lid back on, and you’re going to let this run for another 20 [clears throat] minutes. Okay, here I just um turn the hob up a notch from 3 to 4. So now your 20 minutes is up. Take the lid off and then Doesn’t that look lovely? Just move it around a bit and make sure that uh you put the juices on the chicken. So you just base the chicken the juices. Right. So what we want to do here is just turn the heat up to medium high for about 5 minutes. And this is just to let the juices thicken up a bit. Leave the cover off. As I said, let it run for about 5 minutes. And that will allow the juices to thicken up. [bell] Okay, I decided to serve this with some couscous. Um, as there’s only two of us, um, I work out that it’s normally about 60 gram of couscous per person. So, I’m going to make some stock up here. This is vegetable stock, and you would need about half a pint of it. So, 280 ml. Mix it up. And then you want to measure out your couscous into a bowl. As I said, 60 g per person. So that’s 120 g of couscous. Now, what you want to do is pour your stock over the couscous until it just covers it. If you haven’t quite got enough stock there, then just co cover the rest of the couscous with some boiling water cuz that couscous is that stock is quite thick. But adding a bit of water does help so that all soaks in. So you just top it up with boiling water just to cover it all. Give it a good old mix. And then you want to cover it for about 10 minutes. Let it stand. So, we’re just popping the couscous into some bowls. And your tjine is ready. Look at that. Lovely authentic Moroccan chicken tjine. Very nice. And there you have it. You just serve it up and enjoy it. So, Moroccan chicken tjine. Please try it because it makes an absolutely lovely meal. And it is, as I said before, quite authentic to Morocco. Unfortunately, I can’t produce the same level of videos as I did in the past because my wife is currently laid up with a big plaster cast on our ankle. So, I have to take on all the domestic responsibilities. So, at the moment, I’m trying to get a video out every two weeks. So on that note, if you enjoyed this video, then please hit the like button and if you want to be notified of future videos as I as and when I bring them out, um then please subscribe and you will get a notification. Thank you so much for joining me and hopefully I’ll see you next time. So bye for now.