Moroccan Food on the Road: Tagines, Mint Tea and Desert Bread

Food in Morocco is inseparable from hospitality. On a desert tour, what you eat — and how you eat it — is as much a part of the experience as the dunes themselves. Here is a guide to what will be on your plate.

The slow-cooked tagine is the defining dish of Moroccan cuisine. In the desert, it is typically cooked in a conical clay pot over charcoal, simmering for hours until the meat — lamb, chicken, or kefta — is fall-apart tender. The combination of spices (cumin, coriander, ginger, saffron, preserved lemon) produces a depth of flavour that seems impossible for such simple ingredients. Eat it with khobz — a round, dense flatbread — to scoop up the sauce.

One of the most extraordinary experiences of a desert camp is watching a Berber cook prepare meloui — a layered flatbread — by burying the dough in the hot sand beneath the fire and leaving it to bake. Eaten warm, with argan oil or amlou (an almond and honey paste), it is simple, extraordinary food. The method has not changed in centuries.

Breakfast in a desert camp typically includes msemen (pan-fried flatbread), honey, olive oil, amlou, fresh orange juice, and coffee or the ever-present mint tea. If you are lucky, the cook may serve harira — a thick tomato and lentil soup that is traditionally eaten to break the Ramadan fast but appears on desert breakfast tables as the most sustaining possible start to a dune morning.

Atay — Moroccan mint tea — is served at every possible moment: on arrival, after meals, before bed, at sunrise. It is made with gunpowder green tea, fresh mint leaves, and enough sugar to stop your heart, then poured theatrically from a great height to aerate and cool it. Accepting tea is accepting connection. Refusing it is, gently but genuinely, an insult. Drink three cups. Say thank you in Tamazight: tafadhali.