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Travel back in time to Mourad Lahlou's childhood in Marrakech, Morocco, and discover the exotic flavours of his homeland - with a West Coast twist
San Francisco chef Mourad Lahlou visited Vancouver’s West restaurant, during its Guest Chef Series, to promote his new cookbook, Mourad: New Moroccan
“Some people set out to learn to cook. They pursue it. They look for teachers. They go to cooking school. They practice and study. I became a cook in a way that could scarcely have been more different from all of that, in a place so far from where I ended up that it feels like a beautiful, brightly colored dream. I learned to cook from memory. Let me tell you how.”
So begins Mourad: New Moroccan, the new cookbook by Mourad Lahlou, owner and executive chef at San Francisco’s Michelin-starred Aziza restaurant.
The book offers a fascinating lesson in Moroccan flavour combinations and cooking techniques interwoven with beautiful pictures, and stories from Lahlou’s childhood.
You’d imagine from Lahlou’s success that he grew up dreaming of becoming a chef and attended a prestigious cooking school, but that’s not the case.
Lahlou was on his way to becoming a PhD after obtaining his Master’s in economics at San Francisco State University, when his desire for the home cooked food of his childhood in Marrakesh compelled him to begin learning to cook, inspired by the memories of the home he grew up in, a massive complex housing a dozen relatives, where only the women prepared food.
As a child, he accompanied his grandfather to the market to collect fresh ingredients and then watched his mother, aunts, cousins and grandmother prepare traditional dishes.
In Mourad: New Moroccan, Lahlou takes his self-taught skills in Moroccan cooking and gives them a modern twist, using California’s abundance of fresh, local ingredients – easily transferable to Vancouver’s Pacific Northwest offerings.
Lahlou was in Vancouver to promote his cookbook, with events at Barbara-Jo’s Books to Cooks and West restaurant.
Lahlou (third from right) and Dang (far right), along with Dang’s team, prepare dishes inspired by Lahlou’s cookbook for guests at West restaurant. (Image: Catherine Roscoe Barr)
At West, diners were treated to a seven-course menu with dishes that took inspiration from the cookbook and were prepared by Lahlou and West’s executive chef Quang Dang.
The event was part of West’s Guest Chef Series, created to “showcase a variety of chef’s styles and culinary talents with our guests,” says Dang.
“Mourad is a self-taught chef, incredibly talented and passionate, and very willing to share ideas and techniques,” he says.
Each course was paired with Bombay Saphire cocktails crafted by bar manager David Wolowydnick, who fittingly won the World’s Most Imaginative Bartender Competition in Morocco last year.
“Mourad has an exceptional gift for Moroccan spice combinations,” says Wolowydnick, “and is always open to converse about his recipes to describe the balance of each dish. Much like when wines are paired with food, cocktails must also create a balance with the dishes, either through complement or contrast to the food.”
Here are three recipes excerpted from Lahlou’s cookbook, which is available at Barbara-Jo’s Books to Cooks, your local bookstore, or online.
(Image: Excerpted from Mourad: New Moroccan by Mourad Lahlou (Artisan Books). Copyright © 2011. Photographs by Deborah Jones.)
“The first thing people need to make is the preserved lemons,” says Lahlou, over the phone, about his cookbook. “It is something that is so easy – three ingredients: lemons, lemon juice and salt. If you make that, you can have it in your pantry within four weeks. I know that you have to wait a little bit to get it there but at the end of the day it’s something that will really change the way you cook. It could be added to anything you want: stews, grilled meats, salads vinaigrettes, purees. If there’s one thing that I want people to cook from the book, that’s it. You can’t be making Moroccan food without preserved lemons.”
In fact, an entire chapter of the cookbook is dedicated to preserved lemons, beginning with an explanation of why they are so important to Moroccan cuisine.
Makes a 1-quart batch
Ingredients
Instructions
Lahlou’s Moroccan lentil soup is served to guests at West restaurant. (Image: Catherine Roscoe Barr)
“This is my version of harira, the national soup of Morocco,” says Lahlou, “which shows up in unending variations from city to city, street stall to street stall, and family to family. It can be vegan [like this version], vegetarian, or made with meat – usually lamb.”
“This makes a big batch,” he says. “That’s how I always do it, even at home, because we love to eat it over several nights, and it keeps for up to a week.”
Serves 12 to 14
Spice Mix
Soup
Date Balls
Lentils
Celery Salad
To finish the soup
“The chicken skewers are the simplest recipe in the book,” says Lahlou, and the ingredients “work together to give you an easy approximation of the pleasure of red charmoula” – a mixture that Lahlou calls “a defining Moroccan flavor that’s more than the sum of its parts.”
Serves 6
Marinade
Chicken
Vinaigrette